Exile returns to Libya to explore father’s martyrdom
Exile returns to Libya to explore father’s martyrdom
Jaballa Matar was a leading dissident in Libya under the reign of Moammar Khadafy.
After Khadafy was ousted and killed in 2011, Matar’s son Hisham, a novelist who had been living in exile, returned to Libya to try to discover his father’s fate.
In her New York Times review of the book, Michiko Kakutani said Matar wrote “with both a novelist’s eye for physical and emotional detail and a reporter’s tactile sense of place and time.”
The prose is precise, economical, chiseled; the narrative elliptical, almost musical, cutting back and forth in time.
In a recent email interview, Matar discussed what he had learned after returning to Libya, his feelings about his father’s political activism, his own dealings with Khadafy’s son and more.
Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.
At what time did you come to believe that your father was no longer alive?
In my case, because the evidence remains inconclusive, my acceptance of my father’s passing has come upon me as cunningly as a slowly fading line that was there and suddenly is not.
After the fall of Khadafy, when all political prisoners were released and my father was not among them, it became inescapable.
What do you think your father would have made of your journey back to Libya and your inquiries into his fate?
The two novels you’ve written deal with themes drawn from your life and your father’s life.
What did writing a memoir allow you to address that the novels didn’t?
Each book I’ve written has a different attitude and sensibility and therefore has demanded, technically and intellectually and emotionally, different things.
What was the most surprising thing you learned from them?
Most of all, I learned that we can endure great suffering and survive, mostly intact yet altered.
What I was referring to was not so much a cathartic outcome but rather a tendency of being and how the direction where there seems to be the least resistance is towards creation, joy and effortless curiosity.
Salvatore Satta’s “The Day of Judgment,” where a man in old age visits the island where he grew up; Tayeb Salih’s “Season of Migration to the North,” where the native, having lived far away in London for many years, moves back to his village in the Sudan; and “Good Morning, Midnight,” by the formidably delicate Jean Rhys.
All are, in a way, about the complications involved in returning home.
In one of his letters to your family from prison, your father wrote: “My forehead does not know how to bow.”