The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

we know that Father was in Abu Salim at least from March 1990 to April 1996, when he was moved from his cell and either taken to another secret wing in the same prison, moved to another prison or executed.

was really saying was that she would much rather I return with my two fictional characters than be carrying the ghost of my father, the man she calls the Absent-Present.

china, feather pillows, silver candelabras. The

Its name, whose meaning and linguistic origin we do not know, is Blo’thaah. My father was born there, in the spring of 1939.

it turns out need and uncertainty can be excellent teachers.

The simple rule was never to refuse any one or thing in need. “It’s not your job to read their hearts,”

“Your duty is not to doubt but to give.

The accused were convicted of conspiring against the state. My father was sentenced to death in absentia. The rest all got life. They were, from time to time, allowed visits after that. That was how, over the years, Izzo got to know his father a little.

Uncle Mahmoud was one of several political prisoners released in early February 2011.

For the first time since Izzo was a toddler, he was sleeping and waking up in the same house as his father.

We had heard stories, which always seemed too fanciful to be believed, that beneath the compound lay underground prisons where the dictator’s most ardent dissidents were kept. Those accounts turned out to be true.

It makes me think that we all carry, from childhood, our death mask with us.

What they didn’t know was that a sniper remained on the roof of that building.

A couple of hours later, at 9 P.M., Izzo died in hospital.

A few days later he was wounded.

After a long period of convalescence, Hamed returned with his parents to Ajdabiya.

I stood at the door to our flat and, before ringing the bell, listened to the familiar voices, all grown up but the child in each still perceptible.

Unlike my paternal family, my maternal aunts and cousins were constantly reaching out and touching one another, as though one of us might suddenly disappear.

The regime had set up a trap. It invited young literary talent to take part in a book festival, then arrested them.

When I first read those lines by Jean Rhys, I thought, yes, and then almost immediately resented the connection I felt. This is why returning to that pre-life is like catching your reflection in a public place. Your first reaction, before you realize it is you,

the life of the architect who designed the cathedral. Guido Ferrazza, it turned out, had had an eventful life.

He worked on the parliament of Montevideo, a monumental structure designed by Vittorio Meano.

He lived a quiet retirement until, on the 1st of February 1961, perhaps out of nostalgia that in old age seemed inescapable, Guido Ferrazza boarded a train for Bocenago, his birthplace in the Alps. The carriage he was in derailed and crashed a few miles outside Milan. He was seventy-four.

Perhaps my old theory that saw connections between the façades of buildings and the faces of their architects was not entirely ridiculous.

“I’m here for you till the end of time. Anything you need. As for the hereafter,” he said, and laughed, “you are on your own.”

The Scholar, it said, was a literary journal for short fiction. The cover of the June 1957 issue, when my father was eighteen, had an illustration of a stack of books, an inkwell, a beaming light and a semicircular protractor.

“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.”

My father was one of its three editors,

With a gently quivering finger he pointed to two short stories. The author’s name: “Jaballa Matar.”

My cousin Nafa stood up and read: The wind roared against the tent that stood alone in the desert. Its pegs were firmly planted in the sand. The time was midnight. Darkness perched over the world. The moon, having just taken off its deep red garment, passed now, stretching through the spacious skies. Stillness spread its curtain over everything. The only sounds that could be heard were those of the grazing camels and the lazy melody of the sheep’s bleating. Wonderment dominated the universe. Fear had rooted itself into the lives of those who inhabited these parts. Everyone was afraid except the men in the tent: Ahmed, who was his mother’s only son, and his maternal uncle. Accompanying them was the uncle’s family. Despite the specter of the enemy, who threatened everyone on this land, Ahmed and his uncle had ventured out to these plains to tend to their livestock. Nothing mattered to them more than the well-being of their flock. Fear was kept at bay because they had sufficient weapons and ammunition, which, on a previous confrontation, they had captured from the enemy. The “enemy” was the Italian Army unit that was sneaking into the camp to steal the livestock. “The enemy’s eyes,” we are told, “never sleep.” Once surrounded, the uncle, who is an old man: hears inside his chest the defiant cry of a young rebel. He is transformed, feels a bitter strength, and is emboldened by a youthful vigor that, at any moment, is liable to fade, and self-discipline earned by old age and a ...

The old man’s words, “I will not let disgrace stain my forehead,” were echoed thirty-six years later in Father’s first letter from prison,

the silent sacrifices of Hisham’s mother, Fawzia Tarbah.”

about the kind woman in Tripoli.

Some of its staircases took you outside, under the open sky, before winding back in.

The décor was plain.

Describes granddather's home.

“Show me where it came out,” I said, and pulled his shirt further down to see his back, expecting to find an identical scar. Instead, the skin there was completely smooth.

over the past three millennia, occupied Libya: the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottomans and, most recently, the Italians.

one in every six inhabitants of the Libyan capital was kidnapped and made to disappear.

The twenty-third stanza in particular, and its image of the aged child, haunted me when I was a boy:

shadows where the only way to engage with what happened is through the imagination, an activity that serves only to excite the past, multiplying its possibilities, like a house with endless rooms, inescapable and haunted.

Perhaps this is why, in countless cultures, people in mourning rock or sway from side to side—not only to recall infancy and the mother’s heartbeat, but to keep time.

The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence

There are times when I lie on my back and close my eyes and see them floating above me like moths.

whenever I see a Manet, the white, his white, which is unlike any other white, cannot be a cloud, a tablecloth or a woman’s dress but will always remain the white leather belts of the firing squad in The Execution of Maximilian.

Abuzed Dorda was the director of the Mukhabarat el-Jamahiriya, the intelligence services under Qaddafi.

The earth in this country is like an inkwell. It stains every bare foot, car tyre and tree trunk a reddish brown.

“Men are their actions,” I said. “Trust me.” A few minutes later I got this text: “Most important, don’t do anything you don’t want. MOSHE DAYAN” I texted back: “Be the change you want to see in the world. MAHATMA GANDHI”

He replied: “;->”

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.

Out of all the words she must have screamed that day, the only one that survived the various retellings of the story was “Years.”