The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

in March 1990, Father was kidnapped from our Cairo flat by the Egyptian secret police and delivered to Qaddafi. He was taken to Abu Salim prison, in Tripoli, which was known as “The Last Stop”—the place where the regime sent those it wanted to forget.

Now, catching these first glimpses of the country, I thought that, if anything, it was more luminous than I remembered. The fact that it had existed all this time, that it remained as it was all these years, that I was able to recognize it, felt like an exchange, a call and its echo, a mutual expression of recognition.

To have to sign an apology after twenty-one years of cruel and unjust imprisonment can break a man.

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