by Hisham Matar
In 2011, when Tripoli fell and all prisoners in Abu Salim were released, Ziad met a man who had been in the cell next door to Father’s. The man recalled the interrogation provoked by the publication of the letter. He told Ziad he heard it by placing his ear against the opening in the wall. He relayed it in the following way:
“The interrogator said: ‘I want to know who delivered the letter.’
“Your father responded: ‘What letter?’
“The interrogator: ‘The letter in this newspaper. I want the name of the prisoner you gave it to and the one on the outside who delivered it.’
“Your father said: ‘I will tell you. I wrote that letter with my own hand, I folded the piece of paper several times, and I gave it to you. If anyone asks me, I will tell them you delivered it.’
“After this,” the prisoner told Ziad, “Mr. Jaballa was tortured so badly that he could not stand up at night to talk to us. It went on for three days. Then they moved him.”
—
I have always known who delivered the letters to us. It was my cousin Nasser al-Tashani, Marwan and Nafa’s older brother. I remember the day in Cairo when the doorbell rang and he walked in. He had not told us that he was coming all the way from Libya. We were surprised and pleased to see him. But instead of greeting us, he went straight to the stereo system—as I remember it, a song by Oum Kalthum was playing—and he turned the volume all the way up. He then embraced Mother and whispered something in her ear. We all watched as he brought out a white piece of paper folded several times over so that it was the size of a postage stamp.
Over the years, Nasser never told me the name of the man inside Abu Salim prison who had handed him the letters. All I knew was that the man was a friend whom Nasser visited from time to time. I have many times wondered if Father, when he was sent down into the bottomless abyss, yielded the man’s name under torture. That the authorities never questioned Nasser boded well, but it could also have meant that the authorities, having extracted the name of the prisoner from my father, then failed to extract Nasser’s name from the prisoner. I was ashamed to think these thoughts, for who could blame a man for speaking under torture, let alone one’s own father? But it was not just pride. I somehow needed to know that he did not break, that he went on retaining what was his, that there was a place they could never reach.
One morning in Benghazi, the telephone in our hotel room rang. When I answered, a man’s voice said, “You don’t know me, but your father was like a father to me. I’m downstairs. Would love to meet you.”
When the lift doors opened, I found the man standing in the lobby. He was perhaps five years older than me. He had an exceptionally healthy-looking face. I remember thinking this at the time. Clear eyes and clear skin. He led me to a table where I found, smiling broadly, my cousin Nasser.
The man’s name was Ehlayyel Bejo. He was a poet. He was arrested in 1984, when he was nineteen years old, and spent seventeen years in prison. Since the revolution, he has worked for the Ministry of Culture. He and Nasser were childhood friends. But when Ehlayyel was first imprisoned, he did not know that Nasser had an uncle in the same prison, and Nasser, just like the rest of us, had no idea that Father was in Abu Salim.
“I didn’t know your father before prison,” Ehlayyel said. “I came to know him first by his voice. When one of us young prisoners was being taken to the interrogation room, your father would call out, ‘Boys, if you get stuck, say Jaballa Matar told you to do it.’ I loved him for that, because you have no idea what hearing that did for my heart. Strength at the weakest hour. Gradually he and I started exchanging letters. He wrote me many beautiful letters that I had to destroy.”
Ehlayyel Bejo and Nasser al-Tashani risked their lives to bring us the letter that shattered the myth the Egyptian authorities had constructed. And once Father was sent down into the bottomless abyss, he did not give up their names.
—
I have always wondered if it is possible to lose your father without sensing the particular moment of his death. I recall an interview on the radio with a Syrian poet whose name I have forgotten. He came to London to give a reading. He was staying at a hotel off Grosvenor Square. One afternoon, he felt the compulsion to go out into the square.
“I walked under the trees. It was a beautiful day. But I could not get rid of a desperate sadness. I longed for my mother. When I returned to my room I found a message telling me that she had just passed away.”
I remember hearing that on the radio and thinking, it makes perfect sense. Of course, I told myself, it would be impossible that I should fail to detect the moment when someone I love dies. And this thought often comforted me, particularly when hope was thin. And now that it is unimaginable that my father is alive, I am unsettled by the failure. So much happens in this world without us blinking.
Most likely, Father was killed in the massacre at Abu Salim. Several of the prisoners had told me that although they did not see him, they had heard from others that Jaballa Matar was amongst those who were brought into the courtyard that day. Ehlayyel Bejo was taken aback by the fact that I even doubted it, but then when I asked him if he or anyone he knew saw my father that day, he said, “No,” and then added, “But it’s obvious.” Another prisoner, who was in a cell facing the passage into the courtyard, told me, “I can almost swear I saw him, but I can’t be certain because the light wasn’t good. It was very early in the morning.” It is possible that such accounts were made deliberately ambiguous in order to soften the blow. So, although it has never been confirmed, the most probable day my father’s life ended was June 29, 1996, when he was fifty-seven and I was twenty-five.
