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  Hisham Matar
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  Hisham Matar
  Hisham Matar.jpg
  Hisham Matar in 2011.
  Native name هشام مطر
  Born 1970 (age 46–47)
  New York City, New York, United States
  Occupation Novelist, poet, essayist
  Period 2004–present
  Genre Fiction, Memoir
  Notable works In the Country of Men,
  Anatomy of a Disappearance,
  The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between
  Notable awards Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography (2017)

  Hisham Matar (Arabic: هشام مطر‎‎) (born 1970)[1] is a Libyan/American[2] writer. His memoir of the search for his father, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. His debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize.[1] Matar’s essays have appeared in the Asharq al-Awsat, The Independent, The Guardian, The Times and The New York Times. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was published on 3 March 2011. He currently lives and writes in London.

  Contents

  1 Background
  2 Literary career
  2.1 Awards and recognition
  3 Bibliography
  3.1 Books
  3.2 Essays and reporting
  4 See also
  5 References
  6 External links

  Background

  Hisham Matar was born in New York City. He spent his early childhood in America with his Libyan parents while his father, Jaballa Matar, was working for the Libyan delegation to the United Nations. When he was three years old, his family went back to Tripoli, Libya, where he spent the next six years of his life. Due to political persecutions by the Gaddafi regime, in 1979 his father was accused of being a reactionary to the Libyan revolutionary regime and was forced to flee the country with his family. They lived in exile in Egypt where Hisham and his brother completed their schooling in Cairo.[3][4] In 1986 Matar moved to London where he continued his studies and received a degree in architecture. Also in London he completed the MA in Design Futures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

  In 1990, while Matar was in London, his father Jaballa, a political dissident, was kidnapped in Cairo. He has been reported missing ever since. However, in 1996, the family received two letters in his father's handwriting stating that he had been kidnapped by the Egyptian secret police, handed over to the Libyan regime, and imprisoned in the notorious Abu Salim prison in the heart of Tripoli. Since that date, there has been little information about Jaballa Matar's whereabouts. In 2010 Hisham Matar reported that he had received news that his father had been seen alive in 2002, indicating that Jaballa had survived a 1996 massacre of 1200 political prisoners by the Libyan authorities.[5]

  In March 1990, Egyptian secret service agents abducted my father from his home in Cairo. For the first two years they led us to believe that he was being held in Egypt, and told us to keep quiet or else they could not guarantee his safety. In 1992 my father managed to smuggle out a letter. A few months later my mother held it in her hand. His careful handwriting curled tightly on to itself to fit as many words as possible on the single A4 sheet of paper. Words with hardly a space between, above or beneath them. No margins, they run to the brink.[6]

  Literary career

  Matar began writing his first novel, In the Country of Men, in early 2000. In the autumn of 2005, the publishers Penguin International signed him to a two-book deal. In the Country of Men was published in July 2006 and has been translated into 22 languages.

  In 2008 Matar became the Mary Amelia Cummins Harvey Visiting Fellow Commoner at Girton College at the University of Cambridge. He is currently a writer-in-residence for the charity First Story.

  Matar's second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, contains a character whose father is taken away by the authorities; while Matar acknowledges the relation to his own father's disappearance, he has stated that the novel is not autobiographical.

  In 2016, Matar published his memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between.[7]
  Awards and recognition

  In the Country of Men received accolades from writers including J. M. Coetzee, Anne Michaels and Nadeem Aslam.[8] It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize[9] and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2006.[10] The book won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book award for Europe and South Asia, the 2007 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the 2007 Premio Gregor von Rezzori for foreign fiction translated into Italian, the Italian Premio Internazionale Flaiano (Sezione Letteratura) and the inaugural Arab American Book Award. "In the Country of Men" has been translated into 28 languages. Matar's short story, "Naima", was included in The Pen/O. Henry Prize Short Stories, The Best Stories of the Year, 2012 collection of short stories, which, as a quote by The Atlantic Monthly reads on its cover, is "Widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction." His memoir of the search for his missing father, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 2017.
  This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
  Bibliography

  He was born in 1970. As of February, 2017, he was alive.
  This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
  Books

  In the Country of Men, Viking-Penguin, 2006, ISBN 0-670-91639-0
  Anatomy of a Disappearance, Viking-Penguin, 2011, ISBN 0-670-91651-X
  The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, Viking-Penguin, 2016, ISBN 0-670-92333-8

  Essays and reporting
  Matar, Hisham (April 8, 2013). "The return : a father's disappearance, a journey home". Letter from Libya. The New Yorker. 89 (8): 46–59. Retrieved 2015-12-22.

• Fresh Air, NPR - http://www.npr.org/2013/04/02/176031868/hisham-matar-a-return-to-libya-in-search-of-his-father

