“[T]here was a room, barely high enough for a man to stand and certainly not wide enough for him to lie down. A deep gray box in the ground. […] I could not find a trapdoor, a pipe, anything leading out. It came over me suddenly. I wept and could hear myself.”

As Matar crosses over a grille in the sidewalk, he imagines the space beneath him as indicative of his grief. This image of the “deep gray box” externalizes the narrator’s suffocating psychological state and his father’s presumed confinement. The absence of a “trapdoor” or any exit symbolizes the finality of ambiguous loss and the lack of narrative or physical escape from his family’s trauma. The narrator’s subsequent public breakdown marks a pivotal moment where repressed grief, triggered by this concrete symbol of his father’s fate, surfaces with overwhelming force.

“‘Hamza, I am Libyan. My name is Hisham Matar. I’m the son of Jaballa Matar.’ He didn’t let go. I felt his body become rigid. […] When we looked at each other we had tears running down our faces.”

This moment of confession culminates the narrator’s painful experience of a split identity while at boarding school, a key aspect of the theme of The Emotional Complexity of Exile and Return. The simple, declarative sentences—“I am Libyan. My name is Hisham Matar”—are a reclamation of self after years of living under a pseudonym for safety. The shared tears between the two boys, whose fathers represent opposing sides of a violent political conflict, illustrate how the regime’s terror permeated and fractured relationships as well as political alliances.

“I have always associated the irrevocable and violent changes my family and my country went through in the following four decades with the image of my father—a poet turned officer turned, reluctantly, diplomat—dressed in a suit and tie, far away from home, collecting the pieces of a dead man.”

This passage functions as foreshadowing, using a single, visceral image of the narrator’s father at a crash scene in New York to encapsulate the fragmentation that will define their future. The act of “collecting the pieces” is a metaphor for the narrator’s own project in the memoir: attempting to reassemble a coherent story from the shattered remains of his father’s life and his country’s history. The description of his father’s shifting identities highlights his dislocation and the external forces that shaped his life long before his kidnapping.

“Mother, no doubt detecting my anxiety, had asked a mischievous question. ‘Who’s returning?’ she said. ‘Suleiman el-Dewani or Nuri el-Alfi?’ Suleiman el-Dewani and Nuri el-Alfi are the exiled protagonists of my novels.”

This self-reflexive moment directly addresses the author’s identity as a novelist and the complex relationship between his art and his life. The mother’s question serves as a gentle warning, questioning which self is returning: the writer who contains his trauma within fictional characters or the son who is about to confront the ghost of his father directly. This highlights a central tension in the memoir, exploring how art can be both a method for processing trauma and a potential shield from its full impact.

“When I think of what might have happened to him, I feel an abyss open up beneath me. […] The pit is circular. Like a well. Our well.”

Matar here introduces the recurring symbol of the abyss to articulate the dual nature of his quest. The “abyss” represents the void of ambiguous loss and the unresolved horror of his father’s unknown fate. He immediately transforms this image into “[o]ur well,” linking the terrifying unknown to an ancestral place of origin, a source of life and history, which suggests that confronting the depths of grief is inseparable from accessing the foundation of a family’s identity.

“I did and he said, ‘I am from Blo’thaah.’ I felt sick, as if my heart had split.”

This quote marks the emotional climax of Uncle Mahmoud’s story about discovering his brother in the adjacent prison wing. The name “Blo’thaah,” the family’s ancestral home, functions as an irrefutable signifier of identity that no imposter could know, confirming Jaballa’s presence in Abu Salim. Mahmoud mentioned how each relative believed they were the only one captured, and the uncle’s intense reaction, described in the simile “as if my heart had split,” conveys the immense shock of the revelation, as it extinguished Mahmoud’s hope that his family had escaped his face.

“[N]o matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers. I think this as I consider Uncle Mahmoud’s account of learning that Father was not safely home in Cairo but a few metres away in a cell in the opposite wing.”

This passage elevates the narrator’s specific search into a broader meditation on the inherent mystery of paternal identity. By framing his father’s extreme situation within a broader aphorism, Matar connects his unique political tragedy to a common human experience of the father-son relationship. The physical proximity of the father in prison (“a few metres away”) ironically underscores the vast, unbridgeable distance created by his suffering, making the act of “knowing” him both an urgent necessity and an acknowledged impossibility.

