The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
56 pages • 1-hour read
Hisham MatarThe Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains depictions of graphic violence, illness or death, and emotional abuse.
The Relationship Between Closure, Grief, and Healing
Hisham Matar’s memoir, The Return, presents the disappearance of a loved one as a condition that never ends and creates a grief that cannot settle. This state of ambiguous loss locks Matar in a long suspension, where private mourning blends with a political attempt to uncover facts. The book shows how mourning turns into resistance when a government obscures a narrative and offers no answers. Matar’s experience reveals that when a person is neither confirmed alive nor dead, grief never moves toward acceptance and instead becomes a watchful and consuming hunt for closure.
The memoir first shows how this loss throws Matar into a psychological and linguistic crisis. For years he describes himself living in the aftermath, a space where the past refuses to recede and the future cannot take shape. His father’s uncertain fate breaks the patterns he normally uses to understand loss. When Matar writes, “My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him” (145), he marks a genuine break in thought, where he is unable to both heal or fully articulate this uncertain state in which his father exists. He is emphasizing how state-sanctioned disappearances create a situation for which language doesn’t yet have a term. His recurring dream of drifting alone on open water sharpens this point by capturing the disorientation and solitude that shape his days. In this world, grief keeps him attached to a memory he cannot accept and move on from.
Matar also shows that this pain stems from deliberate choices by the regime. In a smuggled letter, Jaballa Matar warns that if guards discover the note he will “fall into a bottomless abyss” (151), a place of complete erasure. After a dissident releases one of Jaballa’s letters, the predicted danger arrives during the interrogation that becomes the last confirmed sighting of him. The government widens the abyss for the family through silence and lies, including the Egyptian authorities’ false claim that Jaballa was held in Cairo. These tactics trap the family in a maze of partial reports and missing information, furthering impeding their quest to find closure and heal.
Matar’s response to this manufactured uncertainty is to turn private grief into a public appeal for truth. Matar’s years of contacting foreign governments, human rights groups, and Qaddafi’s son show how mourning creates a political record of his father’s disappearance. His mother’s work in the 1970s, when she welcomed the mothers of other detainees into her home, reflects the same refusal to surrender to silence. However, after his hope is extinguished and the graphic details of the Abu Salim massacre are explained at the memoir’s end, Matar abruptly enjoys a traditional meal with his extended family. This ending demonstrates how sometimes the only way to move forward is to accept the lack of closure, even if it keeps an emotional wound open, and choose to heal through connections with loved ones. This enables Matar to reconcile the fractured parts of his identity and, to some degree, find peace.
The Emotional Complexity of Exile and Return
In The Return, Hisham Matar shows homecoming as a complicated negotiation between the self shaped abroad and the claims of one’s home country. Its foundation is the fractured identity created by the separation from one’s original culture, but this feeling is heightened by the threatening, complicated nature in which Matar’s family was originally ousted from Libya. He was not only alienated from his home and culture; he was forcibly kept away from it and thus unable to explore a key part of who he is. When finally returning to Libya, only after Qaddafi’s death, the memoir challenges the idea of a celebratory return and instead frames it as a crisis of identity and agency, where the pull of origin clashes with the need to protect oneself. Matar’s journey suggests that a return may never feel complete when the past remains unsettled, and reconnecting with “home” is a complex, and potentially unresolvable, ongoing experience.
Matar sets up this conflict at the start. As he prepares to fly to Benghazi, he asks, “What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?” (4). This question marks the dilemma that defines his life. He weighs writers like Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov, who stayed away from their home countries, alongside Naguib Mahfouz, who remained rooted in Egypt. Leaving Libya cut him off from the “source,” or the foundation of his and his father’s identities, yet going back risks confronting what time and trauma have changed. His comparisons reveal that exile becomes a psychological state, where loyalty to the past pulls against the need to survive in the present.
His hesitation grows out of an effort to protect the identity he built in exile. He fears the trip because it might “rob me of a skill that I have worked hard to cultivate: how to live away from places and people I love” (4). When he adds, “I am reluctant to give Libya any more than it has already taken” (4), he names the emotional cost of opening old wounds. Three decades of waiting have shaped him, and his “bloody-minded commitment to rootlessness” keeps him tied to his younger self (23). The pain and lack of closure inherent in his ongoing quest to find the truth of his father’s fate is only emphasized by returning to Libya, where Matar must reassert his individual identity and values separate from the crime committed against his family.
Once in Libya, the tension sharpens rather than fades. Matar reaches Benghazi during the 22nd anniversary of his father’s first week in captivity, so the past presses into every moment. Throughout the memoir, he is presented as unfamiliar with Libya as it is now, thus separating him from his culture and history. This relationship with his culture is primarily rebuilt through the reconciliation with family members separated from him either by his exile or by their imprisonment under Qaddafi’s regime. As Matar gradually hears their stories and bonds with them, he reconnects with both his past and Libya. He doesn’t fully resolve this feeling of alienation or grief, but he finds ways to reconcile the pieces of himself developed in his two homelands, closing the thematic exploration of exile.
Art as a Form of Witness and Survival
In The Return, art takes on a symbolic role, surpassing aesthetic or cultural value to become a discipline tied to survival, memory, and resistance. The narrative is strung together by frequent intertextual references by Matar, who uses allusions to figures like Telemachus, Odysseus, and Hamlet as a lens through which to process his own grief over his father’s unresolved disappearance. As the story continues, poetry, painting, and literature become increasingly present in the narrative to give Matar and those around him a way to work through trauma when ordinary language fails. For people living under a dictatorship, artistic expression becomes a means to hold on to identity and record what the regime tries to erase.
Inside Abu Salim prison, poetry becomes a lifeline. Jaballa Matar recites elegiac Bedouin alam each night, and his “steady and passionate” voice reaches other cells and confirms he is alive (28). When guards place his brother, Mahmoud, nearby and Mahmoud does not recognize his voice, Jaballa chooses specific coded lines to let him know who is speaking. This exchange carries more weight than ordinary communication because it asserts his name and culture against a system attempting to deny his presence there. The connection this creates extends beyond the prison, reaching Matar years later as he recollects his father reciting the same poetry in their house when he was a child. These fond memories emphasize the wide-reaching impact of art and its connection to the memoir, particularly as alam represents knowledge gained through loss, an idea at the core of The Return.
Matare also relies on European painting to shape his understanding of his father’s treatment and the scattered nature of political violence. When he stands before Titian’s The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, he studies the “efficient men” who mete out pain and uses the image to imagine what his father endured. Even stronger connections appear when Matar recalls being drawn to Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian on the day of the 1996 Abu Salim massacre. The painting’s own history of being cut apart and later pieced together mirrors the massacre’s violent and officially denied reality, only constructed through partial accounts from various sources. His response suggests a human pull toward images that echo a hidden or overwhelming truth.
The act of writing the memoir becomes the final artistic record. Matar gathers smuggled notes, prisoner accounts, scattered memories, and research and fits them into a single narrative, much like an artist assembling fragments into a finished piece. His discovery of his father’s early short stories strengthens this link and reveals a shared creative drive. By completing The Return, Matar breaks the silence the regime relies on and creates a lasting document for his father and others who vanished.
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