Hisham Matar’s father, Jaballa, didn’t just die. He vanished. One minute he’s in a house in Cairo in 1990, and the next, he’s a ghost in the machinery of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. For twenty-two years, Hisham lived in the "land in between"—that agonizing purgatory where a parent is neither dead nor alive. You can’t mourn a ghost.
When the regime finally crumbled in 2011, Hisham did something both brave and deeply reckless. He went back. The Return by Hisham Matar is the story of that homecoming, but if you think it’s just a standard "search for the missing dad" memoir, you’re missing the point entirely.
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It’s about how a dictatorship doesn’t just break a country; it breaks the grammar of a family.
The Myth of Closure in The Return
Honestly, we’re obsessed with closure. We want the DNA test, the grave, the final tearful goodbye. But The Return by Hisham Matar refuses to give you that satisfaction. Hisham returns to Libya in 2012, thirty-three years after he fled as a boy. He walks the streets of Benghazi and Ajdabiya, meeting uncles who spent decades in the notorious Abu Salim prison. These men—men like his Uncle Mahmoud—survived twenty-one years in a cage only to emerge into a world that had moved on without them.
Hisham meets with everyone. He even talks to Seif al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son, a man who oscillates between playing the reformer and the tyrant. It's bizarre. It's frustrating. You’ve got the son of the victim talking to the son of the torturer, both caught in a weird, polite dance over the fate of a man who likely died in a 1996 prison massacre.
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What most people get wrong is thinking this book is a mystery novel. It isn't. It's an architecture of grief.
Why the 1996 Abu Salim Massacre Matters
You can't talk about this book without talking about the massacre. In June 1996, over 1,200 prisoners were gunned down in the courtyards of Abu Salim. It’s the "Last Stop." The regime tried to bury the event, but the families wouldn't let it go.
- Jaballa Matar was almost certainly there.
- Hisham’s quest is less about "finding" him and more about "placing" him.
- The book uses these historical anchors to show that personal grief is always political in a dictatorship.
The writing is spare. It’s precise. Matar was trained as an architect, and you can see it in how he builds his sentences. He doesn't waste words. He describes the light in Benghazi like it’s a physical substance you can touch. It’s beautiful, which makes the horror of what he’s describing even harder to stomach.
The "Grammar" of a Missing Father
One of the most moving parts of The Return by Hisham Matar is when he talks about the lack of a "correct tense." Is his father is or was? If you use the past tense, you’re admitting defeat. If you use the present, you’re perhaps delusional.
"My father is both dead and alive," he writes. That’s the core of the book.
Most people think memoirs are about looking back, but Hisham is looking at the present. He’s looking at his mother, Fawzia, and how she carries the weight. He’s looking at his wife, Diana, who joins him on this trip into the lion's den. He’s trying to figure out how to be a man when the primary example of manhood in his life was snatched away when he was nineteen.
Survival as a Form of Art
There’s a section in the book about poetry that’ll stay with you. In prison, the inmates would recite poetry to each other through the walls. Jaballa was known for this. He was a man of culture, a businessman who once imported Converse shoes, but in the dark of a cell, he was a vessel for language.
This isn't just a "nice detail." It's proof that even in a place designed to erase your humanity, you can hold onto something. The regime could take his body, but they couldn't stop the poems from vibrating through the stone.
What This Means for Libya Today
When the book came out in 2016, it won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Award. People loved it because it felt like a window into a "new" Libya. But reading it now, in 2026, it feels more like a warning.
The "honeymoon" period Hisham experienced in 2012 was brief. The revolution didn't just bring freedom; it brought a vacuum. Some critics, particularly Libyans who stayed behind, argue that Matar romanticizes the dissenters. They point out that while the "exiles" were dreaming of democracy in London or Cairo, the people on the ground were dealing with a reality that was much messier.
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It’s a fair point. Hisham acknowledges his own "bloody-minded commitment to rootlessness." He’s a British citizen now. He’s an outsider in his own skin. That tension—the gap between the exile’s memory and the resident’s reality—is what makes the book so complex. It’s not a simple "hero’s return." It’s a man realizing he’s a stranger in the land he spent thirty years longing for.
Actionable Insights for Readers and Writers
If you’re looking to truly engage with The Return by Hisham Matar, don't just read it for the plot. There isn't a traditional "ending" where everything is okay. Instead, focus on these elements:
- Study the Narrative Structure: Notice how Matar jumps between 1979, 1990, 1996, and 2012. He isn't being confusing; he’s showing how trauma makes time circular.
- Look for the Silence: Pay attention to what isn't said. The gaps in the letters smuggled out of prison are as important as the words themselves.
- Understand the Context: Before reading, quickly look up the 1969 coup that brought Gaddafi to power. Knowing the history of the "Ajdabiya Group" makes Hisham's family's role much clearer.
- Contrast with his Fiction: If you’ve read In the Country of Men or Anatomy of a Disappearance, you’ll see the same themes. But in The Return, the mask of fiction is gone. It’s raw.
To get the most out of this work, treat it as a meditation on the persistence of hope. Hisham calls hope "cunning and persistent." It’s not always a good thing. Sometimes, hope is what keeps the wound open. But in the end, writing the book is his way of finally building the funeral his father never had. He’s reclaiming the narrative from the state. He’s giving his father a place to rest, even if it’s only on the page.