  < Hisham Matar: A 'Return' To Libya In Search Of His Father April 2, 20131:02 PM ET 39:30 Download Facebook Twitter Google+ Email TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest has often thought of his father as neither dead nor alive. Hisham Matar's family was living in Egypt, in exile from Libya, when Matar's father, a prominent opponent of the Gadhafi regime, was kidnapped, taken back to Libya and imprisoned. That was in March 1990, and it was the last time Matar saw his father. The only word he'd heard from his father over the years was through a couple of letters smuggled out of prison. In March of last year, after the revolution that overthrew Gadhafi, Matar returned to Libya for the first time since leaving, to look for his father or at least to try to find out what became of him. In Libya, Matar also reconnected with two uncles and two cousins who were dissidents and who had been imprisoned for 21 years. They were released on the same day, just two weeks before the popular uprising against Gadhafi began. Another cousin was killed by a sniper in the battle at Gadhafi's compound. Hisham Matar writes about his father and the recent trip to Libya in his article "The Return," published in this week's edition of the New Yorker. Matar is a novelist who divides his time between New York and London. He teaches a course at Barnard College on the literature of exile and estrangement. Hisham Matar, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So when you set out for Libya, to see if you could find your father who had been imprisoned for many years, the last you'd heard of him was in 2010, you learned that somebody had seen him or said that they'd seen him in prison in 2002. So you really had no idea if he was alive or not. So when you go to Libya looking for your father, where do you start? What was the plan? HISHAM MATAR: Well, the plan was to speak to as many people as possible, people that were in prison, people that are involved in the government now, and to basically make as many inquiries as possible. But even before we went, it was becoming explicitly clear that he was no longer alive because all the prisons were opened, and the political prisoners had been released and accounted for, and he wasn't among them. That fact had become clear, you know, before arriving in Libya. So the question was, well, what actually happened to him, where might his body be, and so that was the nature of the inquiries. GROSS: You describe in your New Yorker piece being on the phone with a man who was one of the men hammering the cells of the worst prison in Libya, a prison which you knew your father had been, at least for a period of his imprisonment, and you were on the phone as they were liberating prisoners, political prisoners. One of the things you were hearing as you were on the phone, they were able to open the door of a cell, and in the cell was a man who obviously hadn't been exposed to daylight for many years. He had no memory anymore. He didn't even know his name. His only possession was a photograph of your father. And so you're on the phone when they find him with this photograph? MATAR: So, yes. So I was on the phone with the person who - one of the people that were releasing the prisoners that were there. So this happened very shortly after Tripoli was - fell under the revolutionaries. And they - obviously with every cell that they opened, there was, you know, heightened anticipation on my part. But then when they reached this final cell that contained what they described to me as an important person from Ajdabiya, which is my father's hometown, I was incredibly hopeful, if that's the right word, except what I was feeling was slightly a dark sense of hope. But then, you know, eventually they opened it, and they found this man who had been in solitary confinement for a long time, you know, in this windowless room. It was obvious that he hadn't been out of this room in years. And they found beside him a photograph of my father. But the man had lost his memory. So he wasn't able to tell him anything about his own identity, let along how he came to have this photograph, or what his relationship might have been to my father, or if they knew each other, or if they were friends or comrades, or - I mean, it's a revelation that poses more questions than answers questions. GROSS: It just seems so - oh, frustrating is not a strong enough word, that you find somebody who has a photo of your father, but this man has no memory, and so there is nothing that he can give you in terms of a clue. To be so close and so far at the same time, I just can't imagine the emotions that that set off in you. MATAR: Yes, and this seems to be a sort of a repeated pattern not only with me and my family and trying to find information about my father, but with many families who have endured disappearance, that somehow with every new piece of information there seems to be either more questions, or other questions become more aggravated in their desire to be answered. And this seems to be a pattern. But also one of the things - one of the questions that it raises, for me, at least, every time it happens is that how do you mark something like this. You know, where is the - you know, what is the appropriate way to be faithful to the memory of this event, to attend to it, because the possibility is very credible that I might never find out what happened to my father. And therefore what - how do you accommodate this thing, this very strange thing that I've been trying to accommodate for over two decades now, certainly more than half my life. GROSS: You write that you've grieved his loss, but you've never grieved his death, because you've never really known for sure, though you suspect now, you know, that he died. MATAR: Yeah, and I think also, you know, something extraordinary happened when I was in Libya making these inquiries. I got a sense of my father, in a way, restraining me, urging me not to proceed. I felt him every time I asked about him. I felt him as if he were saying, you know, just stop. (LAUGHTER) MATAR: You know, I'm not in this place. I'm not where you are looking. And it reminded me of a line in one of his letters, the first letter that was smuggled out of prison and reached us. And he says in this letter: Don't come looking for me. And he meant it in the literal sense, then, and he meant it to do with, you know, don't compromise yourselves by coming to Libya and either subjecting yourself to danger, allowing the regime to use you in some way. You know, don't - you know, so he was warning us in that sense. But after, now, the revolution and this change and me physically being in Libya, that statement in the letter seemed to have a slightly different meaning to me. It seemed that don't come looking for me, meaning I'm not in - I'm not in these places. I'm not with these people that you're asking. I am somewhere else. And it brought me back to the things that are most intimate and most important and incredibly private, to do with my relationship with my father. It's as if the events that have happened, his forced disappearance, was also an attempt to, kind of, make him disappear from my own mind, you know, to make me focus only on the urgency of trying to find him. So that - I found, that was an unexpected event. GROSS: So when you imagined your father giving you this message I'm not here, I'm not where you're looking, do you mean that you think your father was trying to tell you I'm dead, I'm freed from the prison, you're not going to find me anyplace that you look; except maybe like in your heart and in your memory. Is that what you mean? MATAR: Yes, something like that. I mean, I felt that it wasn't - he wasn't literally saying I am not in this physical place, but that you're involved in your mission to try to find me is something that's far more attainable to you than you think; that the people with whom we are deeply involved, emotionally and psychologically, the way that we hold them, the way that we attend to them, sometimes is much more subtle than the ways that we think. It's not necessarily by buying them what they love or fixing the world for them. Sometimes it's something much more subtle than that. And I felt that my father was - his statement was in that kind of vicinity. GROSS: My guest is Hisham Matar. His article "The Return" is in the current edition of the New Yorker. More after a break; this is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: My guest is Hisham Matar. His article "The Return" in the current edition of The New Yorker is about returning to Libya after the revolution to search for his father, who was imprisoned in 1990 by the Gadhafi regime. I'm going to try to sum up why your father was considered an enemy of the Gadhafi regime. So tell me if this is accurate. He had been in the military under the king, and then when the coup overthrew the king, and Gadhafi became president, your father was given a diplomatic position in the Libyan Permanent Mission to the U.N., largely to get rid of him without alienating him as a military man and risking turning military men against the regime. But then your father decided to continue to fight the Gadhafi regime and ran a militia that hoped to depose Gadhafi. Do I have that right? MATAR: Yes, except I think the description of a militia might not be accurate. I mean, he was part of an opposition group that had an armed element. Maybe that's called a militia, but it doesn't ring true. But yes, that's roughly what was going on. My father was an incredibly able and focused opponent to the regime. He had absolutely no intentions of giving in to them or, you know, being co-opted in the many ingenious ways that that regime managed to co-opt so many decent people. And so he was a thorn in their side, and they've tried several things to silence him or remove him or buy him or scare him. And eventually they succeeded by kidnapping him from his home and imprisoning him and then eventually killing him or causing his death in some way. We don't know exactly what happened. GROSS: How much did you know about what he was doing when you were young? MATAR: I knew quite a bit. You know, we - my family is small. There's only four of us: my parents, my brother and I. And we were very close as a unit and talked about most things that concerned us and talked openly and in a free and honest way. And so, you know, we had a clear sense of what father was involved in and the extent to which he was involved and the dangers that that posed to him. And we were very resistant and really had several arguments about it because we naturally feared for him and wanted to persuade him to not go down this incredibly intense path, you know, that you have to risk unreasonable things. But he, you know, he was devoted. He was completely devoted. GROSS: To the cause. MATAR: Yeah, he was completely devoted to liberating Libya from this dictatorship. And even, you know, after facing the grim reality of prison and being tortured and all the details that he actually notes in his letters, you know, he does say that if he had it to do again, he would do exactly the same thing, that he actually thinks that this event, the event of his incarceration, is not something to mourn, it's something to celebrate, in his words, because he said that he's thankful that he had had the ability and the courage to face up to this regime, and that he would think it would have been a worse fate if he had bowed to them. So he seemed really strong in prison. And one of the positive things that happened out of the trip is that I got to meet a lot of people who knew him in prison and told me things about him that were extraordinary and that confirmed this sense of this strength that he had in prison, and that he became a sort of father to a lot of the young prisoners and gave them a sense of hope and strength. One of the most moving and extraordinary examples of this for me is these young prisoners who told me that we had never seen your father, but we could hear him. So we would speak to each other, but we never saw him because each one of us is locked in a cell. But whenever he would hear that one of us was taken and to be interrogated, he would call out, and he'd say boys, if you get stuck, tell them I told you to do it. GROSS: Wow. MATAR: And so many things like this that I learned about him that although of course they don't resolve my bigger problem of knowing what had happened to him and the very basic human desire and need to have a grave, some marker for the end of such an important life, stories like this still just - you know, they comfort on some level. They make me feel that he was - that they didn't manage to break him, and that not having been broken was, to some extent I'm sure, a comfort to him, as well as it was to others. GROSS: Well, you also write about how some of his fellow prisoners said that he would read - he would just, like, recite poetry all the time. He had committed so many poems to memory, he could do that. And he had told you when you were young that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest. So that must have been reassuring, too, to know that he recited poems, and in that sense he was able to access something beautiful even when he was in this horrible cell. MATAR: Yeah, it was an astonishing demonstration and victory on his part on an old argument that he and I had because like most children I wasn't exactly excited about being obliged to memorize pages and pages of text. And he would tell me that - he would try to convince me about the virtues of doing such a thing, that it would, you know, teach you about language, that it would... He described it once, he said it's like - it's the difference between, you know, reading a poem is like a bird flying over a forest, but memorizing it is like that same bird walking through the forest as well as, you know, learning how to fly over it. So he would give me all these examples to try to sell me the idea of memorizing these poems, which I did. But - and later of course learned other virtues of - many wonderful virtues about memorizing text, that it does feel like company, in a sense. But this story of him reciting poems to comfort himself and others in prison was just another demonstration of how right he was that - and it made me feel, it made me feel - I was happy for him to have had these poems in his chest, that they were there to delight an comfort, perhaps, and entertain him and others, that literature, oftentimes I think we misrepresent literature as some kind of sort of comfortable thing that you, you know, you sink into a nice comfortable chair, and you read a book, and nothing ever really changes in you. And you go on to the next book and so on. And examples like this show you that actually literature is just far more fundamental. It's about the makeup of our psychology. It becomes a kind of country for us and a kind of solace and friend at times, as it did, I think, for my father in those times. GROSS: When you were in Libya trying to investigate what happened to your father, how long was he in prison, did he die in prison, was he executed, did he starve, were you able to track down any prison guards who might be able to tell you anything, former prison guards? MATAR: No, that was very difficult. It remains incredibly difficult. So the prison guards that have been captured, they are very reluctant to give information that might incriminate them. So that's - you know, that still remains, that still remains very difficult. GROSS: You mentioned in our past interview, several years ago, that when you were about 15, your father gave you - I think you were about 15 - your father gave you a video of a public execution in Libya because there had been public executions to instill terror in the population. And he felt that you were old enough to see this and that you should know, at this point, what was happening in your country. Did the images from that video kind of haunt you ever since? MATAR: Yes, and also I have to just say that I'm - you know, memory plays tricks. So - and part of - the piece that I'm writing is also a piece about memory, in a sense. But memory plays tricks. So I'm not sure if my father had given me the video, or my brother and I snuck into his study and took it and watched it against his will, or - you know, I'm not - I don't remember exactly. But I remember seeing it, and I remember that it was incredibly haunting and terrible, really terrible. I think watching human beings do terrible things to human beings is already outrageous and moves us, should move us, incredibly deeply and outrage us. But something about watching your own do terrible things to your own, that somehow makes it more intimate and therefore more horrible and dare I say also more interesting, interesting in the sense of, you know, anybody who is interested in the nature of being a human being. GROSS: When you were imagining, like, what happened to your father, was he executed, did he die of starvation, did this video create images in your mind that you would have preferred not to have? MATAR: You know, I have learned so much about what this regime had done to people that I have already - I already have, you know, a large library of awful possibilities that have happened to my father. I try, you know, lest I go mad I try not to think about that and try to think about the things that I think my father was encouraging us to think about in his letters, you know, his strength and his ideas and his commitment to what he thought was right. GROSS: Hisham Matar will be back in the second half of the show. His article "The Return" is in the current edition of the New Yorker. