Summary

Matar dedicates this brief chapter to a recollection of the few days spent in Nairobi with his mother and brother to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of his father’s disappearance. His mother owned a small flat in the city that she lived in part of the year, which Matar recalls “had the playful, noncommittal air of a holiday home” (190). His mother could not stop asking her sons meaningless questions, if only to keep conversation going; “she misses us. Each one of us misses us,” Matar laments (191). The family sat by the pool talking and laughing, when a large eagle broke the branch it was perched on, sending it down directly on Matar’s cellphone. He “wondered if the eagle above was [their] father,” trying to force Matar to relax by breaking his phone (194). The eve of the anniversary, Matar received...