La ambivalencia del regreso

El escritor libio Hisham Matar (1970), hijo de un importante político e intelectual nacionalista que disintió del régimen de Khadafi, y sufrió prisión por ello, autor de novelas como In the Country of Men (2006), Man Booker Prize, y Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), título tan atractivo como su trama, ha escrito un reportaje de su regreso a Libia tras la última revolución, que hay que leer. Matar ha vivido la mayor parte de su vida en el exilio, en El Cairo, en Nueva York, en Londres, pero como se puede leer en esta memoria editada en el último The New Yorker, no importa que la experiencia de la nación de origen haya sido tan fugaz, para sentir el regreso en toda su paradójica intensidad. Todo regreso a la patria, luego de un exilio plenamente asumido -breve, largo o mediano-, es, a la vez, un reencuentro y un desencuentro, el viaje a una utopía y la vuelta de un desencanto.

"My family left in 1979, thirty-three years earlier. This was the chasm that divided the man from the eight-year old boy I was when my family left. The plane was going to cross that gulf. Surely such journeys were reckless. This one could rob me of a skill that I have worked hard to cultivate: how to live away from places and people I love. Joseph Brodsky was right. So were Nabokov and Conrad: artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured. But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right; never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead drunk, hard and hollow".