The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured.

My silent condemnation of those fellow exiles who wished to assimilate—which is to say, my bloody-minded commitment to rootlessness—was my feeble act of fidelity to the old country, or maybe not even to Libya but to the young boy I was when we left.

In those days my mother operated as if the world were going to remain forever. 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.

He would often quote the twice-repeated line from the chapter “Soothing” in the Quran: “With hardship comes ease. With hardship comes ease.”

One of the injustices involved in disappearing a person is a difficult one to describe. It turns the disappeared into an abstraction, and, because the possibility of his existing under the same sun and the same moon is a real one, it makes it hard to retain a clear picture of him. In death the hallmark fades, and not all the memorials in the world can hold back the tide of forgetting.