—
Throughout all the years, all the searching and investigating I had done, I had never looked at my diary from that year. I am not a regular diarist. There are years when I have made only a handful of entries. Recently, on returning from seeing the Titian exhibition in Rome, I searched my notebooks and found the one from 1996. And there it was, an entry made on June 29, the day of the massacre. It was a Saturday. I was living in the West End, some twenty minutes’ walk from the National Gallery, and poor. For weeks all I ate was rice and lentils. I was always terribly anxious about money. Worry was like acid in the waking hours. But I looked as smart as I could and made a rule of not telling anyone how desperate I was. The entry reads:
“Could not get out of bed till noon. Walked to NG. Done with the Velázquez. I’ve switched to Manet’s Maximilian. Never speak about money worries again. Tomorrow draw.”
The following day there is another entry. One line:
“Didn’t draw.”
I read them again. There was something dizzying about the distance. I had obviously broken my rule, been complaining the night before about money. But that alone cannot explain why, being the early riser I usually am, I could not get out of bed till noon. Most of all, what sent a shiver through me was the fact that, on the day 1,270 men were executed in the prison where my father was held, I chose to switch my vigil, which by then I had been keeping for six years, to Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, a picture of a political execution.
The seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, who had a hold on me during those years, is counted amongst the influences on the French painter Manet. It was probably this chronology of influences that had organized my decision. Nonetheless, it is unsettlingly appropriate. Manet was responding to one of the most controversial political events of his time. The French intervention in Mexico had come to a disastrous end with the execution of their installed ruler, Emperor Maximilian, in 1867. There were no photographs of the incident. Manet had to rely on the stories he heard and the accounts he read in the papers. In the same year, he began work on several imaginings of the event. Over the next couple of years he was to complete three large paintings, an oil sketch and a lithograph depicting the fall of Maximilian. They are scattered around the world. The one at the National Gallery happens to be the most poignant, not least of all becau
se, after the artist’s death, the painting was cut up and sold in fragments. The impressionist artist Edgar Degas purchased the surviving pieces, and it was not until 1992, two years after my father’s disappearance, that the National Gallery assembled them on a single canvas. Large chunks of the picture remain missing. You cannot see Maximilian—only his hand, gripped tightly by one of his generals. The firing squad is as ruthlessly focused and indifferent as the men surrounding Saint Lawrence. It would be hard to think of a painting that better evokes the inconclusive fate of my father and the men who died in Abu Salim. Learning of the fact that my unknowing 25-year-old self was guided, whether by reason or instinct, to this picture on the same day as the massacre unnerved me and has since changed my relationship to all the works of this French artist who, somewhere in Proust’s novels, is described as the painter of countless portraits of vanished models, “models who already belonged to oblivion or to history.” Today, whenever I see a Manet, the white, his white, which is unlike any other white, cannot be a cloud, a tablecloth or a woman’s dress but will always remain the white leather belts of the firing squad in The Execution of Maximilian.
16. The Campaign
Throughout all that has happened in the past two and a half decades since I lost my father, all the successes and failures, all the various tasks one has had to do in order to take one step this way or that, all the discoveries and missed opportunities, the falling-outs, the new loves and new friends, as I pleased some and upset others, as each discovery conducted its particular adjustment, beside all my loud and silent hours, the train of my efforts to find my father’s whereabouts rolled on. It pushed its way into the dark, yielding nothing and seeming, with every passing year, a product of its own craving. For a quarter of a century now, hope has been seeping out of me. Now I can say, I am almost free of it. All that remains are a few scattered grains.
In 2009, nineteen years into the fog, in February, the grimmest month in the English calendar, when the sheets of cloud come in two and three layers, a man telephoned. He told me that he had been a prisoner for eight years and that only recently was he released.
“I saw your father. I saw him in the Mouth of Hell,” he said. “It was several years ago.”
“When precisely?”
“Back in 2002.”
“You saw my father in 2002?”
“Yes, 2002.”
If it were true, it would have been the only time anyone had seen my father after 1996, after the massacre.
I told him I wasn’t able to speak freely and asked whether I could call him back in an hour or so. He gave me his number. Everything stopped. Everything I was doing before that moment and everything I was planning to do next vanished. I looked into the man’s background. He had indeed been a political prisoner, and the prison with the macabre name did, in fact, exist. It was a high-security facility in Tripoli. I dialed the number he had given me. He answered straightaway.
“How did he appear?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” the man asked.
“How did he look? His face? His health?”
“I only saw him once, and very briefly. He was frail but well.”
The words “frail” and “well” rumbled silently in my mouth. Hope, like water on parched earth, surged over me, heavy, drowning. It was tremendous news. Tremendous in the way a storm or a flood can be tremendous. When your father has been made to disappear for nineteen years, your desire to find him is equaled by your fear of finding him. You are the scene of a shameful private battle.
