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I am convinced that this column will surprise the readers. I don’t even know why I’m writing it. I will start with a tricky question: at what point do people come to the conclusion that social and professional constraints become a barrier against life? Two subsidiary questions might arise: what meaning should be given to the notions of duty and sacrifice applied to all human actions, and what would they gain in return?
One might reply that the definition of life is complex, and randomly asking it would be useless. My response would be that people experience multiple dimensions at once, an obvious fact that puts into perspective all the so-called primary truths about the legitimacy of our existence and our hypothetical privileges compared to other creatures. This explanation is far from convincing. Maybe…
At the beginning of the last century, a French writer, who had fled the peaceful life between Brittany and Normandy, was asked why he had chosen to live on an isolated island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He replied, “I listen to the echo of my breath, and it’s a harmonical noise.” He had left France to temporarily settle in the midst of the waves and get a chance to dialogue with the void.
People went to fetch him and convince him to come back and make peace with his family. He initially accepted. A few hundred meters from the arrival aboard his makeshift boat, he saw a hundred people gathered on the dock to give him the best welcome ever. Without further notice, he rowed back and embraced the blue space. He preferred to listen to himself live away from the clamor of a life that kept these people hostage amid unfulfilled expectations.
Talkative Silence
This story offers me the opportunity to recall scenes watched or stories read that are worth meditating on. They fit perfectly with the theme I would like to address. Some might perceive my attempt as a philosophical reflection. Others may describe it as intellectual rambling. However, the move is aimed at questioning our conscience on values that resonate universally but ultimately end up praising seclusion. A situation that everyone experiences while unconsciously surfing on multiple orbits.
The first scene describes Mikhail Gorbachev drawn in by the breath of desolation and dulled to the core of his soul. He was listening to himself coping with life, and this brings about a sarcastic noise. He was the main character in a documentary film dedicated to his life. In an interview with the German filmmaker Werner Herzog (Meeting Gorbachev, 2018), he talked about what he did to save Russia and prevented the country from losing everything in the process. He was not repaid in return. He drank to the dregs, the disappointment bordering on humiliation.
This foretold death that marked time and sculpted it with random blows. The final scene of the documentary film ended with the reading of the poem “I Go Alone on the Highway” by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841). The message is solemn and sad because this poem was written a few months before the tragic death of the latter in a duel in the prime of his life.
Lermontov’s poem that sparkles with apprehension, meditation, and premonition is “I am going alone on the highway/ The flint glimmers in the fog/ God speaks—and the desert listens/ The star to the star casts a long gaze/ In the heavens—harmony and joy/ And the earth sleeps like a child/ What draws me in and oppresses me so much? Regret nothing and expect nothing (…).”
The second scene shows Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, with a pale face, trembling lips, and empty eyes absorbed at the mercy of a hegemonic specter. He has just been blamed for the failure of the peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis in Camp David (2000).
Arafat had refused to make concessions, particularly on the issues of Al-Quds and the refugees. He would be blamed for much more until his suspicious death. His almost-poetic incantation on “the peace of the brave,” after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, resonated like a bell at the gates of hell. Arafat did not have a moment’s opportunity to listen to himself live.
Gorbachev wrote his memoirs (Memoirs: A Life and Reforms, 1997). They are full of truths and facts that leave readers speechless. Arafat didn’t have such a chance. He would have revealed things that would dismiss the entire narrative on activism, the Nakba, betrayal, and compromise. He would have denounced leaders and comrades. He himself would have been smeared for acts and decisions deemed sound for the struggle of the Palestinian people but which, in fact, would have been fatal to the Palestinian fight for freedom.
These two examples can be duplicated and applied to the common people. People identify with heroes with legendary personalities without looking too closely. The most romantic aspect in these examples is the verb, the right (or wrong) word, and the metaphors.
In short, the perception that authors and leaders had of their lives. This very fact explains why renowned personalities begin their memoirs by telling interesting chapters about their childhood and youth. One can read about their preferences and ideological choices and their evolution in the arcana of politics and life. They attempted to justify decisions that did not score unanimous support during their time in power.
