The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

and, because that kind of idealizing serves more to obscure than reveal a man,

Even today, to be Libyan is to live with questions.

a place of shadows where the only way to engage with what happened is through the imagination, an activity that serves only to excite the past, multiplying its possibilities, like a house with endless rooms, inescapable and haunted.

There is shame in not knowing where your father is, shame in not being able to stop searching for him, and shame also in wanting to stop searching for him.