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\"In the winter of 2010, the Libyan novelist Hisham Matar went with his wife Diana and his brother Ziad to the House of Lords, where they sat in the gallery while Lord Lester, the human rights advocate, asked Her Majesty's government whether it would seek information from the government of Libya as to the whereabouts of Matar's father, Jaballa, who had then been missing for two decades. Hearing his father's name spoken in \"my adopted country's highest chamber\" had a \"vertiginous effect\" on Matar, a feeling that recurred every time it was repeated, and for a while he felt that all he wanted to do was to get up and get out. But whatever its other effects, this \"dizzying hollowness\" did not render him blind, and as he listened to the Lords antiseptically carry out their business -- \"Our embassy in Tripoli has raised this with the Libyans and asked them to investigate further,\" responded Baroness Kinnock, then a minister of state in the Foreign Office -- he couldn't help but notice that Peter Mandelson, a man known to have had a fairly close friendship with Colonel Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam, was staring at him. \"His expression was theatrically hard and seemed deliberately without emotion,\" writes Matar. It was a look that seemed to him to sum up the cynicism with which some members of the Blair government were then conducting relations with the Libyan dictatorship. Matar has a reserve that only makes his way with intimacy all the more moving By the time the reader reaches this episode in Matar's new memoir, The Return, he is already heartsick; the behaviour of Tony Blair and his ministers in the matter of Libya -- some days later, David Miliband, the then foreign secretary, suggested to Matar that the \"noise\" he was making over the fate of his father was distinctly unhelpful -- is as nothing to that of Gaddafi's monstrous regime, to whose crimes he has already devoted almost 200 pages. Somehow, though, this encounter and others like it reach another part of you, horror and rage shading suddenly into shame. Cynicism: it seems a mild word for behaviour so unconscionable. In context, however, it has a quiet power. This has to do, I think, with clarity. For all that he has been through personally, Matar is ever clear-eyed. If, as he writes, the calamity that has followed the fall of Gaddafi is more true to the nature of his dictatorship than to the ideals of the 2011 revolution -- \"The masses rule,\" went one of the regime's brutish slogans. \"Representative politics is not democracy\"--Then the role of our present government in that great misfortune can similarly be traced back to Blair's infamous desert kiss in 2004. For isn't the child always the father of the man? But The Return isn't really about politics. It's not even about the last gasp of Gaddafi's rule, for all that the reader must contend in its pages with the sight of Saif al-Islam's puerile swagger: with his arrival at a Knightsbridge hotel (the go-between for this meeting, incidentally, was the financier, Nathaniel Rothschild, another of Peter's friends) surrounded by a group of men in T-shirts who looked \"more like a hip-hop band than a security outfit\"; with his stupid emoticons and his vile cat-and-mouse attitude to Matar. Rather, it is a book about family and loss and love ...\" --Rachel Cooke, The Guardian, accessed May 29, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/03/hisham-matar-the-return-review

This study investigates Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and Hisham Matar's The Return: A Memoir, both pivotal works from 2019, through the lens of postcolonial theory. These novels grapple with themes of systemic injustice, the function of memory, and the enduring effects of oppressive structures on both individuals and communities. The Nickel Boys portrays the brutal realities of a 1960s reform school in Florida, revealing the racial and institutional injustices experienced by African American boys. Conversely, The Return: A Memoir explores political repression in Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, focusing on the protagonist's search for his abducted father amidst widespread human rights abuses. Postcolonial theory, which traditionally addresses the aftermath of colonization, is employed here to examine different manifestations of systemic oppression and resistance. This analysis applies postcolonial perspectives to enhance our comprehension of how racial and political injustices impact personal identities and societal dynamics, offering a sophisticated understanding of these novels\" thematic concerns.

Writings by Libyans in Western countries remained dormant until recently. Autobiography has been a most favorite genre for the Libyan writers, through which prominent figures on the Libyan scene started communicating their experiences and sufferings under Qaddafi's regime. They found in literature the means to resist \"silence and misrepresentation\" (Swindells 7). Ibrahim al-Koni, Ahmed Fagih, and Hisham Matar are some of the Libyan novelists who are familiar with history, landscape and cultural practices of the Libyans. Hisham Matar paints a clear picture of complex and intertwined political events that may have led to the fall of Muammar Qaddafi himself. In almost all of his writings, Matar is profoundly concerned with the Libyan political and cultural affairs. He might have chosen exotic settings and peculiar forms for his novels, but deep inside, and at the core of all he writes, there is that feeling that his target is the Libyan locale and the Libyan citizen, politically and culturally. Underneath the tragedy of the loss of his father, the author devoted a large part of his novels to the atrocities of the Qaddafi regime in a clear token of protest against it yet in the form of cultural rather than violent resistance. Hisham Matar resorts to the cultural and political manifestations of Libya to shape the consciousness of his readers, making them much more aware of the dilemma of Libyan people in the postmodern age. He succeeded to attract the attention of Western society to his father's case, and also he shows the potential of utilizing the English language in expressing the nature and stories of the Libyan community.

This study focuses on the Foucauldian concept of power and resistance; in order to assert the relationship between the so-called 'Arab Spring' as movements of resistance during the late 2010 and early 2011 and the power of tyrant authorities. The study exposes the circumstances and miseries of three Arab countries; Tunisia, Egypt and Libya under the rule of Ben Ali, Mubarak and Qaddafi through the analysis of three novels written by three Arab novelists. These novels are Hassouna Mosbahi's A Tunisian Tale (2008), Mohamed Salmawy's Butterfly Wings (2011) and Hisham Matar's In The Country of Men (2006). According to Foucault's theory, the repressive power of Arab rulers inspired these Arab writers to anticipate public resistance.

يعد تنضيد الآليات التي تشتغل عليها السخرية وفق ما ترتضيه العملية التواصلية مفعلا لوظائف اللغة، التي إن حسن استخدامها داخل الدائرة الخطابية تم التواصل على أتم وجه وظفر بالنقل الناجح والتفاعل المستمر والتلقي السليم لهذا الخطاب. ولعل تصريح بيرلمان وتيتكا Perlman et (o)Tyteca (ch)بإمكانية استعمال السخرية في كل المواقف الحجاجية فتح عيون ورقتنا البحثية على أثر الحجاج في بناء خطاب ساخر في متون الشعر العربي المعاصر، وبدا اختيار ثلاثة نماذجا محالة كافيا وملائما للبحث في الوسائل الاقناعية التي يستنجد بها أي مخاطب لإيصال رسائله المضمرة للمتلقي. ومع ذلك لم نسلم من التساؤل المشكل المستفز عن: إمكانية قراءة أي خطاب ساخر داخل مساق حجاي؟. وعلى الرغم من الغربة بين الوسيلة المنهجية الغربية المتبعة والخطاب الشعري العربي المعاصر. إلا أن المتن أثبت جدارته في استضافة المنهج المقترح، فتم انتقاء نموذجين للشاعر أحمد مطر كونه شاعرا ساخرا بامتياز، وآخر للشاعر هشام الجخ وهو نموذج أريد به التجريب على الإلقاء حيث لا مسافة بين الشعر والمستمع، ويصبح بالمقدور رؤية تعابير وجه الشاعر وهو يلقي خطابه، وتميز نبرته الانفعالية الباتوسية.