This week, Akumbu Uche takes a good look at the critically-acclaimed, Pulitzer-winning book written by Hisham Matar.
By Akumbu Uche
In 1990, Jaballa Matar, a Libyan businessman and political dissident, was abducted from his Cairo home and thrown into Libya’s infamous Abu Salim prison without trial. Except for a few relatives with whom he was incarcerated, his family never saw him again.
Readers familiar with his son, the writer Hisham Matar’s work will recognize the fictionalisation of this tragedy in his first two novels, In the Country of Men (2006) and An Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011).
In The Return (Penguin Books, 2017), the younger Matar once again probes his family’s circumstances, but in memoir form this time around. Subtitled “Fathers, Sons, and the Land In Between,” the book’s portrayal of the relationship between both Matars mirrors that of Odysseus and Telemachus, the mythological father-son duo immortalized by Homer in ‘The Odyssey.’
In the wake of the 2011 revolution that brings Gaddafi’s 42-year rule to an end, Matar recognizes an opportunity to return to his native homeland for the first time since 1979 when his family emigrated to Egypt. Like Telemachus setting off from Ithaca, Matar’s mission is to find his father. Like Telemachus again, 20 years have passed since his father’s disappearance. The Greek hero visits Pylos and Sparta where their kings Nestor and Menelaus fill him in on Odysseus’s exploits during the Trojan War; in similar fashion, our author spends time in Benghazi and Ajdabiya, reuniting with family friends and relatives who recount the events of his father’s early life and later incarceration.
There is a sense that Matar is not only interested in his father’s whereabouts, but is trying to understand his choices which have ruptured the family’s sense of normalcy and plunged them from privilege into precarity. At the end of many trials and tribulations, Odysseus who has been in disguise for the latter part of the Greek story makes himself known to his son, and they are reunited.
Unfortunately, there is no such happy ending for the Matars; after a trail of false leads, the son is advised to presume the father dead, and with neither a date to mark the last day of his father’s life nor a body to bury, his mourning is complicated, prolonged to perpetuity. “I envy the finality of funerals.” He laments. “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.” Grieving a missing person is perplexing.
One of the facts we learn about the elder Matar’s prison years is how he forestalled despair by reciting the alam, an elegiac Bedouin poetic form that “privileges the past over the present.” Although written rather than recited, and in English rather than Arabic, Matar’s prose is also an alam, one dedicated to both father and fatherland.
Recalling his youth and family legends also means making reference to and probing Libyan history from from its time under Italian colonization to Gaddafi’s dictatorship. But try as he might, our author cannot ignore the present. His return to Libya is marked by both reconciliation with distant relatives and a reckoning that the hope for meaningful change that ushered in the revolution has dissipated into chaos and civil war.
Continuing the family’s tradition of political resistance is his twenty-two-year-old cousin Izzo, one of many young Libyan men who have pushed their university studies and career ambitions aside, and taken up guns to liberate their hometowns in anticipation of a new Libya. One thread seems to join three generations of Matar men: their deep love for their homeland requires a lot of sacrifice. One wonders why patriotism often demands a heavy toll.
If men take centre stage in Matar’s account, it is because Libyan society is a gendered one and as such, war and politics tend to be men’s issues and the book simply reflects this reality. Just as Penelope’s heroism is celebrated in the Odyssey, so are that of Fawzia Tarbash (wife to Jaballa and mother to Hisham), and several other Libyan women – mothers, wives and sisters – who visited their relatives in prison and in their own way supported their struggle. This is a male text, but it is not a misogynist one.
Drawing from Western and Maghrebian literary influences and thoroughly descriptive, Hisham Matar’s writing is a rich tapestry. In his worldview, the personal is inseparable from the political, and after reading this book, it would be difficult for outsiders to speak of Libya without making reference to the author’s family. Even though Matar’s quest raises more questions than it does satisfying answers, his memoir is fundamentally a love offering to his absent parent. May we be worthy of such honour.
Akumbu Uche is a Nigerian writer. Her work has appeared in Bella Naija, Brittle Paper, and Engaging Borders Africa. She lives in Owerri.
