The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

This one could rob me of a skill that I have worked hard to cultivate: how to live away from places and people I love. Joseph Brodsky was right. So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured. But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right: never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow. What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

Several political prisoners told me that, at night, when the prison fell silent, when, in Uncle Mahmoud’s words, “you could hear a pin drop or a grown man weep softly to himself,” they heard this man’s voice, steady and passionate, reciting poems. “He never ran out of them,” his nephew, who was in prison at the same time, told me. And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that “knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”

Even he, with his intolerance for superstition, must have sensed an ill omen in an event that took place on his first day at work in New York. Crossing First Avenue towards the UN building, my father saw a lorry collide with a cyclist. The limbs of the cyclist were scattered across the asphalt. My father’s response was to collect the pieces of flesh and bone and respectfully place them beside the torso, which, like the twisted bicycle, had landed on the pavement. I have always associated the irrevocable and violent changes my family and my country went through in the following four decades with the image of my father—a poet turned officer turned, reluctantly, diplomat—dressed in a suit and tie, far away from home, collecting the pieces of a dead man.

Even as a young child, I could never imagine my father bowing, and even then I wanted to protect him. He has always seemed to me the quintessence of what it means to be independent. This, together with his unresolved fate, has complicated my own independence. We need a father to rage against. When a father is neither dead nor alive, when he is a ghost, the will is impotent. I am the son of an unusual man, perhaps even a great man. And when, like most children, I rebelled against these early perceptions of him, I did so because I feared the consequences of his convictions; I was desperate to divert him from his path.

Even then I knew, more from the voice than from the words, and also from the way he stood, not facing me, that he too was mourning the loss. There is a moment when you realize that you and your parent are not the same person, and it usually occurs when you are both consumed by a similar passion.

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 hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers.

Once he saw me count change before handing it to a beggar. “Next time, don’t make a display of it,” he said. “Give as if you were taking.” It took me a long time to understand this. If we passed laborers or street-sweepers eating their lunch and they invited us to join them, which was the custom—meaning they never expected you to actually join them—Father would sit in his fine clothes on the ground amongst the men and, if I was not as quick as he was, he would say, “Come, an honest meal feeds a hundred.” He would take a bite or two, then conduct his magic trick, sliding bank notes beneath the plate mid-sentence. He would look at the time and say, “Men, you are excellent, thank you.” His voice, which was always gentle, would rise if he learnt that one of the servants had turned away a needy person or shooed off a cat. The simple rule was never to refuse any one or thing in need. “It’s not your job to read their hearts,” he once told me after I claimed, with shameful certainty, that begging was a profession. “Your duty is not to doubt but to give. And don’t ask questions at the door. Allow them only to tell you what they came for after they’ve had tea and something to eat.” The word got around. Our doorbell would ring two or three times a day. Most people needed money for food or school or medicine. Some wanted us to mediate in a dispute, to return to them a piece of property—a wagon, a bicycle, a basket—that someone had confiscated after an argument.

Part of what we fear in suffering—perhaps the part we fear most—is transformation.

leaving only the face bare: the skin is clean, the eyes are shut, and the lips open. It cannot be described as an expression but rather as the absence of one. An infinite rest that was always there, behind all of the other faces of his life: the boy sitting proudly by the window on an aeroplane, the young graduate in a suit and tie, the freedom fighter in a beard and red beret, and all the other photographs Marwan’s family has posted on the Internet. It makes me think that we all carry, from childhood, our death mask with us.

realized that I have been carrying within me all these years the child I once was, his particular language and details, his impatient and thirsty teeth wanting to dig into the cold flesh of a watermelon, waking up wondering only about one thing: “What is the sea like today? Is it flat as oil or ruffled white with the spit of waves?”

My mother was sitting in the front row beside Diana. She seemed uncomfortable. She looked at me. She whispered something to Diana, and then they held hands. I think every child is born with a tiny device implanted in their chest that signals the moment their mother is about to cry.

The boy’s words matched an old mysterious instruction that, in the darkest moments and over the past quarter of a century since I lost my father, would come for me, sounding with the hard force of a warning bell, urgently ringing, Work and survive, work and survive. I heard it at university. I heard it when I worked as a stonemason after graduating. I heard it when I became a draughtsman and then an architectural designer. I heard it when, having devoted myself to writing, I worked in construction, painted houses and did odd jobs in a small market town in Bedfordshire. I heard it in the doubt of those days. I heard it when I stood at the edge of the Pont d’Arcole, a bridge in Paris, staring into the water. And I hear it still today. It never left me and yet it has never felt entirely my own. It belongs to some other presence implanted in me, one that knows better than anyone, perhaps even better than myself, that I am far closer to the precipice than I could conceive.

I was back in that familiar place, a place of 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 memorials and all the sacred and secular rituals of mourning across our human history are but failed gestures. The dead live with

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.

They had more things to tell me than I had to tell them. They wanted to bring me into the darkness, to expose the suffering and, in doing so, discretely and indirectly emphasize the bitter and momentous achievement of having survived it. Is there an achievement greater than surviving suffering? Of coming through mostly intact?