One day, Walid Masoud disappears. The titular character of Palestinian author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's novel In Search of Walid Masoud (al-Bahth ʿan Walid Masʿud, 1978) leaves Baghdad in his car and vanishes, never to be seen again. Walid, like Jabra, is a Palestinian intellectual and writer living in exile in Baghdad, and his car is found en route to the Iraqi–Syrian border. Through the narrator, a friend of Walid's who seeks to solve the mystery of his disappearance, the novel unearths a trail of conversations, memories, writings and tape recordings that Walid has left behind. Yet all of these traces provide no definite resolution of the central mystery: where did Walid Masoud go? Many theories, none of them definitive, are presented. In one, he has turned up dead in Beirut. In another, he is living in a cave somewhere, or he became a monk in an Italian monastery. Another friend, Wisal, becomes convinced that he returned to occupied Palestine to join the fidāᐣīyyūn (Palestinian resistance fighters) and fight the Israelis, and the novel concludes with her departure to join him. While we are never sure, it is this theory that sticks out as most likely.

If we take the prevalent theory as true, then Walid's disappearance is a narrative of return to Palestine. He has gone back to fight for his homeland, leaving the trappings of exile behind. To be sure, many writers have sought to tell their own version of the narrative of Palestinian return from exile, as we saw with Ghassan Kanafani in Chapter 2. It is perhaps the most prominent Palestinian literary trope of recent decades. Yet in this novel the return journey does not function as a starting point, as with Kanafani's Returning to Haifa, but as the unsolved mystery of the novel, a gaping absence in the centre of Jabra's work that never reaches resolution and is only told in uncertain bits and fragments.