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with writer Hisham Matar. In this week's edition of The New Yorker, Matar writes about returning to Libya for the first time since his family went into exile. In 1990, his father, a political dissident, was kidnapped from Egypt, where the family was living then and taken to a Libyan prison. That was the last time Matar saw his father. In March of last year, after Gadhafi was overthrown, Matar returned to Libya to search for his father or for clues of what became of him. You made your trip to Libya in the hopes of finding out what happened to your father and if he died in prison, if he was executed, if he was tortured. One of the things you did learn was about the life of your Uncle Mahmoud, who was imprisoned for 21 years and had been released in February of 2011 - 14 days before the uprising against Gadhafi. What did he tell you about life in Abu Salim prison, the prison in which you know your father at least spent part of his time in prison? MATAR: Extraordinary things. Mostly about what he had endured there, and he had endured terrible things. But also, you know, I've sadly been in conversations with political prisoners in Libya for a very long time. As you might imagine, people had left at different stages. And some of what my Uncle Mahmoud was telling me reminded me of these other conversations, that there's a pattern, and the pattern is usually desiring to confirm to you that they hadn't been obliterated, that this individual hadn't been erased by everything that had happened. So my Uncle Mahmoud was an exceptional in this because he - because of how close we are and what he could tell me, but also of this amazing ability of his to remain gentle and loving and able to forgive and, you know, it was astonishing, it was really astonishing to me, given particularly what had happened to him, that he remained so - I mean it's really it was something that moved me so deeply and just - I find it such a lesson in how to be a human being. He's amazing in that way. Even though, you know, he had experienced astonishing hardships of, you know, being tortured and imprisoned and mistreated, and yet he somehow came through that. And, yeah... GROSS: And that's 21 years in prison. That's in solitary the whole time? MATAR: No. No. He was with other people. There were moments when he was alone but mostly he was with other people. GROSS: Mm-hmm. MATAR: And always in close contact with his nephews and - so which is... GROSS: Who were also in prison. Yeah. MATAR: Who were also imprisons, yeah. GROSS: So he managed to know while he was in prison that you'd been nominated for England's most prestigious literary award, the Man Booker Prize. Did he have a radio in prison? MATAR: Eventually, you know, there were certain sort of - prison life was incredibly unpredictable. There are moments of hardship and then suddenly, you know, they'll bring them a radio and food gets better, and then just as quickly things go back to being really terrible. And sometimes there was a reason for the change, sometimes there wasn't. It was just seemingly arbitrary. And so yes, there was a time when they had - when he had a radio, when occasionally they could get a hold of the newspaper - of course it was the national newspaper. And he had heard on BBC radio, the Arabic BBC Radio, World Service, that you know, this Libyan writer had been nominated for the Booker and he heard it was me. And then he heard an interview with me and he told me when we spoke, the moment he was released we spoke on the phone. He was being driven home and we spoke for a long time. It was the first time that I heard his voice, you know, since he was imprisoned for 21 years and we were very close when I was a kid. So he meant, you know, means a great deal to me. So we were speaking on the phone and the first thing he said to me was, so what is this I hear about you having been shortlisted for the Booker? (LAUGHTER) MATAR: You know, it was like you mischievous so-and-so. GROSS: So your father gave his life because of his commitment to overthrowing the Gadhafi regime. Your uncles were imprisoned for the same reason; a cousin lost his life during the revolution that overthrew Gadhafi. When you went to Libya last year, you know, the fledgling new government, the revolutionary government was trying to create order in the country. But one of your cousins who is a judge was on strike - as were, you know, a lot of other judges - because they feared that they could make, you know, fair decisions without fear of reprisals. So were they worried about this new government punishing them for decisions or former Gadhafi people who were still in the country? MATAR: No. The fear is not from the government - fear of reprisals, at least, is not from the government. The fear is from these bandits basically, militias who are armed, act independently. They are, you know, only answerable to themselves and to their immediate commander and they don't fall under any kind of national authority, even though sometimes they take, they oblige the government to pay them money because they threaten it to pay them money. I don't think this will surprise most people who know something about post-revolutionary Libya in the sense that because Libya doesn't have a national army, or an incredibly weak one, or one that is forming, and equally not really a police force, the government, which is an elected government, had to rely on armed groups. Some of them had fought in the revolution, some of them claimed to have fought in the revolution, who control national assets, who basically, you know, look after the airports and the oil fields and the national borders and ports and so on, so the government doesn't feel it can do without them until it can quickly create an army. But we what that situation has done is that actually it gave these people more power and it made them coalescent and start to create their own, start to have their own political agendas and ambitions, and some of those, some of their intentions run against, you know, the independence of the judiciary, for example, and so it's a huge problem and it seems to have only gotten worse since the time that I write about it in 2012; it seems to have only gotten worse. GROSS: So seeing what's happened in post-revolutionary Libya, what kind of feelings has it left you with about revolution and what it can or can't accomplish? MATAR: Well, I've always said, I've always said I'm not by temperament a romantic about revolutions or given to revolutions. I've always thought that they are not the ideal way to change. But we were in a situation where we didn't have any other option. And so in this case we had to have a revolution. But revolutions - and history shows them to be incredibly temperamental things. They call for excitement and violence and blood and impatience, all the things that I am personally, you know, that I fear and dislike. And so, you know, that's generally about revolutions. But how I feel now about what's happening in Libya, you know, I think that there are some things that give one, you know, great enthusiasm and hope, such as what's happening in cultural life and what's happening to a certain extent in democratic political life. The fact that Libyans elected a parliament. The fact that when enough voices gather around and criticism gather around a minister, that minister, you know, there's a high chance that they'd step down, and that has happened. The amount of, you know, cultural festivals and publications that are happening there, these are positive things but there's also equally worrying things going on, such as this question of security that I alluded to and the general sense of impatience and fatigue that revolutions leave countries in that just has to take its course in some sense. But it seems incredibly - it's very worrying what's happening at the moment. Yeah. GROSS: My guest is Hisham Matar. His article, "The Return," is in the current edition of The New Yorker. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: My guest is Hisham Matar. His article, "The Return," in the current edition of The New Yorker, is about returning to Libya after the revolution to search for his father, who was imprisoned in 1990 by the Gadhafi regime. The family had been living in exile in Egypt at the time. You were forced to flee Libya when you were eight or nine. In your heart Libya is, you know, was a beautiful place. You wanted to be there. But knowing what actually happened to your country and having gone back there, having seen what the lives of your relatives who stayed were like, including the lives of relatives who were imprisoned and the lives of their families, what do you think your life would have been like had you stayed, had your family stayed? MATAR: I don't know. I try not to think about that - just because the trajectory of my family poses so many different possibilities. You know, had we stayed in New York when my father resigned from the diplomatic corps where I was born, what would've happened? Had we stayed in Libya, what would've happened? Had we stayed in Kenya, what would've happened, where we went first before settling in Egypt? You know, and so on and so on. So there are so many if's there. But I want to tell you that when I was in Libya, one of the things that happened is very quickly, about the second or the third day of being there, I suddenly felt a sort of panic because suddenly I realized that all my tools with which I could interact with this place are tools from the past. They're all to do with my family, my father or what happened to my father, my memories of childhood, my relatives, that I had nothing immediate. And I wanted, I yearned for something incredibly direct and almost something that had nothing to do with morality or nothing to do with history. And I mourned it. I realized that I don't have that. And then, but very quickly, as soon as I sort of acknowledged that, I very quickly, in the next few days, I started to have this what felt to me to be a sincere, uncomplicated relationship to the land, to the quality of the light, to the trees. There's something about the land of the countries where we come from that seems almost immoral and has nothing to do with history, has nothing to do with lineage even. It is something far more immediate and far more simple and basic. And I can't tell you the extent to which I felt - I yearned for it, even when I was on it and I felt a kind of nourishment from being in it - the landscape, I mean. And Libya's landscape is stunning, maybe more so to me, maybe I'm being biased, but I'm sure I am, but it helps to be in such a magical landscape on which, you know, Greek tragedies were staged. It's just so luminous and marvelous that for moments you feel it's somehow elevated above all of the temporary complications of history and my particular history. GROSS: We talked a little bit about how your father recited poetry in prison and how he loved having committed poems to memory, being able to have it in his chest. I want to just read an excerpt of a letter that he wrote that was smuggled out of prison. It seems to me he was a very good writer. So here's the excerpt. And now a description of this - this was when he was in prison - and now a description of this noble palace. The cell is a concrete box. The walls are made of prefabricated slabs. There is a steel door through which no air passes. A window that is three and a half meters above ground. As for the furniture, it is in the style of Louis XVI. An old mattress worn out by many previous prisoners, torn in several places. The world here is empty. Had you thought of your father as a writer? MATAR: Yes, actually. Because he was, you know, he was really interested in literature and wrote some poems. He wouldn't have called himself a writer because I think he, you know, he didn't dedicate himself to it fully enough. And he knew that. But he loved literature and he loved - had a high regard for the implications and the esthetics of language. And it was apparent in his conversations. He was incredibly articulate, had beautiful Arabic, and in his letters before prison, when I was a student and he would send me letters. So, yes. No, it certainly didn't surprise me. His eloquence didn't surprise me. But in the prison letters there are moments when his eloquence almost becomes as a kind of gesture of defiance. That I am going to sing even here. I'm going to write a, you know, a beautiful sentence. GROSS: Did your father's love of literature help you feel that your father would have approved of the life that you chose for yourself? A life of writing literature and of teaching literature, as opposed to the life that he chose, which was the life of a more physical opposition to the Libyan regime, to the Gadhafi regime? MATAR: Yes. Absolutely. And that statement that I told you about before, Terry, about the letter when he says don't come looking for me. In that too is to me that other meaning. Find your own way. Which was always a sentiment that he insisted on - that each one of us has to find his own way, that we don't have to follow him. And he had a high regard for my misery pursuits in literature when I was a kid. Which reflected in the letter that he sent from prison when he said, you know, started addressing us individually, you know, he wrote mostly letters describing to us all together in general what has happened. But then addressing each one of us individually. And he started with my mother, then he went to my brother, then he came to me. Then he said - being the youngest. So he said I wonder if you are still interested in your two loves: poetry and music. And my heart stopped at that moment because I thought he would be completely permitted to say - the following sentence, for it to say because I hope you have outgrown these childish habits or something. But instead what he says is he says I hope so. I hope that you are still loyal to poetry and music. So for him to give me this confirmation from arguably the darkest place has bolstered my conviction that what I do and, notwithstanding my limited abilities in it, is worthwhile. GROSS: Hisham Matar, I want to thank you so much for talking with us. MATAR: Thank you, Terry. GROSS: I wish you good health and all best. MATAR: Thank you. I wish you good health, too, and all your listeners. GROSS: Hisham Matar's article "The Return" is in the current edition of the New Yorker. His latest novel is called "Anatomy of a Disappearance." Coming up Ken Tucker reviews the album that's number one on Billboard's country album chart. This is FRESH AIR.

