The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?

The ’80s were also the first time that Libya had an armed and determined resistance to the dictatorship. My father was one of the opposition’s most prominent figures.

In one of them, Father writes, “The cruelty of this place far exceeds all of what we have read of the fortress prison of Bastille. The cruelty is in everything, but I remain stronger than their tactics of oppression….My forehead does not know how to bow.”

In another letter, there is this sentence: “At times a whole year will pass by without seeing the sun or being let out of this cell.”

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. It was my first lesson in the limits of one’s ability to dissuade another from a perilous course.

I envy the finality of funerals. I covet the certainty. How it must be to wrap one’s hands around the bones, to choose how to place them, to be able to pat the patch of earth and sing a prayer.

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.

But what made my father dangerous to the Qaddafi regime was that his financial resources matched his political commitment. He was a leader. He knew how to manage and organize a movement. He coordinated several sleeper cells inside Libya. He set up and led military training camps in Chad, close to the Libyan border. He did not only pour his own money into this; he also had a gift for raising large donations and would shuttle around the world convincing wealthy Libyan exiles to support his organization. Its annual budget in the early 1980s was $7 million. A few years later, by the late 1980s, that figure had gone up to $15 million. But he did not stop there. He personally commanded the small army in Chad.

After he was kidnapped, we found that the bank account was nearly empty. According to the statements, the balance in 1979, the year we left Libya, was $6 million. In a little over a decade, it had all vanished.

Revolutions have their momentum, and once you join the current it is very difficult to escape the rapids. Revolutions are not solid gates through which nations pass but a force comparable to a storm that sweeps all before it.

To be a Libyan artist in Libya was heroic. The country, its politics and social dogmas, thwart every possible artistic instinct.

Rage, like a poisoned river, had been running through my life ever since we left Libya.

History remembers Mussolini as the buffoonish Fascist, the ineffective silly man of Italy who led a lame military campaign in the Second World War, but in Libya he oversaw a campaign of genocide.

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.

Of course, I told myself, it would be impossible that I should fail to detect the moment when someone I love dies. And this thought often comforted me, particularly when hope was thin. And now that it is unimaginable that my father is alive, I am unsettled by the failure. So much happens in this world without us blinking.

I was a desperate man, willing to talk to the devil in order to find out if my father was alive or dead. That was how I was then; I am no longer like that now.