Jaballa Hamed Matar is the absent figure at the center of Hisham Matar’s memoir. A former army officer and diplomat who became a successful businessman and a leading figure in the Libyan opposition, Jaballa was a visible and dangerous enemy to the Qaddafi regime. His life embodies the costs of political dissidence. In March 1990, he was abducted from his family’s exile home in Cairo by Egyptian state security and transferred to Libya, where he was imprisoned in the notorious Abu Salim prison. Though he was most likely killed in the 1996 Abu Salim massacre, his death has never been confirmed, and this unresolved fate structures the memoir’s central theme of The Relationship Between Closure, Grief, and Healing. His disappearance exposes the mechanics of enforced disappearance and its emotional impact on the living.

The strongest evidence of Jaballa’s existence within the prison walls comes from the three letters he risked his life to smuggle to his family in the mid-1990s. These documents provide a firsthand account of the abusive conditions, detailing torture, isolation, and the prisoners’ creation of an improvised library to sustain their minds. In one, he writes, “The cruelty of this place far exceeds all of what we have read of the fortress prison of Bastille. The cruelty is in everything, but I remain stronger than their tactics of oppression […] My forehead does not know how to bow” (10-11). These letters are the primary evidence that anchors his son’s investigation, offering a direct voice that counters the regime’s official silence.

Emotionally, Jaballa functions as the “Absent-Present,” a term his wife uses to describe the constant, defining void at the heart of their family. His unresolved disappearance traps his loved ones in a state of suspended grief, unable to mourn yet unable to fully hope. This liminal state drives the narrative’s urgency, compelling his son’s return to Libya and his relentless search for answers. The memoir is shaped by this ambiguity, exploring how a family navigates a loss that is both definite and unresolved.

The regime of Muammar Qaddafi (also often spelled “Gaddafi” and “Gadhafi” in English), the autocratic ruler of Libya from 1969 to 2011, is the primary antagonistic force of The Return. While Qaddafi rarely appears as a direct character, his presence looms over the narrative as the architect of the state machinery that the memoir confronts. After seizing power in a coup, Qaddafi established a highly controversial regime built on a vast security apparatus that systematically targeted opponents at home and abroad. His policies of repression set the conditions for the Matar family’s exile, Jaballa Matar’s abduction, and the fractured civic life that the author chronicles upon his return to Libya.

The regime’s campaign for control of Libya’s historical and political narrative transcended national borders, with his agents pursuing dissidents who had fled the country. Assassinations and kidnappings of exiled critics in European capitals created an atmosphere of pervasive fear that left foreign citizens, politicians, and public figures hesitant to speak out. This policy explains why the Matar family lived under constant threat and why Jaballa’s high-profile opposition work made him a prime target for abduction. The regime’s global reach illustrates that, for its opponents, there was no safety in exile.

The memoir contrasts the regime’s official narrative with the accounts of its victims. Qaddafi’s public image and revolutionary rhetoric included a system of secret prisons, torture, and state-sponsored erasure. His power defines the memoir’s atmosphere of constraint and fear, embodying the force against which the author and his family have struggled for decades. In The Return, he represents both a political and an ideological opponent that seeks to control history by silencing dissent and denying truth.

In The Return, Abdullah Senussi, Muammar Qaddafi’s brother-in-law and longtime intelligence chief, acts as a representation of the regime’s capacity for covert violence and strategic deception. As a senior security official with direct command authority, he was widely implicated in many of the state’s scandals and alleged crimes, most notably the 1996 Abu Salim prison massacre. In the memoir, he is a recurring presence in the testimonies of survivors, offering a specific identity to the obfuscated state-sanctioned violence.

Senussi’s significance is crystallized in his actions during the Abu Salim massacre. According to eyewitness accounts retold in the book, he was the senior official who arrived at the prison to negotiate with inmates who had protested their inhumane conditions. He made false promises of reform and improved treatment, lulling the prisoners into a false sense of security. As survivor Hmad Khanfore recounts, Senussi assured them, “‘When you wake up,’ he told us, ‘you will find everything has changed’” (230). This act of duplicity was a prelude to mass murder, as more than 1,200 men were allegedly subsequently executed.

Through these accounts, Senussi comes to embody the regime’s weaponization of secrecy and deceit. His staged negotiations reveal a methodology in which even the language of reform was used as a tool of repression. In the narrative, he functions as a symbol of the terror and bad faith that characterized the regime’s inner circle, heightening the book’s moral indictment of the individuals who carried out Qaddafi’s orders.

Seif al-Islam Qaddafi, the Western-educated son of Muammar Qaddafi, serves as a complex and ultimately disillusioning figure in the memoir, representing the failed promise of regime reform. Cultivating an image as a modernizer, he engaged with foreign governments and dissidents during the years of Libya’s political “normalization,” positioning himself as a potential successor who could guide the country toward a more open future. For Hisham Matar, he becomes the gatekeeper of information who might be persuaded to reveal the truth about Jaballa Matar’s fate.

His role in the narrative becomes central when he meets directly the author, connecting Matar with the regime previously abstracted by his exile. In these exchanges, Seif promises a “road map” to the truth, drawing Matar into a protracted and psychologically taxing negotiation. Despite presenting himself ambivalently, his lawyer implies to Matar that he is obscuring the truth, as he would’ve said if he knew Matar’s father was alive.

The essential conflict he embodies is exposed by the stark contradiction between his reformist rhetoric and his actions during the 2011 uprising. After years of positioning himself as a bridge to the West, he delivered a televised speech threatening that opposition would be met with “rivers of blood” (203), revealing his disloyalty to the Libyan people. Ultimately, Seif al-Islam demonstrates how authoritarian forces use the appearance of moderation and benevolence to maintain its power.

Mahmoud Matar, Jaballa’s youngest brother, is an eyewitness whose testimony forms a cornerstone of the memoir’s investigation. Arrested in March 1990, just weeks after his brother was taken, he was imprisoned in Abu Salim for 21 years and released only days before the 2011 revolution. His long detention, during which he endured torture, isolation, and chronic illness, makes him a symbol of endurance under systematic state abuse.

As a survivor of the 1996 Abu Salim massacre, Mahmoud provides firsthand details of prison life and the events leading up to the executions. His account of first hearing his brother’s voice reciting poetry from a neighboring cell is a poignant moment that confirms Jaballa’s presence in the prison. After his release, he reunites with his nephew, Hisham Matar, and his memories guide the author’s search, connecting the intimate threads of family memory to the broader historical record. He recollections and his physical wounds from this era reinforce the recurring narrative device of the past’s intrusion on the present.

Fawzia Tarbah, Hisham Matar’s mother, is an emotional anchor of the memoir, embodying the fundamentals of care and remembrance that stand in opposition to the regime’s project of erasure. While her husband, Jaballa, engaged in public opposition, Fawzia managed the family’s precarious life in exile, bearing the daily costs and risks of his activism. Her role highlights the often-unseen labor of women whose lives are upended by political conflict.

Her resilience is a form of resistance. She not only sustained her own family but also quietly supported the mothers and wives of other political prisoners in Tripoli, creating a network of solidarity. As the man at Matar’s public reading recalls, “Every week the two women cooked for the entire prison wing, 150 men” (120). By preserving her husband’s smuggled letters and the stories of other detainees, she becomes the family’s archivist. Her decision to accompany her son back to Libya in 2012 provides the narrative with its moral compass, as she urges him to be thoughtful about his desire to find his father. Her cautious, steady presence tempers his urgent quest and encourages more focus on his bonds with his surviving family.