The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

We tiptoed around each other, trying our best to avoid confronting the ways in which political reality manages to infiltrate intimacies, corrupting them with unuttered longings and accusations.

“Nothing ever happens here. But when it does, it happens at the speed of lightning. You can change the world in a day. It might take forty-two years for that day to come, but when it does…”

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

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