“All he said was, ‘Are you well? Your health? Your family?’ and would repeat these three questions every two minutes or so. […] Together with his silence, his eyes—those eyes not leaving mine, not looking anywhere else but into my own—made me feel I had entered, and was somehow trapped inside, a state as pure as an allegory.”

This scene with the elderly relative Muftah demonstrates a form of communication that transcends explicit language. Muftah’s son gently dismisses Muftah’s psychological state as worsening, delegitimizing the value of Muftah’s repetitive, formulaic questions. However, Matar sees them not as a means of gathering information but as a ritual of connection, while his unblinking gaze conveys a deep, shared history of loss without needing to articulate it. The narrator’s feeling of being “trapped inside, a state as pure as an allegory” reveals how this encounter distills the family’s multi-generational trauma into a single, symbolic moment of deep but unspoken recognition.

“We don’t even know our children.”

Spoken by Uncle Hmad Khanfore after recounting how his own son failed to recognize him in a courtroom after 11 years of imprisonment, this statement encapsulates the intergenerational trauma caused by political violence. The line functions as an understated summary of the collateral damage inflicted on families by the regime. Matar uses this moment of dialogue to illustrate a central tragedy of long-term incarceration: the loss of both freedom and the fundamental bonds of recognition and shared life between loved ones.

“I am doing my best but he’s beginning to smell. I must find a way to bury him soon.”

An elderly man in Zliten speaks these words to Matar over the phone, describing his son’s corpse, which he has hidden in his air-conditioned home for three days to protect it from being desecrated by Qaddafi’s forces. This quote juxtaposes the domestic and the horrific, grounding the abstract violence of war in a visceral, sensory reality. The father’s practical concern about the smell highlights the grotesque intrusion of political brutality into the private rituals of grief.

“‘There is the beautiful flag,’ Izzo says softly. ‘The flag of life and liberty.’”

Izzo whispers this commentary while filming his friend Marwan raising the revolutionary flag in Zliten, an act of symbolism for his defiance against the regime. The phrase “life and liberty” articulates the idealistic hope driving the young revolutionaries, contrasting sharply with the death and repression of the regime. The description of the flag as “beautiful” transforms a political emblem into an aesthetic and moral object, representing the aspirations for which Izzo will ultimately sacrifice his life.

“Guilt is exile’s eternal companion. It stains every departure.”

This aphoristic statement reflects Matar’s state of mind as he leaves his uncle’s house in Ajdabiya to return to Benghazi. The metaphor of a stain conveys the inescapable and permanent nature of the guilt that accompanies the life of an exile, suggesting a sense of responsibility to those left behind. The quote provides direct insight into the psychological burden central to the theme of the emotional complexity of exile and return.

“I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing.”

This interior monologue, triggered by Matar’s return to Benghazi, reveals the extreme and permanent sense of alienation that results from a life lived in exile. By quoting the author Jean Rhys before this passage, Matar places his personal experience within a broader literary tradition of displacement. The repetitive sentence structure (“I would never […]”) emphasizes the definitive and unchanging nature of this feeling, defining the psychological landscape of the displaced person.

“I will not let disgrace stain my forehead.”

This line is spoken by the elderly hero in a short story written by Jaballa Matar at age 18. The author discovers this story decades later and recognizes its language as a direct echo of his father’s smuggled prison letter, in which he wrote, “My forehead does not know how to bow” (118). This literary discovery forges a link across time, revealing a core element of Jaballa’s character—his unyielding pride and resistance to dishonor—that was present long before his imprisonment.

“‘Where is it?’ I asked. ‘Still inside,’ he said.”

Matar’s grandfather, Hamed, says this after showing the young Matar the scar where a bullet entered his body during the resistance against the Italians, revealing it never exited. The embedded bullet becomes a symbol of unresolved historical trauma carried physically within the body and passed down through generations. This quiet exchange transforms a family anecdote into a metaphor for the way Libya’s violent past remains lodged within its people.

“My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future.”

This quote is a concise articulation of The Relationship Between Closure, Grief, and Healing, the central theme of the memoir. By stating he lacks a “grammar” for his father, Matar uses a linguistic metaphor to describe the inability of conventional language and verb tenses to contain the paradoxical state of a person who has been “disappeared.” It establishes his father not as a memory but as a constant, unresolved presence that defies the neat categories of life and death.

