The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

We embraced. “Man,” he said, “I’m going to miss you.” I remember the shape of his ear, how my eyes focused on it. I said the words as though involuntarily: “Hamza, I am Libyan. My name is Hisham Matar. I’m the son of Jaballa Matar.” He didn’t let go. I felt his body become rigid. “I am sorry,” I said. I was not sure what exactly I was apologizing for. When we looked at each other we had tears running down our faces. We embraced again, rushed back to the bar and continued drinking. We all stayed there until the place closed. Neither of us mentioned a word to the others. He never called me Hisham.

Father had high hopes for the new regime. Maybe he saw his imprisonment, removal from the army and temporary banishment as natural repercussions—perhaps even reversible—of the country’s historical transformation. He, like many of his generation, was inspired by the example of Egypt, where, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a young, secular and nationalist pan-Arab republic replaced a corrupt monarchy.

My idea of swimming then was to front crawl until I could no longer see land. I would float in the deep waters and then spin myself around until I lost direction.

The country that separates fathers and sons has disoriented many travelers. It is very easy to get lost here. Telemachus, Edgar, Hamlet, and countless other sons, their private dramas ticking away in the silent hours, have sailed so far out into the uncertain distance between past and present that they seem adrift. They are men, like all men, who have come into the world through another man, a sponsor, opening the gate and, if they are lucky, doing so gently, perhaps with a reassuring smile and an encouraging nudge on the shoulder. And the fathers must have known, having once themselves been sons, that the ghostly presence of their hand will remain throughout the years, to the end of time, and that no matter what burdens are laid on that shoulder or the number of kisses a lover plants there, perhaps knowingly driven by the secret wish to erase the claim of another, the shoulder will remain forever faithful, remembering that good man’s hand that had ushered them into the world. 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 h...

servants,

Servants reference in passing... They are there but not there.

The combination of Mother’s eccentricities and Father’s wealth—he had made a small fortune importing Japanese and Western goods to the Middle East—meant not only that we could live lavishly but also that the money helped fuel Father’s political activism.

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.

Amongst the photographs Amal has been posting were those taken moments after Izzo died. The blood had been washed off his face, and the place where the bullet entered his skull was bandaged as if there were still hope he might recover. The emergency doctors must have used some disinfectant, or perhaps this is the color blood stains the skin, because around his right temple and cheekbone Izzo’s face is a shade of yellow. It brings to mind the color of the hot, waxy syrup my aunts cooked up—the smell of burning sugar and orange blossom pulling us children indoors to stick our fingers into the syrup. As soon as it cooled and hardened, the women would spoil it, spreading it in sheets over their arms and legs, snatching quickly and sucking in air from the pain; the sound like fabric tearing. On one occasion cousin Ibtesam—in those days she and I were inseparable—cried, not only upset at their ruining the syrup but also in anticipation of the torture womanhood promised. “There must be an easier way,” she screamed. I seconded her opinion. But we were told categorically that this was the best way, because it plucked the little black hairs right out at the roots. They asked Ibtesam and me to run our fingers on the skin, “smooth as marble,” but inflamed and lacquered a weak shade of yellow.

I realize now that my walks, whether taken to pass the time or to better acquaint myself with a foreign city, or conducted in a hurry—to post a letter, to catch a train or on the occasion I was late for an appointment—all took place under the vague suspicion that I might somehow come upon myself, that is to say, that other self who lives in harmony with his surroundings, who exists, like a chapter in a book, in the right place, not torn out and left to make sense on its own.

The first page described the publication as “A journal published by the students of the Teachers’ College of Cyrenaica.” The journal’s motto was: “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.” This was the sentiment of the time. Libya was trying to drag itself into modernity. The policy of the Italian colonial government did not promote education for the “indigenous” population.

In other words, one in every six inhabitants of the Libyan capital was kidnapped and made to disappear. The damage was more lasting because the Italian authorities selected the most noted and distinguished men: scholars, jurists, wealthy traders, and bureaucrats. The conditions aboard ship were so bad that during the journey, which couldn’t have taken much more than a couple of days, hundreds of prisoners died. Some historians claim that one-quarter of the 5,000 men lost their lives during the passage. The majority of those who reached the island prisons perished in captivity. There appears to be no record of survivors from those prisoners. It is an extraordinary example of a European occupying power devastating a city. Yet, as with Italian crimes in Libya in general, it is an event little known today. It has been clouded over by the greater horrors inflicted by the Italians later, which are, alas, only slightly less obscure.

When the Italians attacked his village, they burnt down the houses and poured concrete in the well. They marched him and his family, along with the rest of the villagers, 400 kilometres to the infamous El-Agheila concentration camp. Being forbidden pens and paper, he composed a thirty-stanza-long poem that he committed to memory. It was memorized by others and that way spread across the country. It so fortified the spirit of resistance that when the Italians uncovered the identity of its author they whipped him. The poem is called “I Have No Illness But.” It opens: I have no illness but El-Agheila Camp, the imprisonment of the tribe and being cut off from the open country.

