The Return

by Hisham Matar

  Unable to sleep, I read the second of Father’s two short stories in the anthology, entitled “A Struggle with Fate.” It had an enigmatic beginning:

  I used to know him. It all seems so long ago and yet as though it had all happened yesterday. It was when his family still lived in our village. His father ran the café on the main road. The old mud bricks of the interior resembled skulls, each stamped with a sarcastic smile. I was one of the regulars who frequented the café. I would walk in and take any one of the wooden chairs scattered in a disorderly way around the place.

  The unnamed narrator and the man referred to, the unspecified time, the ghostly bricks, the furniture set in no particular formation—all served to exacerbate my disorientation. The story told of the terrible misfortunes of a boy. We never learn his name and this, paradoxically, made him seem more intimate to me. Perhaps he was a fictional vessel into which the eighteen-year-old author could deposit his worst fears. The boy’s “struggle with fate” causes him to lose everything—his family, his home—until he is left destitute. “I wandered aimlessly, and did not find anywhere that would take me except that one place that had absorbed thousands of miserable souls before me: the street.” But then suddenly, gripped by fear and humiliation, he returns to the place where his father is buried in order to be able to “shed the same tears once more.” After doing so, he goes out into the world and the story ends with him declaring, “I decided to work and survive.”

  That final sentence caught me. The boy’s words matched an old mysterious instruction that, in the darkest moments and over the past quarter of a century since I lost my father, would come for me, sounding with the hard force of a warning bell, urgently ringing, Work and survive, work and survive. I heard it at university. I heard it when I worked as a stonemason after graduating. I heard it when I became a draughtsman and then an architectural designer. I heard it when, having devoted myself to writing, I worked in construction, painted houses and did odd jobs in a small market town in Bedfordshire. I heard it in the doubt of those days. I heard it when I stood at the edge of the Pont d’Arcole, a bridge in Paris, staring into the water. And I hear it still today. It never left me and yet it has never felt entirely my own. It belongs to some other presence implanted in me, one that knows better than anyone, perhaps even better than myself, that I am far closer to the precipice than I could conceive.

  Running into that familiar call, which has long represented my rescue, and finding it in the shape of the closing sentence of one of only two short stories my father ever published, was oddly consoling and disquieting. It flipped time on its head. The words were not coming to me from a parental authority now but through the eighteen-year-old who was yet to become my father, a man young enough to be my son, a talented and ambitious student who might have sought out my thoughts about becoming a writer. I reread the stories several times and, although I tried not to indulge the fantasy, I kept seeing myself complimenting him on his abilities and instincts, suggesting how he could improve his short stories, perhaps ending with a recommendation of what to read and taking down his address so as to send him books, perhaps buy him a subscription to some of the better literary journals, and then, on parting, it would be me now speaking the bell call to him: “Work and survive.”

  The stories were a profound discovery. They were a gift sent back through time, opening a window onto the interior landscape of the young man who was to become my father. They were forward-looking, interested in finding a contemporary mode in which to write about Libya, but they were also engaged in the past. Their young protagonists were subject to the consequences of colonialism and its aftermath: the violence and poverty brought on by the Italian invasion. I stood at the window of my hotel room, watching the corniche stretch on both sides, the lamp-posts doing their best to illuminate it, and the sea unfolding, drawing itself out into the blackness. It was impossible not to read in the stories a latent expression of Father’s anxiety. He had come close to losing his father. The extraordinary risks Grandfather Hamed had taken in confronting the Italian occupation, the many near-death experiences he had endured, which were colorfully chronicled in stories that have become part of the mythology of our family, must have represented for the young author a formative acquaintanceship with injustice. But I also imagine, from reading these narratives in which old men are vulnerable, that they made vivid to the teenager the universal fact that each one of us had, on too many occasions, come dangerously close to never having been born. In other words, he was a writer responding to ghosts and to history. Then, at some point, a crack opened and politics seeped in. I remember the great binges when, in between the relentless travel and political meetings, Father would bring me with him to the bookshop on Talaat Harb Square, in downtown Cairo. The bookseller knew him and would lead us up to the private flat upstairs, where all the banned books were kept. We would walk out with several black plastic bags full of novels the Egyptian censor had, for one reason or another, found objectionable. For the next two or three days Father would hardly emerge from his bedroom, reading one book after the next.

  —

  Grandfather Hamed lived an exceptionally long life. There are different estimates about his age when he died. Most agree that he was somewhere between 103 and 109 years old, although I was once emphatically told that he lived to 112. This would mean he was born somewhere between 1876 and 1885.

  The Royal Relief Atlas “of all Parts of the World,” published in London in October 1880, celebrates in its preface the “great advance” that “the scientific teaching of Geography” has made in recent years. It trumpets the Swiss pedagogue Johann Pestalozzi’s maxim: “Through the eye to the mind.” According to this, Libya was not even in the mind then. “The countries into which [North] Africa is divided,” the Atlas tells us, “are Morocco, governed by a Sultan, cap. Morocco; Algeria, a French colony, cap. Algiers; Tunis, governed by a Bey, cap. Tunis; Tripoli, governed by a Pasha, cap. Tripoli; Egypt, governed by a Khedive, cap. Cairo.” Then, to clarify, the authors inform us that “All these, except Algiers, are tributaries of the Ottoman or Turkish Empire.” The closest we get to a mention of Libya is in the arching letters, stretching from Fezzan all the way to the Nile Delta, that read, “LIBYAN DESERT.”

