A conscious decision to remember a man before the disappearance. Told by Hisham Matar (EP 30).
Jaballa Matar, Hisham's father, was a Libyan diplomat turned opposition figure. He was abducted from Cairo in 1990 by agents of the Gaddafi regime, handed over to Libyan intelligence, and is believed to have been killed in Abu Salim prison. The full circumstances of his death have never been officially confirmed.
Hisham described his twenties as "black years." The grief did not resolve. It compounded. He said, directly, that he never wished revenge — not because he had forgiven anyone, but because he had noticed what anger did to the person carrying it. His formulation: "Getting trapped in anger is another victory for the event."
He extended the observation to the country. The Gaddafi regime, he argued, had taught Libyans a debased language of power in which strength was expressed through humiliation and revenge. Killing Gaddafi was the easy part. Taking that language out of Libyan public life is the hard part, and it has barely begun. He opposed the manner of Gaddafi's death on precisely these grounds: it was revenge, not justice, and the difference matters.
The core story is smaller and more deliberate. At some point during the black years, Hisham made a conscious decision about memory. He refused to let his father's identity collapse into the moment of his disappearance. The man who had been taken was not primarily "the man they took." He was a father, a reader, a diplomat, a person with mornings and conversations and plans, and those moments were the ones Hisham chose to hold.
He described this as the only real victory available to him: "saving my father's memory from becoming only the disappearance."
The decision is the spine of The Return, the 2016 memoir for which Hisham received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. It is also the practical form of his larger argument about revenge. You cannot prevent a regime from taking a person. You can refuse to let the regime also define who that person was. That refusal, in Hisham's framing, is what memory is for.
See: Hisham Matar