Hisham Matar on Other Histories

In this clip from a full length program, author Hisham Matar discusses America’s tendency to simplify the complex histories of countries in Africa and the Middle East, including Libya, his homeland.

When Hisham Matar was a university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime’s most prominent critics in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Matar, the author of In the Country of Men, a Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, chronicles his journey home to his native Libya after the fall of Qaddafi in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. Matar shares from The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between, his impassioned new work that weaves the intimacy of a memoir with the suspense of journalism to offer a moving reflection on exile, art, family, and the history of a revolution.