The Return

Hisham Matar left his homeland, Libya, when he was eight years old. He didn’t return for thirty-three years. When he was nineteen, in the 1990s, his father, Jaballa Matar, was kidnapped and imprisoned in Libya, in one of the most notorious prisons in the country, because of his opposition to Qaddafi regime. His fate is still a mystery.

Jaballa Matar was a man committed to his cause, and this it was the most important thing to him. “Don’t put yourselves in competition with Libya. You will always lose,” he had said, when once his wife and two sons had tried to dissuade him from openly opposing Qaddafi. His fight against the Qaddafi regime was an uneasy preoccupation; it made the life of his sons challenging and complicated.

The Return is not just a memoir. It is a description of a whole life but it’s also a book about fathers and sons. It’s about how it is to live with the ambiguity of not knowing what happened to your father and the consequences of that. How it feels to live away from places and people you love. Not able to return.

Hisham’s father was counted among those who disappeared in Qaddafi’s prison system. He was killed at some point but how, where and when, is unknown. Matar describes how not knowing, the possibility of his father been alive, at this exact moment, alters the quality of that moment and as a consequence the quality of his life. The book is a journey of feelings and emotions that cannot easily be translated into language. In a sense, the book is a tool for Hisham Matar to find ways to express the forms of these feelings into words.

After the revolution in Libya and the fall of Qaddafi in 2011, Hisham Matar went back, not only to re-engage with the country and his relatives that had not seen for thirty-three years, but also to try to find information about what happened to his father. He wants to understand what happened to his country. He tries to bring everything in surface, the political events, the oppression, the massacre, the political revolution, specific private and political moments that affect people’s lives.

The revolution was an authentic, genuine response to a very brutal reality. It was a glimpse, a possibility of having a different kind of society. But it found Libya unprepared to face the extraordinary challenges of the regime change. And yes, we can contribute to the present and we can change some things, but the present is always a symptom of everything else that happened in the past. And the present of Libya has been formed by the experiences of the decades of the Qaddafi regime.

Despite the grimness of the subject, My return is a serene, poetic book. It is not just a book about someone’s life, yes, certainly it includes particulars about Hisham Matar’s life but, in a sense, it is also a book about who he has become in these thirty-three years, and the distances that he has crossed. It is a book about our relationship to the past, our relationship to one another, and our relationship to history. It’s a writer’s response to ghosts and to history.

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The author's memoir, describing his family's exile from Libya when the Qaddafi regime took over, his father's efforts to oppose the regime, and then his efforts to learn the fate of his father who was kidnapped by the regime in 1990. The family received two letters from him, smuggled out of the prison where he was being held prisoner in Abu Salim by Qaddafi's regime, and then nothing more. Since 1990, the author dedicated much of his life to opposing the regime, fighting to learn what had happened to his father, and trying to get his other relatives freed.

Reading this book, I felt ashamed that although the Qaddafi regime was in power for most of my life, I was relatively ignorant of the details of the atrocities the regime had committed. It's also dismaying to read about how willing western governments (like England) were to overlook the corruption and the vast numbers of political prisoners being tortured and killed as long as business relationships were good.

The author's memoir gives a personal viewpoint to the lengthy and somewhat overwhelmingly complex story of the regime, which makes it both more comprehensible and more emotionally involving. I did find it disappointing that he focuses pretty much solely on his father and a few male family members though. His mother is present throughout and a bit more perspective on her involvement with the family's attempts to overthrow the regime would have made it a more well-rounded narrative, and probably provided a lot more details of the bigger picture, particularly in the years the author was so young he would not have been aware of the family's work to overthrow the regime. In Matar's memoir, women seem to almost not exist at all, which is certainly not a balanced portrait of their involvement in the conflict. Still, a very interesting read and perspective of the conflict through the eyes of a young boy who clearly idolizes his father.