Fifty Books Project 2023

The Return by Hisham Matar

In 1980, my family was living in Egypt.  On several occasions as a child I would sit in my room with the atlas and try to calculate the number of kilometers between our flat and the border.  Every year, Qaddafi was going to die or be forced to flee the country.  Every year we were going to return home.

The Return tells the story of Matar’s eventual return to Libya after Muammar al-Qaddafi is finally overthrown in 2011.  It is also the story of his futile search for his father – kidnapped from Egypt by Libyan security forces in 1990 and imprisoned In Libya’s Abu Salim prison for daring to criticize the Qaddafi regime while abroad.  It is a powerful testament to the cost of political dissidence in a dictatorship and a moving tribute to the power of the father-son bond.

It is not, however, an easily mapped narrative.  Matar’s father, Jaballa Matar, was a prominent Libyan citizen who had a long life of involvement in Libyan politics.  Jaballa’s brothers, Hisham’s uncles are also involved in dissident movements and are imprisoned in Abu Salim until the overthrow of Qaddafi.  Cousins are killed in the 2011 revolution that overthrew Qaddafi.  In the course of all this, Matar lives in New York, London, Cairo, Paris and other places, always with an eye towards Tripoli and his father’s fate.

And that fate is never clear.  Jaballa disappears into the Abu Salim prison and only communicates with his family sporadically.  Even that communication stopped in 2006 – after a prison uprising is put down with a violent massacre of prisoners.  It is likely that Jaballa died in that uprising – there are no reliable reports of him being seen or heard from after 1996.  This means Matar is searching for information of his father’s death, not his father – but is not always willing to admit that difference to himself.

All of this is narrated in a complex structure that spirals between the past and present giving us a sense of the details of the past Matar must drag up and the aspects of the present he must overcome.  The rise of Qaddafi, the start of his autocratic rule, the expansion of the political prison system, the legitimization of his dictatorship by international acceptance, the 2011 revolution, the death of his relatives and his return to Tripoli with his mother are narrated, along with Matar’s formal education, his love of art, and his development and success as a writer (he is the author of two novels, one of which – In the country of Men – was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2006).  However, they are not presented in that natural, chronological order.  The reader, like Matar, is constantly pulled between the past and the present.

The prose is deeply visual and personal while only rarely emotional.  Matar spends a good deal of time explicating his bond with his father, but does so by portraying the cost of that 21-year gap – he knows more about his father from the testimony of others than through his own experience.  Often these testimonies are from other prisoners who had very brief encounters with the man, so the resulting portrait is necessarily and painfully shallow.  Similarly, while we are introduced to several cities, the focus of the visuals is always through a specific and narrow point of view – so we are much more aware of distinct corners in particular rooms than of the sweep of travel and culture. 

The result is oddly tame.  While often deeply intellectually engaged (in part because I was largely ignorant of the history of Libya) I was rarely moved.  His growing awareness of his father’s fate is terrible, but since we know of his father’s death long before the author knows it and accepts it, the pain is muted.  The subtitle of the book is “Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between.”  The power and the weakness of the novel lie in the fact that the land and distance in question is not metaphorical.  Those kilometers mentioned in the quote above, and the country of Libya, have come between the two.  We think of the poignance that Matar will never return to the Libya he knew as a child because his father is not there.  But we are less like to fee that poignance.