Since the year 2000 i have spent most of my summers in benghazi, libya, the city of my birth and childhood. I have been able to return for the past six years, after an absence of twenty-one. At first I anticipated disorientation. The two decades that I'd lived in the United States saw extreme forms of oppression in Libya, as well as hostility between Libya and the West, which by 2003 was coming to an end. Yet little surprised me about my city when I returned. I had expected the buildings to appear smaller than I'd remembered, the streets to seem shorter and narrower, and, given how the Qaddafi regime had mismanaged the country, everything to be shabbier.