The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

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...