The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

“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.