Terry Gross interviewed Matar about his father and his recent article "The Return," published in this week's edition of the New Yorker. Matar -- author of In the Country of Men -- is a novelist who divides his time between New York and London.
Hisham Matar, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So when you set out for Libya, to see if you could find your father who had been imprisoned for many years, the last you'd heard of him was in 2010, you learned that somebody had seen him or said that they'd seen him in prison in 2002. So you really had no idea if he was alive or not. So when you go to Libya looking for your father, where do you start? What was the plan?I'm going to try to sum up why your father was considered an enemy of the Gadhafi regime. So tell me if this is accurate. He had been in the military under the king, and then when the coup overthrew the king, and Gadhafi became president, your father was given a diplomatic position in the Libyan Permanent Mission to the U.N., largely to get rid of him without alienating him as a military man and risking turning military men against the regime. But then your father decided to continue to fight the Gadhafi regime and ran a militia that hoped to depose Gadhafi. Do I have that right?