In March 2011 the head of a school in London asks one of her teachers, Khaled, who is from Libya, to give a presentation to students on the unfolding movement soon to be known as the Arab spring. No, he says, he’d rather not. He doesn’t “know much about politics”. The lie is transparent. As Khaled’s friend Hosam says to him, history is a “tide” and no one from their country can swim away from it. “We are in it and of it.”
Hisham Matar’s own life has been cruelly disrupted by that tide. His justly acclaimed work of nonfiction The Return described his father’s abduction by Gaddafi’s forces, his disappearance into the dictator’s prisons, and Matar’s decades-long quest to discover his fate. That book’s content was shocking, but its manner was quiet and tentative, all the more powerful for meeting brutality not with anger but with sadness.