• The Baillie Gifford Prize Web site - http://thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/news/hisham-matar-interview

  Hisham Matar interview

  Submitted by Alice on Sun, 2016-10-16 14:11
  The Baillie Gifford Prize 2016 longlist

  Hisham Matar tells us what triggered the writing of The Return was a trip he made back to Libya after 33 years of not being able to go there and that he thinks in books rather than authors.

  This is part of our series of longlisted author interviews.

  What does it feel like to be longlisted?

  I am amazed by how books, these creatures that arise from the depths, through silence and solitude, and that can neither be suppressed nor hurried, leave the men and women who write them and chart, as though independently, paths to individual readers. That this ever happens, that books are written and read at all, is itself a wonder. And if that book is yours and furthermore acknowledged by a prize as reputable as this, and placed amongst such excellent company, it increases the magic. But, I must say, it also adds to it an anxious humility that is, perhaps, the silent acknowledgement of the simple fact that it is impossible to ever know the true measure of one’s own work.

  How did you research for your book?

  The Return has for a long time been in my veins. But what triggered it was a trip I made back to my old country, Libya, after 33 years of not being able to go there. Returning to the place of my forefathers and foremothers, searching for old and new connections, searching for my disappeared father, destabilised me deeply. It pressed upon me urgent questions concerning what it means to return to anything or anyone, how to live, and the nature of grief and remembrance. It also became, I discovered, about the present, the life I have made for myself in London, my relationships to certain books and paintings. So although The Return was written out of a writer’s passion and curiosity, it was also written out of a reader’s enthusiasm and gratitude for literature and art.

  Which non-fiction authors do you admire?

  I think in books rather than authors, and some of those that I returned to in the early days when I was embarking on this project were Jean Rhys’s unfinished and broken autobiography, Smile Please, which contains that unique honesty that is unaware and unsatisfied and all the more searing for that; Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which cannot be more different from Rhys’s autobiography, and is poignant for what it conceals as much as what it reveals; Primo Levi’s The Truce, a book about a return and how, given how much one is forever changing and changed, every return is also a departure; W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, in which the German author excavates from the Suffolk coast such rare and precious responses that are made more luminous by the displaced sensibility of our observer, his passions and patience, and gentle intelligence; and Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, which although is not non-fiction, hovered around me then for, amongst other things, the example it offered of how an independent and yet implicated sensibility sustains its contradictions in a changing world.

  What are you working on next?

  A novel. And the wonderful thing is, I still know almost nothing about how to write a book.

  You are known for writing two autobiographical novels (In the Country of Men in 2006 and Anatomy of a Disappearance in 2011). How did writing your memoir The Return compare to the process for your novels?

  It was hard to write directly about my life, to be so naked (for notwithstanding the evidence, I am a private man), but any feelings of discomfort or anxiety were eventually replaced by the everyday demands of the book, which were at once urgent and thrilling, for the paradox here is that even though The Return was difficult for the man, it was exhilarating for the artist. It often felt as though I were riding a horse whose appetites and abilities exceeded my own. But I don’t think I am alone in this; every writer’s secret prayer must be to write a book that is better than him or her. Who amongst us wants to get just what they deserve?

Libyan ghosts: searching for truth after Qaddafi
Robert F. Worth
96.3 (May-June 2017): p127.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org

The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between

BY HISHAM MATAR. Random House, 2016, 256 pp.