—
Human Rights Watch published the sighting in its next report, which came out on December 12, 2009. The press it attracted invigorated my search. Together with several human-rights organizations, journalists and writers, we launched a campaign focused on my father’s case and, more broadly, human rights in Libya. We sought to make the close diplomatic ties Britain was then enjoying with the Qaddafi regime contingent on material reform in Libya. An open letter to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, was organized by the English chapter of the worldwide association of writers, PEN International. It urged the British government to:
use its new relationship with the Libyan government to demand sincere and significant improvements in Libya’s human rights record. We therefore ask the Foreign Office whether, having regard to the latest Human Rights Watch report…in which Jaballa [Matar]’s case is documented, it will seek information from the Libyan government about the whereabouts of Jaballa and other political prisoners.
The letter was published in The Times on the 15th of January 2010. The more notable names amongst its 270 signatories were printed. That day, the Libyan embassy in London “was shaking,” as a member of the staff there told me. “You caused an earthquake,” he said. The ambassador was heard shouting, “Where the hell did this Hisham Matar descend on us from?” My mobile phone began to exhibit strange signs. It would switch off and on by itself. I became paranoid. A couple of years before, a man claiming to be a member of the Libyan secret service—who also claimed to have my “best interests at heart”—had told me that I have a “red light” on my head. He had said he wanted to warn me “because you must stop. I am worried about you.” I now imagined that “red light” growing brighter. Pathetically, I carried a knife in my pocket every time I stepped out of the flat. A shadow lingered over our hours, penetrating every room of our home.
David Miliband responded immediately. His reply was also published in The Times.
“Hisham and his family need to know the truth now,” he wrote. “[Jaballa Matar’s disappearance] is one of a number of concerns we have about the human rights situation in Libya.”
Friends gathered around me like a grove. One built a website, another managed social media, and all opened up their address books. One friend in particular, Paul van Zyl, who had extensive experience in dealing with oppressive governments through his work with the International Center for Transitional Justice, became my closest ally and adviser. I consulted him every step of the way. I became obsessed. I lost my reticence. I was prepared to contact anyone if I thought they could help. For three months I did not write a single sentence. I hardly slept. The only thing I could read was poetry, and only a few lines at a time, and all the while the blood ran hotly in my veins. My mind became a tightly revving engine, thinking only of the next task. In rare moments of calm, when the motor would quiet down, there was a taste of the inauthentic. I could not understand it then. Was I not doing all I could? Doesn’t a son have a right to know what happened to his father? But it turns out when you are looking for your father you are also looking for other things. This was why the harder I looked, the less present he became in my thoughts. It’s a paradox, but my father never felt more distant than during those days when every minute was dedicated to finding him. Every week his name was mentioned at least once in a newspaper, a radio or television programme. I would remain awake for two or three days in a row, then collapse for twelve or more hours, waking up unnerved and confused, not entirely clear where I was. It was from within one such state of deep unconsciousness that I dreamed of him. He walked into the flat. The living room was exactly as it had been on that particular day: the same arrangement of papers on the table, the same wilting flowers, the same empty teacup on the floor in front of the fireplace. He stood at the room’s entrance, watching me. For some reason, he did not want to come in. He was cross about something. Eventually he spoke.
“You are not paying me enough attention,” he said.
One of the injustices involved in disappearing a person is a difficult one to describe. It turns the disappeared into an abstraction, and, because the possibility of his existing under the same sun and the same moon is a real one, it makes it hard to retain a clear picture of him. In death the hallmark fades, and not all the memorials in the world can hold back the tide of forgetting. But in life the disappeared changes in ways that are active and elaborate.
—
A few days after the open letter and David
Miliband’s response, the novelist Kamila Shamsie and the respected authority on international law Philippe Sands co-wrote a newspaper article, in which they concluded:
[Jaballa] Matar’s initial disappearance violated international law; his continuing imprisonment without communication with the outside world violates international law; his disappearance over nearly two decades violates international law; the failure by the Libyan government to effectively investigate his case violates international law. These violations expose individuals within the Libyan government to the risk of criminal action. What this means is that Hisham Matar’s rights are being violated. As a UK national he is entitled to expect the British government to intervene directly with Libya to bring the torture to an end.
The following day Ziad, who flew over for the purpose, Diana and I, and a group of our friends sat in the gallery of the House of Lords. At 2:44 P.M. the barrister and human-rights advocate Lord Lester stood up and asked Her Majesty’s government whether, following the Human Rights Watch report, it would seek “information from the government of Libya about the whereabouts of Jaballa Hamed Matar…”
Hearing Father’s name spoken in my adopted country’s highest chamber had a vertiginous effect on me. Every time it was repeated, the feeling reoccurred. Not pride so much as a dizzying hollowness. I was certain Ziad felt it too. His eyes were perfectly still and his face was drawn back a little. I had the overwhelming urge to pull him by the hand and run out of the neo-gothic building, run till we had no strength left.
The minister of state, Baroness Kinnock, responded. She cited David Miliband’s reply to the open letter and added, “Our embassy in Tripoli has raised this with the Libyans and has asked them to investigate further.”
Several other members of the House weighed in.
Baroness Kennedy said, “I would also be grateful if the minister could tell us whether the [British] government have sought an investigation into the massacre that took place in Abu Salim prison in 1996….To what extent are the government muting criticism of human-rights abuses in Libya to establish trade relations, particularly on oil?”