  The first census carried out in Libya was in 1931. The population then was 700,000. Therefore, judging by how the population climbed after 1931, it would be reasonable to assume that back in the 1880s the population of the territory we now know as Libya was somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. When Grandfather Hamed was born, Tripoli was a state, but the rest of the country was a vast and nearly empty landscape, with villages and towns dotted here and there, serving the trade and travel routes that ran up north from the continent and those that went east towards Mecca. Blo’thaah, Grandfather Hamed’s ancestral home, hovered almost exactly mid-distance between Tripoli and Alexandria, with a three-week ride to either.

  He was an only child, born in Ottoman Libya. He witnessed the Italian invasion, the reign of King Idris, and saw the two decades that followed Qaddafi’s coup d’état of 1969. He was in his late forties or early fifties when my father was born and near seventy on the birth of his youngest, Uncle Mahmoud. In a time when life expectancy for a Libyan man hovered somewhere around sixty-five, people thought him irresponsible. “You won’t live to see him walk,” they had told him. He saw Uncle Mahmoud graduate from university, marry and have children of his own. He died in his home in Ajdabiya in 1989.

  Grandfather Hamed’s house suited him. Ajdabiya then was a cluster of buildings in a vast emptiness. He never traveled in those days except the thirty or so kilometres to Blo’thaah, where he still preferred to spend the spring months, exposed further to what he called “the expanse.”

  “He felt free out there,” I remember my father once telling me. “And, as a man who valued silence, it suited him perfectly.”

  But even back in the days when Grandfather Hamed did travel to visit relatives, he was well known for going to great lengt
hs not to spend a night at anyone’s home. Perhaps that is where my unease at being a houseguest comes from. But once when I was a young boy, and after much insistence, my parents convinced him to pay us a visit in Tripoli. Finally he was going to see where we lived. I never saw my father more nervous or excited. Preparations intensified. Grandfather arrived in high spirits. He and my mother had a special fondness for one another. Grandfather seemed happy to have made the trip, but as the day wore on he became completely silent. My poor father and mother could not think what had caused the sudden change. The following day he packed his bag and wanted to leave. We all got in the car and began the long drive to Ajdabiya. My father drove, his father in the passenger seat beside him, and my mother, Ziad and I all crammed into the back. Grandfather’s silence was particularly unsettling. He seemed to be holding his breath. He sat upright, his back not touching the backrest. As we left the capital and the wide desert plains opened all around us, he sighed and leant back.

  “Finally,” he said, “the horizon.”

  My parents laughed and Grandfather told stories the whole way.

  Grandfather’s house stood in the center of town. To my child’s mind, it was the point from which not only Ajdabiya but the entire map of the world developed. Its architecture fostered this idea. For a young boy it was as mysterious and magical as a maze. And I cannot separate its various surprising turns, its seeming endlessness, its modest and somewhat austere aesthetic, from my grandfather’s life and character. I often lost my way in its endless rooms, corridors and courtyards. Some windows looked out onto the street, some onto one of the courtyards, yet others, strangely, looked into other rooms. It was never quite clear whether you were indoors or outdoors. Some of its halls and corridors were roofless or had an opening through which a shaft of light leant in and turned with the hours. Some of its staircases took you outside, under the open sky, before winding back in. The décor was plain. The walls were plastered and painted in two halves: the lower part dark, usually in a strong blue or green or purple, and the upper in white or pale pink or pastel yellow. Some floors were tiled and others were covered unevenly—like cream cheese on toast, I used to think—in a material similar to concrete. Where there was heavy traffic, such as the entrance, it shone dark and smooth. Bare bulbs hung from the ceilings and there was hardly any furniture. The house was like one of my grandfather’s long poems: austere, unpredictable, plain, unfinished, yet inhabited. Ever since I can remember, I have found the unfinished state of much of modern Libya’s architecture unsettling. It expresses neglect more actively than, say, ruins or old decaying structures. When something is built, we assume it to have been built out of a sense of necessity, intent or desire. Therefore, we associate its incompleteness with deliberate negligence and carelessness, or else sudden impotence. These half-finished buildings seem more of an affront, more offensive and indeed oppressive, than a finished building that has fallen on hard times. The epidemic is on such a scale—exterior walls left without render, unpainted—that it is hard not to read it as a lack of self-regard. Our unfinished homes are, in other words, a reflection of our present. Just as we have made them, they have come to define us. But perhaps I am wrong, allowing my taste, my liking for the meticulous and finished surface, to get in the way. Because I know Grandfather Hamed found great freedom in his house and in his poems. To him—in architecture, in literature, as in good manners—grandeur, good taste and such were best expressed through a modest minimalism that shied away from the polished surface. He didn’t like things that glittered. He never praised himself, not even obliquely.