In the early summer of 2003, a few months after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, I arrived at the door of a pockmarked building in Baghdad where many of the military and intelligence files of Saddam Hussein's government were stored. The street was full of dust, and Iraqis of all ages were streaming in and out, some of them clutching folders. A group of men was standing near the door in authoritative poses, and older women were yelling at them, pleading for information. I was new to the country, and a little baffled at first that these scraps of yellowing paper had provoked so much passion and excitement. It did not take me long to figure out why. For all the Iraqis publicly executed under Saddam, countless more had disappeared into his archipelago of dungeons. Their families had submitted to a familiar pattern: years of soul-sapping hope and dread, with regime officials cynically demanding money in exchange for information about the disappeared that they never supplied. Some of these people told me they would have given almost anything for the peace of mind conveyed by a genuine death certificate.

This is the emotional terrain of Hisham Matar, a Libyan British writer whose career has revolved around the drama of forced disappearance under dictatorship. His two novels, In the Country of Men (2006) and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), are both disguised memoirs based on the 1990 abduction of his father, the Libyan dissident Jaballa Matar, by Egyptian intelligence agents in Cairo. The Egyptians turned the elder Matar over to the security services of Libya's vicious ruler, Muammar al-Qaddafi; he then entered the ranks of the disappeared. His family never knew where he was being held; by the mid-1990s, they were no longer certain if he was even alive. Capturing Jaballa Matar was a significant feat for the Libyan regime: he had been a leading figure in the opposition, using the considerable wealth he'd built as a businessman to organize a network inside and outside the country that aimed to overthrow Qaddafi. In 1979, his family had left Libya for Egypt with him, and soon afterward, his sons had been sent to the even safer remove of European boarding schools.

Matar's novels evoke and reference these events; in The Return, Matar fully lifts the veil, providing a mesmerizing, harrowing account of his return to Libya in 2012 and his long effort to grapple with his father's fate and legacy. "I envy the finality of funerals," Matar writes early on in the book. "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."

Matar has put together an artfully structured book that takes on larger themes and is ultimately more satisfying than either of his novels. The author's journey forces him to reassess himself and his origins and weaves together multiple characters and histories: an uncle who survived 21 years in a Libyan prison; the heroism of his young cousins during the civil war that began in 2011 after the overthrow of Qaddafi; and the larger, tragic arc of Libyan history, from the Italian conquest a century ago to the murderous chaos of the present. Many fathers and sons are present here, including Qaddafi's slick and self-deluded son Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, who in 2010 approached Matar in London with dubious promises of information and friendship.

In some places, The Return resembles an elegy; in others, a detective story. It is also a meditation on art, mourning, and the human costs of dictatorship, which Libyans are still paying. Although Matar's narrative does not extend past 2012, it sheds more light than any other book I have read on the multiple tragedies that have brought Libya to its present shattered state.

YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

Matar was reluctant to return to Libya after the revolt against Qaddafi began in February 2011. He was living in London at the time, awaiting the publication of his second novel; he had gone to college there and had become a British citizen. He had also spent years on a public campaign to pressure Qaddafi's government for information about his father, and suddenly the prospect of actually encountering him--dead or alive--seemed shockingly real. I was in Libya during the 2011 revolt, reporting for The New York Times Magazine; I remember speaking to Matar once or twice on the phone from Benghazi and wondering why he was still in London. The reason, as he makes clear in the first pages of the book, is that his life had become premised, in a sense, on not returning. The journey home "could rob me of a skill that I have worked hard to cultivate: how to live away from places and people that I love." Exile had become part of his identity, and he was afraid to trade the frozen images he had lived with for 33 years for up-to-date realities. He is also an emotionally vulnerable man who feared that if he visited the prison where his father was most likely murdered, he might be "forever undone." But the temptation to solve the mystery of his father's fate proved too strong.

Matar is in fact undone by his visit, although not only in the ways he expected. Walking through Benghazi, he begins to feel unmoored from the exile's anger that has sustained him for so long: "I could see the walls, so old I had never noticed them before, that stood between me and everyone I have ever known, every book and painting and symphony and work of art that had ever mattered to me, suddenly seeming impermanent. The freedom frightened me." He finds himself constantly revisiting his past, and the book shuttles accordingly from the present tense of the return journey to various earlier chapters of his life.

In this way, The Return recalls Matar's first novel, which projected a sensitive child's consciousness onto a paternalistic culture that is suffused with violence. In The Return, Matar revisits this terrain, conjuring memories of his childhood soccer games and his first glimpse of a sheep being slaughtered. These memories are rendered with an extraordinary eye for detail and shaped by a heightened awareness of the gulf between child and adult perception:

The animal kicked furiously, snorting for air, which entered its
nostrils and escaped through the open neck. The blood poured out black
and thick like date syrup. Small translucent bubbles grew and burst
around its mouth. I snapped my fingers, I clapped my hands beside its
wide-open eye. When it did not respond, I began to cry.... Moments
later, I sat around the table with the others and ate liver and kidneys
sauteed with chili, onion, garlic, parsley and coriander, and agreed
that the dish did taste better than at any other time because the meat
was, as one of the adults had said, "unbelievably fresh."

FATHER FIGURE

Much of Matar's return journey involves rediscovering his relatives, whose bravery provides a striking counterpoint to Matar's inwardness. His uncle Mahmoud and other relatives were released from prison just as the 2011 protests began, after 21 years of confinement and torture. (They had been members of Matar's father's dissident group.) Mahmoud, it turns out, was sustained for years in prison by an obsession that is almost a mirror image of Matar's: he followed news of Matar's writings in radio broadcasts and press clippings, in the rare moments when he had access to them. Another relative, Mahmoud's irrepressible son Izzo, plays a major role in Matar's poignant retelling of the 2011 uprising. Izzo fought with remarkable bravery on several fronts until he was shot and killed by a sniper during the liberation of Tripoli in late August, six months into the conflict. Izzo's brother Hamed kept fighting, despite his parents' pleas, and later traveled to Syria to join a rebel group there in the fight against the Assad regime. Matar yells at Hamed over the phone, exhorting him to come home, to no avail. Only after Hamed is wounded and removed from the Syrian battlefield does he agree to return to Libya.

Matar's family drama coincides, in many respects, with the brief modern history of Libya. His paternal grandfather was born around 1880, when the country was "a vast and nearly empty landscape," as Matar writes, nominally under Ottoman rule. After the Italians invaded in 1911, jockeying for a better position in the European race for colonial territory and hoping to gain a "fourth shore," a fierce native resistance arose, guided by the Senussi, a mystical religious order. Its leader was Omar al-Mukhtar, a legendary guerrilla who remains Libya's great national hero. Matar's grandfather fought in the first phase of the resistance, from 1911 until 1919. He lived a long life, and Matar knew him well as a boy. He recalls his grandfather unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a "small rosette just beneath the collarbone" where an Italian soldier's bullet had wounded him. Matar's grandfather probably would have died had he not fled to Egypt and avoided the bloodiest phase of the Italian war, after Mussolini took charge in 1922. Airplanes bombed and gassed villages, and tens of thousands of Libyans were marched to concentration camps, where torture and starvation were common. Official Italian records show that the population of eastern Libya dropped from 225,000 to 142,000 during this period, Matar writes.

Matar's own father remains a central (although spectral) figure in the book, and the grandeur and mystery of the elder Matar continue to expand during his son's return journey. "I am the son of an unusual man, perhaps even a great man," Matar writes. Many boys are inclined to think this way about their fathers--and if a father disappears, the temptation only grows. But Matar's father was clearly a person of immense charisma long before his disappearance. During the 1980s, capturing the elder Matar became a top priority for the Libyan regime, which sent hit men abroad to find him. He gave his children pseudonyms to use when talking about him in public. At one point, during a trip to Europe, Matar chastised his father for being so paranoid. But shortly afterward, they passed two men on the street speaking Libyan Arabic. "So what does this Jaballa Matar look like anyway?" one said to the other. Later, Matar's brother, Ziad, narrowly escaped a carful of would-be kidnappers who chased him all the way to his boarding school in a Swiss mountain village. When the family urged Jaballa to withdraw from politics, they encountered an austere patriotism: "Don't put yourselves in competition with Libya," he told them. "You will always lose."

