Hisham Matar

"Anatomy of a Disappearance"


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We hear from Libyan author Hisham Matar about the revolution in his native country and his father's disappearance under Moammar Ghadafi, a subject he takes on in his latest novel: Anatomy of a Disappearance.

The following excerpt is from Chapter 1 of the book.

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There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy
as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely
recall the exact features of his face and must bring out
the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the
drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day
since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have
not been searching for him, looking in the most
unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence
itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance.
Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and
now almost archaic word: elegy.

I do not see him in the mirror but feel him adjusting,
as if he were twisting within a shirt that nearly fits. My
father has always been intimately mysterious even when
he was present. I can almost imagine how it might have
been coming to him as an equal, as a friend, but not quite.

My father disappeared in 1972, at the beginning of my
school Christmas holiday, when I was fourteen. Mona
and I were staying at the Montreux Palace, taking
breakfast  – I with my large glass of bright orange
juice, and she with her steaming black tea – on the
terrace overlooking the steel-blue surface of Lake
Geneva, at the other end of which, beyond the hills
and the bending waters, lay the now vacant city of
Geneva. I was watching the silent paragliders hover
above the still lake, and she was paging through La
Tribune de Genève, when suddenly her hand rose to her
mouth and trembled.

A few minutes later we were aboard a train, hardly
speaking, passing the newspaper back and forth.

We collected from the police station the few
belongings that were left on the bedside table. When I
unsealed the small plastic bag, along with the tobacco
and the lighter flint, I smelled him. That same watch is
now wrapped round my wrist, and even today, after all
these years, when I press the underside of the leather
strap against my nostrils I can detect a whiff of him.

I wonder now how different my story would have
been were Mona’s hands unbeautiful, her fingertips
coarse.

I still, all of these years later, hear the same childish
persistence, ‘I saw her first,’ which bounced like a
devil on my tongue whenever I caught one of Father’s
claiming gestures: his fingers sinking into her hair,
his  hand landing on her skirted thigh with the ab-
sentmindedness of a man touching his earlobe in
mid-sentence. He had taken to the Western habit of
holding hands, kissing, embracing in public. But he
could not fool me; like a bad actor, he seemed unsure
of his steps. Whenever he would catch me watching
him, he would look away and I swear I could see
colour in his cheeks. A dark tenderness rises in me
now as I think how hard he had tried; how I yearn still
for an easy sympathy with my father. Our relationship
lacked what I have always believed possible, given
time, and perhaps after I had become a man, after he
had seen me become a father: a kind of emotional
eloquence and ease. But now the distances that had
then governed our interactions and cut a quiet gap
between us continue to shape him in my thoughts.

Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar
Copyright Hisham Matar, 2011
All rights reserved
Penguin Books Ltd
www.penguin.co.uk/tasters

In the following video, Matar reads from his book.

 

For more information on Hisham Matar and Anatomy of a Disappearance, please visit the links below.

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