The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

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 ...

I might somehow come upon myself, that is to say, that other self who lives in harmony with his surroundings, who exists, like a chapter in a book, in the right place, not torn out and left to make sense on its own.

every book and painting and symphony and work of art that had ever mattered to me, suddenly seeming impermanent. The freedom frightened me—because, after all,

absence has never seemed empty or passive but rather a busy place, vocal and insistent. As Aristotle writes, “The theory that

Aristotle is to much a victim of intellection Both traditional Zen and Platonic thinking claim void as something outside the realm of experience in Space/Time

way of justifying it—it is a hopeful part at that. What is extraordinary is that, given everything that has happened, the natural alignment of the heart remains towards the light. It is in that direction that there is the least resistance. I have never understood this. Not intellectually anyway. But it is somehow in the body, in the physical knowledge of the eternity of each moment, in the expansive

nature of time and space, that declarative statements such as “He is dead” are not precise. 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 ...

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

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.