In his very powerful new memoir, The Return, the Libyan writer Hisham Matar writes about his beloved activist father, kidnapped in Cairo and taken to the notorious Abu Salim prison in Libya during the last years of the brutal Qaddafi regime, where he vanished after six years of torture and isolation.
No one knows his precise fate, but he is presumed to have been executed. And he reportedly kept his dignity and refused to submit.
In the book, Matar returns to Libya after Qaddafi was overthrown to understand what happened to his father and to come to terms with his loss. He writes eloquently about his father’s independence and how this, coupled with his father’s unresolved fate, has compromised his own identity.
“We need a father to rage against,” he wrote. “When a father is neither dead nor alive, when he is a ghost, the will is impotent. I am the son of an unusual man, perhaps even a great man. And when, like most children, I rebelled against these early perceptions of him, I did so because I feared the consequences of his convictions. I was desperate to divert him from his path.”
I was up much of the night reading this quite wonderful book, a study in fathers and sons, a story that resonated very powerfully with me and brought my own father, so deeply submerged in my subconscious, briefly back to life. I’ve written more than 20 books, and have barely mentioned my father once, it is as if he never existed. In a sense, that is true.
I am the son of an unusual man too, and he was and is also a ghost to me. A first generation immigrant, he came of age in a simpler time, when life was not so complex. He became a social worker and a probation officer without any formal training or education, and was apparently extraordinarily good at it.
He was much loved by almost everyone he met outside of his family.
I know this because countless people have contacted me, come up to me, mailed me to tell me how he had saved their lives, altered their destinies, taken great chances with them, turned them to the right path, pulled them back from the abyss. I remember the phone ringing night after night, my father rushing out in the dark to save another troubled soul.
I have heard this about the saintly side of my father from so many people, even from my older brother, whom I rarely see and with whom i rarely speak. Another ghost, I think. We need to rage against our big brothers too.
I have never known what to make of these stories about my father, with whom I never got along and did not know very well. The time we spent together was not pleasant.
He was disappointed in me, disapproved of me in almost every way. He thought me weak, lazy, not too bright, a sissy, a bed-wetter and a wimp. He railed against me for not playing sports or being good at them and at every turn, made me feel badly about myself, my body, my courage. I saw him nearly destroy my sister day after day, criticizing her weight, her looks, her beliefs. It was like watching a murder.
His disappointment and resentment of me nearly ruined my life, it took me so long to understand how to deal with it.
I could not connect the man I lived with – who told me every morning for many years how my wet sheets were a sign of my cowardice and lack of character – could be so loved, do so much good for so many people, and be so utterly disconnected from his own family. And from me. It was as if I did not have a father.
In my entire life at home, my father was never once home for breakfast, he preferred to eat breakfast every morning with his buddies at a diner. And rarely home for dinner.
I can hardly recall a single experience where we did one thing together, other than his taking me out into the yard on sunny days and throwing baseballs at me as hard as he could to toughen me up. How I dreaded those lessons. And then one day, the baseball he threw hit me in the forehead and knocked me down, nearly unconscious, and I heard him calling me a sissy and shouting at me to get up.
My life changed that day, I grasped that my life and well-being depended on my getting away from this man and never listening to him again, and I did not.
I got up and walked off the field and did not really speak to him for many years. I never let him talk to me, get close to me, or visit me. He never once set food into any house I lived in or came near my daughter.
That seemed to be all right with him, and he never tried to teach me to catch a baseball again. We saw one another at family gatherings, but never really spoke, not until he lay on his death-bed and we had our first honest conversation: he agreed I was not the son he wanted, I agreed he was not the father I would have liked to have had.
So both of us were ghosts to one another.I imagine I caused him as much pain as he caused me, but when I was young, I could not imagine that he was also vulnerable.
My father gave me the gift of independence, born out of my need to be independent of him. I understood I better take good care of myself or nobody would take good care of me.
I am sure my father was a good man in many ways, I know he worked hard to help so many people, and the answer is not that he was a good or evil man, but that he was simply a man. He was a product of his world, of another time.
He feared for me in exactly the same way Matar feared for his father, he struck out against his early perceptions of me as weak and troubled, and he fought as hard as he could in his own way to divert me from this path. He wanted to save me, even if it nearly killed me. That is how powerful a parent’s love can be.
I think I know now that if he didn’t love me he wouldn’t have bothered to batter me, but that is a guess really. Like Matar’s father, he eluded me and I did not have a father to know or rage against. We just abandoned one another, neither of us knew how to break through the walls of fear and mistrust we had built around one another.
I know my anger at him was deep and unsparing, for me and for my sister. Now, even after so many years, I feel it still, though it comes up so much less frequently. Like many ghosts do, he has drifted from my consciousness, my head is filled with other things. And when one is, in fact, finally loved, those other stings fade and fade from memory.
I have spent much of my life recovering from my father and his perceptions of me, it is exhausting to think of it. Men draw so muchof their identity from their fathers, as women do from their mothers. I am grateful that my mother loved the stories I wrote and praised them, my father never read them or spoke of them. He was quite openly astonished by every success that I had, he could hardly believe it.
And I am grateful for my grandmother, who loved me beyond reason and showed me that this was possible.
I think of my father, and I can’t see him clearly. He is a blur to me, moving in and out, when he came into my room to lecture me, I always pretended to be asleep. I can’t distinctly recall him. When the father is a ghost, the will is impotent.
He was a ghost to me, drifting in and out of hour home, where he never really wanted to be, and out into the world, where he loved to be, where he was admired and successful. A whole floor of our home was dedicated to the plaques and testimonials given him, a startling counterpoint to the prison our home became, a hiding place for frightened and broken people.
Was he a fraud, or was I? I will never know.
He nearly broke me, but only made me stronger. When I was in my last year of high school, my father took a job in Philadelphia and my family moved. I stayed behind with an uncle, who was horrified at my struggles. “Didn’t your father teach you one single thing?,” he would shout at me, teaching me how to brush my teeth and tie a tie.
No, I mumbled, mortified. He didn’t.
I think I did inherit from him this wish to do good, to step outside of myself and reach out to other people when and if I could. And he made me strong and determined. In that sense, I think he did what he set out to do, perhaps he knew that. He had such a big heart and such a small spirit.
I have never really trusted men since that day he threw the baseball at my head.
A son without a father is crippled in many ways, we have to learn so many things on our own, we have to convince ourselves that we are strong enough to make our own way in the world, we have to define for ourselves what it means to be a man in this world. We walk in a kind of loneliness that will never really end, we are never certain that we know how live in our world.
Hisham Matar adored his father, who was a loving and brave man who sacrificed his life to fight against tyranny. His story is very different from mine. He loved his father very much, and I cannot honestly say that I did.
But the emptiness, I think, is where we connect. Having a father who is a ghost leaves a large hole in the heart, and in life. I think I will never be done trying to till it.