My parents left Libya in 1979, escaping political repression, and settled in Cairo. I was nine. Eleven years later, when I was at university in London, my father, one of the most outspoken Libyan dissidents abroad, was kidnapped from our family’s Cairo home. Agents from Egyptian State Security Investigations visited one afternoon. They asked if Father would be so kind as to accompany them on a little errand. He never returned. Later, we learned that he was put on a private jet and sent to Libya. He is counted among Libya’s “disappeared.”

…Walking into the family home, finding my family and my childhood friends waiting for me, and seeing old familiar objects—my father’s books, family photographs—I felt the tight fist in my heart release. Egyptian friends, who, since Father’s disappearance, had felt awkward and silently guilty around me, suddenly became closer than ever. It became clear to me that one of the things these dictators had tried to do was to humiliate us and distance us from one another. Everyone I met in Egypt seemed to be as obsessed as my family was with events in Libya. There was a palpable conviction that the two revolutions were reliant on one another for their success.

Libyan novelist Hishan Matar writing in the New Yorker. Worth reading in full.