The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow. What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a son’s gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows. With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful—for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget—that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers.

And I suppose that is what we want from our mothers: to maintain the world and, even if it is a lie, to proceed as though the world could be maintained. Whereas my father was obsessed with the past and the future, with returning to and remaking Libya, my mother was devoted to the present. For this reason, she was the truly radical force in my adolescence.

Uncle Mahmoud’s enthusiasms for football and literature are distinct in quality, they are equal in intensity.

One needs to be vigilant with such a fate, I thought, looking out for the smallest clue, words that arise after long silences, words such as “unknown.”

Guilt is exile’s eternal companion. It stains every departure.

Revolutions have their momentum, and once you join the current it is very difficult to escape the rapids. Revolutions are not solid gates through which nations pass but a force comparable to a storm that sweeps all before it.

Or is this what being home is like: home as a place from which the entire world is suddenly possible?

“Education gains the nation its dignity, sovereignty and pride. Where knowledge spreads, prosperity, happiness and security prevail. Education is as necessary as water and oxygen.”

A Libyan hoping to glimpse something of that past must, like an intruder at a private party, enter such books in the full knowledge that most of them were not written by or for him, and, therefore, at heart, they are accounts concerning the lives of others, their adventures and misadventures in Libya, as though one’s country is but an opportunity for foreigners to exorcize their demons and live out their ambitions.

The dead live with us. Grief is not a whodunit story, or a puzzle to solve, but an active and vibrant enterprise. It is hard, honest work. It can break your back. It is part of one’s initiation into death and—I don’t know why, I have no way of justifying it—it is a hopeful part at that.

My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future. Even if I had held his hand, and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense. I suspect many men who have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.

But grief is a divider; it moved each one of us into a territory of private shadows, where the torment was incommunicable, so horribly outside of language.

You make a man disappear to silence him but also to narrow the minds of those left behind, to pervert their soul and limit their imagination. When Qaddafi took my father, he placed me in a space not much bigger than the cell Father was in.

As long as Odysseus is lost, Telemachus cannot leave home. As long as Odysseus is not home, he is everywhere unknown.