Sometimes I could sense what a horse liked or preferred to do. One of the distinct qualities of this book, and why it challenged and gave me so much pleasure, was its ability to handle different things at once. Each book I’ve written has a different attitude and sensibility and therefore has demanded, technically and intellectually and emotionally, different things. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer. I’ve never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. What did writing a memoir allow you to address that the novels didn’t? The two novels you’ve written deal with themes drawn from your life and your father’s life. What do you think your father would have made of your journey back to Libya and your inquiries into his fate? In several variations we turned in circles over this, neither side ever giving in. My argument was that the best way to achieve the social and political changes he desired was through education and culture he agreed, but believed that a prerequisite to this would have to be the overthrow of the dictatorship. One of the ways this expressed itself, particularly in my midteens, was through our vigorous and at times heated debates. I was always alive to the dangers he was putting himself in, even when I couldn’t quite conceive of the true gravity of the situation. After the fall of Qaddafi, when all political prisoners were released, and my father was not among them, it became inescapable.Īs a child, did you fear or resent your father’s work in opposition to Qaddafi’s regime? In my case, because the evidence remains inconclusive, my acceptance of my father’s passing has come upon me as cunningly as a slowly fading line that was there and suddenly is not. People can die, sometimes the closest people to us, without us noticing a thing. I used to believe that it was not possible to lose someone I loved without sensing it somehow, without feeling something shift.
At what time did you come to believe that your father was no longer alive? Before or after you returned to Libya?