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 behi...

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, ...

old I had become, but also the boyishness that persisted, as if part of me had stopped

Light entered as solid as a wall, blackening the three or four figures walking in. We stood up to greet

confident manner of couples that, notwithstanding the usual apprehensions of parents, regard the future as a friendly country.

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 labourers 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. My brother and I would often manage this without my father’s

Had the pain not been so precise I would have asked To which of my sorrows should I yield.

realize now that my walks, whether taken to pass the time or to better acquaint myself with a foreign city, or conducted in a hurry – to post a letter, to catch a train or on the occasion I was late for an appointment – all took place under the vague suspicion that 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.

The sun was out. The light did not seem to shine down on the valley as much as pour in and fill it like liquid. As I walked through the village

many people around me idealized him, and, because that kind of idealizing serves more to obscure than reveal a man, it clouded my early

I have no illness but this endless despair,

I have no illness but the loss of noble folk and the foul ones who now, with calamitous, shameless faces, govern us.

Titian’s The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence. I had gone

is massive in scale, measuring just less than five metres high by three metres wide. It is impossible to ignore Lawrence’s suffering. I stood there till closing time. I watched the fit body of a man, a body still good, pinned to a wooden bench. I thought of the carpenter who had constructed the bench. I saw the daughter handing him a glass of water. The bench had been constructed carefully to play its part effectively: to hold up the body until, at the right moment, it would burn too and crumble. But we are at an earlier stage. The bench is still holding up well. The fire beneath it is being stoked by a half-naked figure. Like the carpenter – or perhaps he is the carpenter – the man is diligent in his

work. There is no end to Lawrence’s torment. He is surrounded by efficient men. Behind him stands one with strong arms. He is working hard to keep the victim down. Agony is twisting Lawrence’s body. His head is thrown back. The brute, either out of strain or shame, looks away. Meanwhile another man, barefaced, is stabbing Lawrence in the ribs, poking him as he might a chained animal, safe in the knowledge it cannot reach him. The light comes from the fires: the one burning beneath Lawrence and those of the torches of bystanders watching the spectacle. The only other source of light is a gash in the heavens, its edges bubbling with clouds, as though the sky has developed an infected wound. The moon’s glow pours through. It touches Lawrence’s outstretched hand and lights up his fingertips. There is a strange detail: Lawrence’s left foot is caught in a peculiar position, dangling off the bench, floating in the flames, as if enjoying the fire.

the blood off the Libyan regime.

Manet’s Maximilian

Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, a picture of a political execution.

The seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, who had a hold on me during those years, is counted amongst the influences on the French painter Manet. It was probably this chronology of influences that had organized my decision. Nonetheless, it is unsettlingly appropriate. Manet was responding to one of the most controversial political events of his time. The French intervention in Mexico had come to a disastrous end with the execution of their installed ruler, Emperor Maximilian, in 1867. There were no photographs of the incident. Manet had to rely on the stories he heard and the accounts he read in the papers. In the same year, he began work on several imaginings of the event. Over the next

couple of years he was to complete three large paintings, an oil sketch and a lithograph depicting the fall of Maximilian. They are scattered around the world. The one at the National Gallery happens to be the most poignant, not least of all because, after the artist’s death, the painting was cut up and sold in fragments. The impressionist artist Edgar Degas purchased the surviving pieces, and it was not until 1992, two years after my father’s disappearance, that the National Gallery assembled them on a single canvas. Large chunks of the picture remain missing. You cannot see Maximilian – only his hand, gripped tightly by one of his generals. The firing squad is as ruthlessly focused and indifferent as the men surrounding Saint Lawrence. It would be h...

reason or instinct, to this picture on the same day as the massacre unnerved me and has since changed my relationship to all the works of this French artist, who, somewhere in Proust’s novels, is described as the painter of countless portraits of vanished models, ‘models who already belonged to oblivion or to history’. Today, whenever I see a Manet, the white, his white, which is unlike any other white, cannot be a cloud, a tablecloth or...

In death the hallmark fades, and not all the memorials in the world can hold back the tide of forgetting. But in life the disappeared changes in ways that are active and elaborate.

Jaballa Hamed Matar’.

In the letter I asked Mr Mandela whether, given his close ties with Qaddafi, he could enquire about my father’s whereabouts and well-being. The answer, which was given to my friend, was unambiguous: ‘Mandela says to never ask him such a thing again.’ As it was second hand, it is impossible to be certain of the wording, but what was clear is that even a man as great as Nelson

Mandela felt too indebted to Qaddafi to risk upsetting him. Such concerns were clearly not important to the archbishop. His statement gained our campaign extraordinary momentum.

And I remembered once again Telemachus’s words: I wish at least I had some happy man as father, growing old in his own house – but unknown death and silence are the fate of him …

And for the first time those familiar words, which have been to me loyal companions for many years, moved and expanded in

meaning. They were now just as much about Odysseus as they were about Telemachus; just as much about the father as they were about the son; just as much about the wish of the son to have his father spend the remainder of his days in the comfort and dignity of his own house as they were about the son’s wish to finally be able to leave the father at home, to finally turn and face forward and walk into the world. As long...