On his return to Libya in 2012, Matar meets men who knew his father in prison, and revered him. He hears about how his father took an enormous risk by smuggling out a letter authorizing a loan to the family of a fellow prisoner. When prison officials found out, he refused to name his accomplices and was tortured horribly for three days. One man shows Matar his father's youthful fiction, published in a student journal, some of it relating to the desert war for independence against the Italians. Another former prisoner who knew Matar's father and admired him immensely clutches Matar's hand and gazes into his eyes, unable to express his emotions except by repeating the same phrase again and again: "Are you well? Your health? Your family?"

These encounters are interspersed with Matar's reports on the disgraceful efforts of the Libyan regime to placate him in the years prior to the 2011 revolt. The messenger was Qaddafi's son Saif, who arranged to meet Matar at a London hotel in 2010. The British government was mending fences with Qaddafi at the time, and Saif seemed confident that he could buy Matar off and elide all the horrors of the previous decades. Saif claimed that he knew what had happened to Matar's father, but he refused to tell him, saying that he first had to reach some shadowy accommodation with the Egyptian security services and Qaddafi's henchmen. At one point during their correspondence, Saif texted Matar a quote attributed to the Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan: "Most important, don't do anything you don't want." Matar texted back a quote from Gandhi; Saif responded with a smiley-face emoji.

In the end, Matar's quest to touch his father's bones is thwarted. "For a quarter of a century now, hope has been seeping out of me," he concludes. "Now I can say, I am almost free of it." He must accept the overwhelming likelihood that his father was murdered at the Abu Salim prison in 1996, during a massacre in which the Libyan authorities murdered 1,270 men. Their remains were scattered at sea or buried in a mass grave. Fittingly, it was this atrocity that helped give rise to the 2011 uprising, which was sparked in part by a demonstration in Benghazi in support of a lawyer for the victims of the Abu Salim killings.

FAREWELL TO THE BIG MAN?

Matar's narrative ends in mid-2012, during his brief stay in Libya. At that point, Libyans were still recovering from Qaddafi's overthrow and death in the wake of a NATO-led military intervention. The country had not yet begun its disintegration into militiarun fiefdoms, and Matar chooses not to narrate that catastrophe. In a book so layered with tragedies, perhaps it would have been too much to add another one. Instead, Matar frames his return home as a brief moment of clarity, almost an idyll, when "anything seemed possible, and nearly every individual I met spoke of his optimism and foreboding in the same breath." Those days are long gone. One can only hope that someday Libya's national story will again be amenable to a narrator as sensitive, honest, and forgiving as Matar.

For the time being, Libya has become a tale so furious that it seems to resist all efforts at translation. The outlines are familiar: two rival governments, each with foreign backers; a jihadist insurgency, now largely broken; and a fragmentation of authority among rival gangs. Is this the harvest of a misconceived nato intervention? Is it the inevitable result of Qaddafi's deliberate destruction of Libyan institutions? No one can be sure.

Matar has said little about Libya's descent into chaos, perhaps wisely. One of the few hopeful notes I have heard from revolutionaries in the Middle East is the idea that the Arab revolts of 2010-11 were part of a broader shift away from paternalism. The younger generation, some say, is slowly turning away from the traditional Arab reverence for a "big man" in politics, culture, and religion. They hope that this reorientation of social life will eventually erode the pillars of autocracy and the ills that came along with it.

The potential for such an outcome provides little comfort in the present moment. But taking a long-term perspective may be the best way to view the Arab world's current mayhem. It also gives added meaning to Matar's preoccupation with a legendary father figure, the man whose terrible shadow is so difficult to escape. "I am no different," Matar writes of his filial obsession. "I live, as we all live, in the aftermath."

ROBERT F. WORTH is a journalist and former chief of The New York Times' Beirut bureau. He is the author of A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS.

Caption: Gone but not forgotten: Qaddafi in Rome, November 2009
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Worth, Robert F. "Libyan ghosts: searching for truth after Qaddafi." Foreign Affairs, May-June 2017, p. 127+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491038234&it=r&asid=07ddac302e58adbbc253faecfcce79fc. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491038234
The fallacy of hope
Elif Shafak
145.5342 (Nov. 25, 2016): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/

The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between

Hisham Matar

Viking, 280pp, 14.99 [pounds sterling]

"Even +as a young child, I could never imagine my father bowing, and even then I wanted to protect him," Hisham Matar writes, in his memoir The Return. This says a lot about the land he comes from: Libya. There are countries where fathers have to bury their murdered sons, or where sons try desperately to keep their fathers safe. Then there are countries that separate fathers from their sons.

The Return follows the footsteps of the Libyan-British author as he travels to his fatherland after years in exile. It is 2012. He is accompanied by his wife, the photographer Diana Matar, and his mother. Coincidentally, it is the 22nd anniversary of his father's captivity. Jaballa Matar, a successful businessman, diplomat and lifelong critic of Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, was kidnapped by Libyan security troops in 1979. He was taken to Abu Salim Prison--notorious for its torture techniques and human rights violations. At the time of the abduction, Hisham Matar was 19 years old.

Matar wants to learn what has happened to his father: a question as simple as it is complicated--even dangerous. In the words of Telemachus in the Odyssey, "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 ..." In looking for his father, Matar says, he is also looking for other things: memory, belonging, childhood, justice, roots ...

It is these "other things" that make this book unforgettable. Matar's observations of the "new Libya" are those of an insider/ outsider. He is not a part of this culture--not any longer--but nor is he detached from it, even when he tries to be. Like every exile, he carries his fatherland in his conscience wherever he goes. Like every exile, he feels guilty about being the one who left and survived.

It is fascinating to see how each member of the Matar family responds differently to Jaballa's disappearance. Hisham's elder brother, Zia, remains optimistic to the end, claiming that their father could still be alive, having perhaps lost his memory, "unable to find his way back, like Gloucester wandering the heath in King Lear". The mother remains resilient, focused on the present, on raising her sons. In truth, both parents are strikingly resilient. In one of the last letters Jaballa manages to send his family from prison, he writes: "The cruelty is everything, but I remain stronger than their tactics of oppression ... My forehead does not know how to bow." Within the family, it is Hisham, more than anyone else, who allows the anger, the resentment and the despair to surface.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The family's psychological torment is deepened by not knowing what happened to Jaballa. Was he shot? Was he hanged? Did he die at the hands of torturers? "Not knowing when my father ceased to exist has further complicated the boundary between life and death," Hisham writes. "My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future." When, in 2011, the Gaddafi regime is toppled and political prisoners are freed one by one, the waiting becomes all the more painful. Suddenly, for the first time in years, there is reason to be hopeful.

Matar's voice is at its strongest when he talks about his self-imposed exile. "I noticed how old I had become, but also the boyishness that had persisted, as if part of me had stopped developing the moment we left Libya." He contrasts his lack of ability to settle down anywhere--his "bloody-minded commitment to rootlessness" with "the resigned stability of other exiles". "My silent condemnation of those fellow exiles who wished to assimilate was my feeble act of fidelity to the old country, or maybe not even to Libya but to the young boy I was when we left."

Matar's cultural and literary references throughout the book are mostly European. It would have produced a wonderful mix if he had included Middle Eastern or Eastern references, too. But his analyses are deep, from his boarding-school years in England to his exchanges with the then British foreign secretary, David Miliband, when he tries to secure international help both for his father and for other political prisoners.

One of the most memorable chapters concerns Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, the second son of Colonel Gaddafi, a man with many sides to his personality, who makes promises he cannot keep and who ultimately sides with tyranny--and cannot understand the pain of the thousands of people who have lost their fathers, sons or brothers under his own father's regime.