“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.”

Matar reflects on Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, a painting he was unknowingly drawn to on the exact day of the Abu Salim massacre. The artwork, itself sold in fragments and later reassembled with pieces missing, becomes an objective correlative for the fragmented truth of his father’s fate. This moment crystallizes the theme of Art as a Form of Witness and Survival, demonstrating how art captures and conveys a myriad of experiences. Here, it becomes a means of processing political violence and finding a form for inconclusive grief.

“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.”

This passage articulates a central psychological paradox of Matar’s search, utilizing antithesis (“the harder I looked, the less present he became”) to explore the tension between public action and private memory. The effort to transform his father into a political “case” in order to find him risks turning him into an abstraction, thereby diminishing the intimate, personal connection that fuels the search. Matar’s reflection reveals how the political demand for truth can paradoxically distance one from the emotional reality of loss.

“Then Seif looked at me and with an impatient tone said, ‘What do you want if he is dead?’ […] ‘We want to know when, where and how it happened,’ I said. ‘We want the body in order to bury it in our own way, so we can have our funeral, and then we want accountability. You talk of “closing the file”: this is how you do it.’”

This direct dialogue between Matar and the dictator’s son functions as a moment of intense narrative and psychological confrontation. Seif’s blunt, pragmatic question is a thinly veiled admission, designed to gauge Matar’s price for silence. Matar’s reply counters this cynicism by outlining a sequence of human and legal rights—knowledge, ritual, and justice—thereby defining the memoir’s moral argument against the regime’s instrumentalist view of life and death. Matar mentions that Qaddafi’s regime sought to buy him or find some other way to “control” him, but truth and justice were concepts they were unable to offer.

“Then I wondered if the eagle above was our father. Perhaps this was why it sent a branch precisely on to my bloody phone.”

In Nairobi on the anniversary of his father’s disappearance, Matar considers the eagle as a complex symbol. The bird represents his father’s perceived strength and pride, but its action—destroying the phone—suggests a supernatural rejection of the political campaign and its technology. This interior reflection illustrates the psychological toll of ambiguous loss, where the rational mind seeks meaning in omens and the surreal to process grief. It also implies that Matar sought confirmation of something he had already come to realize, which was that the quest to find his father must end.

“Watching Seif’s speech was like witnessing someone tearing off a mask. He neither apologized nor offered condolences to the families of the demonstrators recently killed by the authorities. […] [He said], ‘you will be crying over hundreds of thousands of deaths. There will be rivers of blood.’”

The simile “like witnessing someone tearing off a mask” marks the definitive end of any pretense of Seif el-Islam Qaddafi as a political reformer, a key turning point in the narrative. The direct quote from the televised speech condemning the uprising, with its graphic imagery (“rivers of blood”) and contemptuous tone, exposes the violent truth hidden by Seif’s previous demeanor of earnestness when interacting with Matar. This moment frames the family’s private tragedy within the larger public catastrophe of the 2011 civil war, showing the brutal reality that underlay the previous 13 months of negotiation.

“I sensed the old dark acknowledgment that Father had been killed in the massacre […] because I have always preferred to think of him dying with others.”

After learning the sole sighting of his father after 1996 was a misidentification, Matar’s internal state is one of exhaustion and a paradoxical sense of relief. The author uses a reflective tone to analyze his own complex emotional response, revealing that the “certainty” of death in the massacre is preferable to the torment of ambiguous loss. This preference for a communal death over a solitary one highlights his deep empathy and the psychological need to imagine a dignified, more comforting end for his father, despite its inherent violence.

“Power must believe, given how things proceed, that the world was better made for the perpetrator than for those who arrive after the fact, seeking justice or accountability or truth. Power must see such attempts as pathetic, and yet the bereaved, the witness, the investigator and the chronicler cannot but try to make reason of the diabolical mess.”

This passage offers a philosophical reflection on the nature of state-sponsored violence and historical memory. The personification of power as a cynical, omnipotent force that relies on public fatigue and the difficulty of establishing truth is juxtaposed with the persistent human impulse to document and make sense of atrocity, articulating a core argument of the memoir about the moral necessity of bearing witness. Matar asserts that the belief of those in power that the world is more suitable for them is inherently a warped and short-sighted perspective that overlooks the resilience and connection between oppressed people.