  Grandfather Hamed would lie down in the far corner of the hall, which was a large rectangular room lined with cushions. One of the photographs I keep of him—a copy of which I sent to the Canadian forensic artist to help her produce a likeness of how Father might look today—shows Grandfather Hamed lying in that same corner. His exceptionally tall, lean figure is spread across the cushions, the radio and a couple of cartons of Kent cigarettes beside him. His face looks back at me with gentle solemnity. A cigarette is between his long and dark fingers, the thin line of smoke rising above his head.

  The impression I have always had of being from a horizontal family probably originated in these early encounters with my grandfather. It is in part literal, to do with our tendency, whenever reading or conversing casually or needing to carefully consider a particular problem, to reach for the nearest pillow. But also the ways in which we affect and come at one another have always had a sideways motion. The image that comes to mind is that of spilt milk, spreading as it spends itself. Perhaps this is why in our gatherings there has always been, besides the exuberance and warmth, that unspoken desperation to gather up the pieces.

  I remember him beckoning me over once, gathering his fingers round a troublesome button on my shirt and feeding it through its hole, straightening my collar, and then running a trembling hand over my hair with a strange, feathery touch, as though he were barely there. I asked him about fighting the Italians. I don’t remember what he said, if indeed he said anything at all about it. Another time, someone, perhaps it was Uncle Mahmoud, retold the story—a little louder than necessary, because Grandfather Hamed was hard of hearing by then—of the time when Grandfather was shot in battle. He was brought to a house in a nearby village. No one could stop the bleeding. A young girl known for her intelligence ran to the sorceress in the neighboring town. The old woman gave her a small pouch of white powder and told the girl to place it on the wound. The bleeding stopped, and a few days later Grandfather Hamed was well enough to rejoin the resistance. I had heard the story before but never in the presence of its protagonist. Seeing how relentlessly I was staring at him, my grandfather patted the seat beside him.

  “You needn’t look so sad,” he said.

  “Where did they shoot you?” I asked.

  He paused for a moment and then unbuttoned his shirt. He pulled the fabric over his shoulder and showed me where the bullet had entered: a small rosette just beneath the collarbone.

  “Show me where it came out,” I said, and pulled his shirt further down to see his back, expecting to find an identical scar. Instead, the skin there was completely smooth.

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “Still inside,” he said.

  I remember how terribly upset I became, not immediately but a little while later, when I returned to ask if there was no way of removing it. To distract me, he took me on a walk. People stopped and greeted him. He introduced me. “I would like you to meet my grandson Hisham. He has come all the way from Tripoli especially to see me.”

  —

  I had been lucky, it was communicated to me in countless wordless ways, to be Hamed Matar’s grandson. When I was a child I could see that many people around me idealized him, and, because that kind of idealizing serves more to obscure than reveal a man, it clouded my early impressions of him and made me even more curious about what kind of man he was. I paid close attention whenever his name was mentioned. I knew that his life had been deeply disrupted by the Italian invasion, and, because of the scarcity of accounts from that period, the gaps in Grandfather Hamed’s life are in part connected to the wider story of the occupation. The trend of silence continued. Even today, to be Libyan is to live with questions.

  All the books on the modern history of the country could fit neatly on a couple of shelves. The best amongst them is slim enough to slide into my coat pocket and be read in a day or two. There are many other histories, of course, concerning those who, over the past three millennia, occupied Libya: the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottomans and, most recently, the Italians. A Libyan hoping to glimpse something of that past must, like an intruder at a private party, enter such books in the full knowledge that most of them were not written by or for him, and, therefore, at heart, they are accounts concerning the lives of others, their adventures and misadventures in Libya, as though one’s country is but an opportunity for foreigners to exorcize their demons and live out
their ambitions.

  This shortage of historical accounts is partly a result of the painful birth of modern Libya. The country experienced one of the most violent campaigns in the history of colonial repression. The Italians arrived in 1911. They had calculated rightly that the few Ottoman garrisons based in coastal towns would quickly fall. What they did not expect, however, was the determination, discipline and stamina of local resistance. Between 1911 and 1916—and in retaliation for a popular uprising in Tripoli, what the Italians term the “Arab Revolt”—more than 5,000 men were banished from the city and sent to small islands scattered around Italy—islands such as Isole Tremiti, Ponza, Ustica and Favignana—and kept in prisons there. Five thousand is a large number, but it is even more significant given that the population of Tripoli at that time was only thirty thousand. In other words, one in every six inhabitants of the Libyan capital was kidnapped and made to disappear. The damage was more lasting because the Italian authorities selected the most noted and distinguished men: scholars, jurists, wealthy traders, and bureaucrats. The conditions aboard ship were so bad that during the journey, which couldn’t have taken much more than a couple of days, hundreds of prisoners died. Some historians claim that one-quarter of the 5,000 men lost their lives during the passage. The majority of those who reached the island prisons perished in captivity. There appears to be no record of survivors from those prisoners. It is an extraordinary example of a European occupying power devastating a city. Yet, as with Italian crimes in Libya in general, it is an event little known today. It has been clouded over by the greater horrors inflicted by the Italians later, which are, alas, only slightly less obscure.