Towards the end, it becomes painfully clear that Jaballa Matar was probably killed at Abu Salim on 29 June 1996, when 1,270 prisoners were massacred. The revelation is strangely liberating for Hisham: "For a quarter of a century now, hope has been seeping out of me. Now I can say, I am almost free of it." Optimism weighs us down sometimes, especially when it is unsustainable.

I have been reading The Return at a time when my motherland, Turkey, is sliding backwards at bewildering speed, and journalists, writers and intellectuals are being detained, arrested, blacklisted or ostracised. Matar's story is not only the story of his family, nor even of Libya, but, sadly, of a fate that is repeated again and again in countries that separate fathers from their sons.

Elif Shafak's "Three Daughters of Eve" will be published in February by Viking
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shafak, Elif. "The fallacy of hope." New Statesman, 25 Nov. 2016, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474547965&it=r&asid=c5ec05f00aa6398d535ea099faa11a29. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A474547965
The Return
Charlie Gillis
129.31 (Aug. 8, 2016): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Rogers Publishing Ltd.
http://www2.macleans.ca/

THE RETURN

Hisham Matar

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Of the numberless outrages committed by the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, the massacre at Abu Salim prison stands out by dint of sheer scale and savagery. On June 29, 1996, inmates of the notorious facility in Tripoli--most of them political prisoners--were herded into cellblock courtyards, where guards and soldiers fired on them from above. The shooters spent three hours executing 1,270 men, leaving the bodies to rot before burial. Then, weeks later, guards exhumed the bones, ground them up and dumped the powdered remains into the Mediterranean.

For Hisham Matar, the Man Booker-nominated novelist, this atrocity is the focal point of a dreadful quest. The writer, who spent part of his childhood in Libya, has agonized since he was young over the fate of his father, a Libyan political dissident who fled with his family to Egypt when Hisham was nine. Even in Cairo, though, Jaballa Matar wasn't safe. In March 1990, through the collaboration of the Mubarak government, he was abducted and whisked away to Tripoli. Matar had grown resigned over the years to the likelihood his father's body lay among the piles at Abu Salim, but in 2008, his hopes rose anew: a survivor of the Gadhafi dungeon system reported seeing Jaballa just six years earlier.

This memoir chronicles Matar's pursuit of that clue and the truth about his father's fate. It follows his return to Libya during the interregnum between Gadhafi's overthrow in August 2011 and the country's subsequent spiral into sectarian chaos--a moment, as he puts it, "burning brightly with hope for the future." Beneath Matar's personal search lies a parallel quest for the true Libya, a nation that, apart from a 24-year period of independence following the Second World War, has spent the better part of a millennium under the thumb of occupiers and tyrants. Matar--who shares his father's dream of a free and democratic Libya--interweaves the two storylines with spectacular effect, careening from wrenching reunions with relatives to a climactic negotiation with Qaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam. The dictator's heir promises to help.

The hope he offers seems as reliable as the prospect of a stable, peaceful Libya. Since Matar's visit, the country has been riven by parliamentary schism and militant Islamism, leading some to lament Gadhafi's downfall. Matar likens these Libyans to "a man who looks at the ashes and says, 'I much prefer the fire.'" Alas, that doesn't make the ashes look any better.

Caption: 'The Return': Hisham Matar believed his father died in the Libya's Abu Salim prison, where 1,270 political prisoners were executed in 1996
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gillis, Charlie. "The Return." Maclean's, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285310&it=r&asid=0ff25c78e78ae40f0fcb5cebccb7441a. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285310
The Return
Sarah McCraw Crow
(July 2016): p27.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/

THE RETURN

By Hisham Matar

Random House

$26, 256 pages

ISBN 9780812994827

eBook available

MEMOIR

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In The Return, Libyan novelist Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men) tells the harrowing story of his search for his father, Jaballa Matar. Early in Muammar Qaddafi's regime, Jaballa served as a U.N. diplomat, but he was soon accused of criticizing Qaddafi and forced to flee to Cairo with his family. In 1990, while Matar was at university in London, Jaballa was kidnapped by Egyptian secret police and sent to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

Matar's narrative roams through time, moving from his 2012 visit to see family in Tripoli and Benghazi after Qaddafi's downfall (Matar's first visit in 33 years), to the distant past--when his grandfather fought against the brutal Italian occupation of Libya. He recounts his efforts to gather scraps of information, meeting with former prisoners who might have seen Jaballa.

At times, the memoir reads like a spy novel: In the 1980s, Qaddafi's spies kept tabs not only on Jaballa but also on family members, following Matar's brother when he was at boarding school. Decades later, Matar connected with Qaddafi's "reformist" son Seif, who'd promised him an answer about what had happened to Jaballa.

Seif put Matar through a series of phone calls and clandestine meetings in London hotels, mixing threats and compliments, meetings that ultimately proved fruitless.

The Return beautifully chronicles the vagaries of life as an exile and the grief of wondering about a father's suffering. Yes, Matar's memoir is sometimes bleak in describing the Qaddafi regime's decades of bizarre repressive actions. But it also offers a portrait of a loving family and a needed window into Libya, not only its troubles but also its beauty, and the many kindnesses Matar encountered there.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Crow, Sarah McCraw. "The Return." BookPage, July 2016, p. 27. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456480902&it=r&asid=c6a1d3d18d1af51abeda5678428ad5fb. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A456480902
Misadventures in Libya: Hisham Matar's family memoir of terrible deeds--and of love, loyalty and courage--simply must be read
Horatio Clare
331.9800 (June 25, 2016): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

Viking Penguin, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 280, ISBN 9780670923335

If photographs of 'the deal in the desert' made you queasy--you remember, Tony Blair and Muammar Gaddafi shaking hands for the cameras in 2004--imagine how you would have felt if you were in exile in London and your father under torture in Gaddafi's cells at the time.

Now Blair is not looking forward to the Chilcot report, Gaddafi is dead and Hisham Matar, who was the helpless onlooker, has published The Return, a memoir about his father and about Libya which will attract many readers and prizes. It may also help focus our ideas about whom we protect, whom we betray, and how we deal with the devil.

Gaddafi's death might not have been a source of sorrow to Blair (and co). But the fact that the details of Gaddafi's dealings with our politicians and spies did not die with Gaddafi, and were exposed in the chaos surrounding his demise, must still sting. A cache of documents found in Tripoli detailed cooperation between MI5, MI6 and regime thugs. In their defence, MI5 admitted, via Eliza Manningham-Buller (whose agents provided Gaddafi's with a list of 1,600 questions to be put to their victims) in her Reith lecture of 2011, 'that there are questions to be answered as to whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon'.

That sort of supping leaves a repugnant taste, which is one of many reasons to welcome The Return . Matar is the prizewinning author of a Man Booker-shortlisted novel, In the Country of Men . In this memoir, which is astonishing for its perception, control and technical excellence, often upsetting and entirely gripping, we begin to understand the modern history of Libya, how Gaddafi operated, and what it was like to be a dissident opposed to him, sheltered, or not, by Britain and other countries. Historical accident places a writer of prodigious talent in the middle of the bloody denouement and fall of Gaddafi's regime.

The author's father, Jaballa Matar, was remarkable. A soldier in the diplomatic service of King Idris, he was based in the embassy in St James's Square--where PC Yvonne Fletcher would later be gunned down--when news broke, in 1969, of Gaddafi's coup. He returned to Libya, was imprisoned and then sent abroad to the UN. As Gaddafi's nature became clear, Jaballa Matar resigned and built a fortune importing goods into the Middle East. He was a highly cultured man who carried pages of verse in his memory and was a significant figure in Libyan society. Outspoken against Gaddafi, he eventually fled the country with his immediate family.

By 1990 he had sleeper cells in place in Libya and a significant armed force in Chad, poised to attempt the overthrow of the regime. Before they could strike he was betrayed in Cairo by the Egyptian government, flown to Libya and disappeared into Abu Salim, Tripoli's notorious maximum-security prison. Records of him there are limited to a few smuggled notes and the accounts of other prisoners who overheard his interrogation and torture and listened to him reciting poetry in the still watches of the night.