I have no illness but the loss of noble folk and the foul ones who now, with calamitous, shameless faces, govern us. How many a child have they taken and whipped? The poor young flowers return confused, made old without having lived.

The body of my father is gone, but his place is here and occupied by something that cannot just be called memory. It is alive and current. How could the complexities of being, the mechanics of our anatomy, the intelligence of our biology, and the endless firmament of our interiority—the thoughts and questions and yearnings and hopes and hunger and desire and the thousand and one contradictions that inhabit us at any given moment—ever have an ending that could be marked by a date on a calendar? Hasn’t it always seemed that way? Haven’t I always detected the confusion of funerals, the uncertainty of cemeteries, the bewilderment of a headstone? Perhaps memorials and all the sacred and secular rituals of mourning across our human history are but failed gestures. 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. What is extraordinary is that, given everything that has happened, the natural alignment of the heart remains towards the light. It is in that direction that there is the least resistance. I have never understood this. Not intellectually anyway. But it is somehow in the body, in the physical knowledge of the eternity of each moment, in the expansive nature of time and space, that declarative statements such as “He is dead” are not precise. 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.

The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence

This was in the years after 2004, when Tony Blair had gone to Libya and stood shaking hands with Muammar Qaddafi. Ziad called me that afternoon. “Now we have lost everything,” he said. The dictatorship became more powerful than ever before. Some of its worst criminals began to buy houses in London. Qaddafi’s spymaster, Moussa Koussa—who, in 1980, had been expelled from Britain after advocating strong support, in an interview in The Times, for Libya’s policy of assassinating opponents abroad—was now a regular visitor. Following Tony Blair’s visit, the British capital became the number one place from which the Libyan secret service could monitor Libyans abroad. Britain helped to deliver dissidents to Tripoli. The Libyan Investment Authority, a corrupt institution that claimed to manage the national wealth, was based in London. The LIA purchased hotels, real estate and various investments, often in the names of individuals from the Qaddafi inner circle. Noted and powerful British financiers were board members. The dictator’s son and heir apparent, Seif el-Islam Qaddafi, became the darling of the British establishment. The London School of Economics awarded him a PhD, which later turned out to be fraudulent. Several British academics, politicians, lawyers and public relations agencies began working hard at washing the blood off the Libyan regime. None of us felt safe.

“I didn’t know your father before prison,” Ehlayyel said. “I came to know him first by his voice. When one of us young prisoners was being taken to the interrogation room, your father would call out, ‘Boys, if you get stuck, say Jaballa Matar told you to do it.’ I loved him for that, because you have no idea what hearing that did for my heart. Strength at the weakest hour.

“Are you sure he died in the massacre?” “No.” “I hope you find out one day.” No one in Libya had ever told me this. No one told me they hoped I would find out, only that I will find out. And something about this made me drop my guard. The tears were here. I took a deep breath but it was too late. I faced away, pretending to be looking at the photographs. I clasped my hands behind my waist. I paced, looking at the gallery of faces as though I were one of those people you see in art exhibitions, moving sideways from one picture to the next with hardly a pause, covering up to fifty paintings in an hour, as if the point were to have looked rather than to look. I felt my heart contract and grow small. Pain shrinks the heart. This, I believe, is part of the intention. 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. I paced back and forth, anger in one direction, hatred in the other, until I could feel my insides grow small and hard. And, because I was young, and hatred and anger are a young man’s emotions, I tricked myself into thinking the transformation was good, that it was akin to progress, a sign of vigor and strength.

I heard the stories and registered them perhaps the way we all, from within our detailed lives, perceive facts—that is, we do not perceive them at all until they have been repeated countless times and, even then, understand them only partially. So much information is lost that every small loss provokes inexplicable grief. Power must know this. Power must know how fatigued human nature is, and how unready we are to listen, and how willing we are to settle for lies. Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know. Power must believe, given how things proceed, that the world was better made for the perpetrator than for those who arrive after the fact, seeking justice or accountability or truth. Power must see such attempts as pathetic, and yet the bereaved, the witness, the investigator and the chronicler cannot but try to make reason of the diabolical mess. Each motivated by his or her own need or idea or obsession, they rush this way and that, like ants after a picnic, attending to the crumbs, and time rolls on, infinitely duplicating the distances, furthering us from the original event, making it less possible with every passing day to account for exactly what happened or to be certain, indeed, that anything happened at all. Yet also, with every folding year, like the line of a step mimicking the one before it, it becomes increasingly difficult to escape, to give up altogether on what has been invested so far, least of all the person swallowed up by the injustic...

On my previous visit, in a moment when we were alone, Uncle Mahmoud had told me how he had had everything done to him. “They beat me, deprived me of food and sleep, tied me down, spilled a bucketful of cockroaches on my chest. There is nothing they didn’t do. Nothing can happen to me now that can be worse than that time. And always, I managed it. I kept a place in my mind, where I was still able to love and forgive everyone,” he said, his eyes soft and lips smiling. “They never succeeded to take that from me.”