Curing Oneself of One's (Father)Land Nosto/Patriography in "The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between" by Hisham Matar

Abstract

In 2012, the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar returned to his native Libya after a hiatus of over thirty years so as to learn about the fate of his father—an anti-Gaddafi political dissident who in 1979 took his family into exile and who only a decade later was kidnapped and imprisoned by the Libyan regime. However, the search for the writer’s father turned out to be something more than just a fact-finding inquiry into what had happened to Jaballa Matar. It metamorphosed into a profoundly auto/biographical project in which he investigated not only the father-son relationship but also his “expatriate” position with regard to his fatherland. Moreover, the whole experience resulted in Matar completing and publishing an account of his father/home-search entitled "The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between" (2016). The aim of this paper is to discuss Matar’s "The Return" as a specimen of nosto- and patriography. The memoir will be analysed with reference to two narrative categories mentioned above (namely a narrative about one’s homecoming [nostos narrative] and about the father-son relationship [patriography]) and their specific poetics developed and formulated by the micro-genres’ prominent theorists. The paper will also address an issue which appears to be particularly pertinent both to the auto/biographical self and to the book’s readers: the “success” at both homecoming and overcoming grief.