Hisham Matar was 20 years old when Jaballa was taken. His life had not been ordinary, a childhood of both wealth and insecurity. His brother narrowly escaped Gaddafi's goons, who had tracked him down to school in Switzerland, and he himself lived under a false name and nationality at an English boarding school. His father carried a gun, travelled on false papers and checked their car for bombs. Part of the book is a meditation on absent fathers, and the effect of fathers on their sons:

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 feared the consequences
of his convictions; I was desperate
to divert him from his path. Like that famous
son in the Odyssey,
I wished that 'at least I
had some happy man as father, growing old
in his own house'. But, unlike Telemachus, I
continue, after 25 years, to endure my father's
'unknown death and silence'. I envy the finality
of funerals.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Studies in London and many travels see Matar becoming a novelist and an increasingly effective campaigner on his father's behalf. The House of Lords and many notable writers and journalists play honourable roles here: there is a side of British society in these pages of which we can be proud, which tries to help, which agitates and persists with awkward questions. During the Blair-Gaddafi rapprochement Matar secured a meeting with the dictator's son, Seif el-Islam. The meeting was arranged by the only figure in the book who comes across as possessing unshakable power, Jacob Rothschild:

'You are the writer?' Seif asked again.

'Yes,' I said.

'Is that all you do?'

'I am afraid so,' I said.

'What, you mean all you do is write?'

'Precisely.'

'You don't do anything else?'

'I try not to,' I said.

Seif is baffled that the source of Matar's influence could be so simple. The dictatorship's attitude to writers is summed up in a literary festival it staged at which all the writers who attended were incarcerated. Matar also meets David Miliband, then Foreign Secretary, who says the ambassador will make fortnightly representations to the Libyans regarding Jaballa Matar:

'So tell me,' he said, 'Are you British now?'

'Yes.'

'Good man. Excellent. So you're one of us.'
Perhaps it was the genuine warm confederacy
of a fellow Brit. Or maybe it was the
impatient, political, bullying pragmatism of
power towards a person of mixed identities,
a man whose preoccupations do not fit neatly
inside the borders of one country ...

The narrative moves in time and across borders, conjuring echoes between generations and continents. Jaballa once confided that he had sometimes sneaked into Libya to visit his own father, Hamed, who in his time had fought the genocidal Italian occupation. Libya's history, as Matar points out, is composed of

accounts concerning the lives of others, their
adventures and misadventures in Libya, as
though one's country is but an opportunity
for foreigners to exorcise their demons and
live out their ambitions.

Hamed was never told that Jaballa was coming, but he seemed to know by premonition. They talked in the dark. After Hamed's death, Hisham lies on a narrow bed in a London hearing this story from Jaballa. Reckless, says the son. Now that he's gone there's no need to worry, returns the father. Later Hisham sees this as a warning that he missed at the time: 'Now his father was gone, he could take even greater risks.'

The author's eventual return to Libya, which is staggered throughout the book, is at times almost unbearably moving. The voices of friends and family take us into the darkest of Gaddafi's evils, to the confused front lines of street battles in the uprising and civil war, and into the quiet, the savage light, the colour and shade of the Libya beyond news and war.

Hisham Matar is an observer and listener of enormous subtlety and sensitivity, and he writes English prose as cleanly and clearly as it can be written. This is a story of terrible deeds, but also a tale of mighty love, loyalty and courage. It simply must be read.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Clare, Horatio. "Misadventures in Libya: Hisham Matar's family memoir of terrible deeds--and of love, loyalty and courage--simply must be read." Spectator, 25 June 2016, p. 32+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456095229&it=r&asid=71492fceadf14dae206147f98af8151c. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A456095229
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
Bridget Thoreson
112.19-20 (June 1, 2016): p35.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm

The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. By Hisham Matar. July 2016. 256p. Random, $26 (9780812994827). 823.

Matar envies mourners at funerals. Unlike him, they have the luxury of knowing that their loved ones are dead. The uncertainty about what became of his father after he was incarcerated in a prison in Tripoli has haunted Matar's years of living away from his homeland of Libya. After several decades, novelist Matar returns to the country in this elegiac memoir. His father was a high-ranking military officer when Muammar al-Qaddafi came to power, and was imprisoned before being exiled. Those Matar's father associated with in his efforts against the Qaddafi regime--many of them relatives--met similar fates. Matar recounts their stories, the precious few details he was able to collect about his father, and his own anguish in the twilight of uncertainty following his father's presumed death. It is a testament to the power of his story that his own search campaign, involving human-rights organizations and both the Libyan and British governments, takes second place to the bitter poignance of his journey home. With muscular elegance, Matar demonstrates that hope can be a form of agony.--Bridget Thoreson

Thoreson, Bridget
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between." Booklist, 1 June 2016, p. 35+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456094046&it=r&asid=af1b2f729b30bf7d500c535e86288d20. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A456094046
Matar, Hisham: THE RETURN
(May 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Matar, Hisham THE RETURN Random House (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 7, 5 ISBN: 978-0-8129-9482-7

Novelist Matar (Anatomy of a Disappearance, 2011, etc.) returns to his native Libya in 2012 following a three-decade exile.At the center of this moving and vividly documented memoir is the author's quest to find answers to his father's disappearance in 1990. Jaballa Matar had formerly worked for the Libyan delegation to the United States yet later became an influential political dissident who, in reacting against Muammar Gaddafi's revolutionary regime, was forced to flee with his family from their home in Tripoli to Cairo. A decade later, while the author was a student in London, his father was kidnapped in the streets of Cairo by forces in the Libyan government. Though his eventual whereabouts would remain uncertain, he was likely held prisoner in the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, where he may have perished in the 1996 massacre of over 1,200 prisoners. Matar provides an intimate and absorbing account of the complex political events that would eventually lead to Gaddafi's downfall. As he shifts his focus between past and present events, allowing details of his father's disappearance to slowly and subtly emerge, he reveals a suspense novelist's seasoned instincts. In his ruminations on returning to a long-forgotten family and country, and the consequences of time passing, he applies a poet's sensibility. "Somebody would be telling an anecdote and midway through I would realize I had heard it before," he writes. "It seemed as if everyone else's development had been linear, allowed to progress naturally in the known environment, and therefore each of them seemed to have remained linked, even if begrudgingly or in disagreement, to the original setting-off point. At times I was experiencing a kind of distance-sickness, a state in which not only the ground was unsteady but also time and space." A beautifully written, harrowing story of a son's search for his father and how the impact of inexplicable loss can be unrelenting while the strength of family and cultural ties can ultimately sustain.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Matar, Hisham: THE RETURN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450833139&it=r&asid=a824ae9e152724da5d13097f2a93eacd. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A450833139

Worth, Robert F. "Libyan ghosts: searching for truth after Qaddafi." Foreign Affairs, May-June 2017, p. 127+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA491038234&asid=07ddac302e58adbbc253faecfcce79fc. Accessed 25 May 2017. Shafak, Elif. "The fallacy of hope." New Statesman, 25 Nov. 2016, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA474547965&asid=c5ec05f00aa6398d535ea099faa11a29. Accessed 25 May 2017. Gillis, Charlie. "The Return." Maclean's, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA460285310&asid=0ff25c78e78ae40f0fcb5cebccb7441a. Accessed 25 May 2017. Crow, Sarah McCraw. "The Return." BookPage, July 2016, p. 27. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA456480902&asid=c6a1d3d18d1af51abeda5678428ad5fb. Accessed 25 May 2017. Clare, Horatio. "Misadventures in Libya: Hisham Matar's family memoir of terrible deeds--and of love, loyalty and courage--simply must be read." Spectator, 25 June 2016, p. 32+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA456095229&asid=71492fceadf14dae206147f98af8151c. Accessed 25 May 2017. Thoreson, Bridget. "The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between." Booklist, 1 June 2016, p. 35+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA456094046&asid=af1b2f729b30bf7d500c535e86288d20. Accessed 25 May 2017. "Matar, Hisham: THE RETURN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA450833139&asid=a824ae9e152724da5d13097f2a93eacd. Accessed 25 May 2017.

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