Readers mainly discover that these preferences took a different trajectory from what these personalities wished for their lives. Life. Life is full of surprises. However, readers don’t understand a clue about it. Out of ignorance. By overestimating their cognitive abilities. Out of sheer arrogance.
Speaking out of a broken sentence in an unfinished chapter
A few weeks ago, while I was rummaging through my archives looking for a CNOPS care slip (National Fund for Social Welfare Organizations) before a routine check-up. I was experiencing inexplicable pain. However, I was less worried than usual. In doing so, I came across a handwritten letter that my brother A. H. had sent me over thirty years ago.
A letter so moving that it had shaken me to the very depths of my soul. It’s true that A. H. was known for behaving strangely according to the family’s standard code. He was a musician and had a captivating pen. He overlooked things that we deemed nonsensical and even absurd. He used to speak about death in a language difficult to decipher back then.
This passion for matters of death had whispered to him the idea of joining Palestinian factions to free himself from the grip of death on his mind. A perception of duty wrapped in a scarf of sacrifice to escape the hell of the daily life he was experiencing.
Unable to realize his first dream, he found a certain comfort in volunteering at the Ain El-Borja prison in Casablanca. He enjoyed helping young prisoners prepare for their high school diplomas. Duty and sacrifice went hand in hand; however, they could not satisfy his desire to surpass himself and become a superman.
So, while rediscovering this letter as I was looking for the CNOPS care bulletin, an invisible hand propelled me forward and forced me to seize it. This letter resonated like a wake-up call, like a sort of bloodbath. I read it several times. A surgical incision pierced my heart from top to bottom.
My brother was in distress, and I hadn’t seen it coming. He wasn’t the only one; other family members wore that vacant, plaintive look, which was unbearable at the first glance. Death was lurking nearby. I remembered the story of a Moroccan student who had almost been convicted and imprisoned around the same time. He had not come to the aid of his French roommate in the university dormitory.
The Moroccan’s friend had told him that he was going to commit suicide. He let him do it. Fortunately, friends arrived just as he was about to take action by cutting a vein. The Moroccan was held accountable for his indifference and cruelty. He replied that the choice between life and death was an individual responsibility and that this choice was sacred to his French friend. Ironically, the French student was outraged at the rescuers for saving his life.
Yes, this text sounds cynical… Let’s try to go beyond the syntax and the grammar to appreciate the metaphors used in my brother’s letter. I read the introduction, and already a solemn warning blinks to announce a scheduled deluge.
“I would always get my writing back on track…” But I would derail for you… And I would play my words distinctly at a slow tempo, where you would decipher my underlying weakness in the strong beats of my fickle score.”
“It is true that this score was, for a long time, riddled with silence, and you couldn’t stand my silences!” At this hour as I write to you, my sigh-words cling to me, panting with desire and harmony.
Yes, writing under pressure has never been a sweet water that dissolves in a cascade of fortune. The silences my brother speaks of denounce a state of unbearable solitude. So, he renounces his restraint and his tact, as Gorbachev did when reciting Lermontov’s poem.
“Yes,” my brother continues, I will not sing for the merchants of notes!” “I can’t stop indulging in gestures that shock more than one but open the gates of heaven for the new iconoclast that I am!”
“And since God must reckon with a new enemy, I will not account to him for my negative actions, for deep down within himself, if he dares to delve, he will know the positive gain I derive from them with perverse delight.”
“Now, we respect each other, and I will burn myself with nonsense to honor my own pyre.” (…) “I would tinker on these stairs that lead nowhere, on these steps that I keep climbing to the altar of all the perdition that God has forged to trap our souls. Amen!”
Workaholism—Sword of Damocles
A moment where the senses collide. The duty to inform, to exonerate oneself, and the sacrifice of unmasking at the risk of facing misunderstanding, even humiliation. A carefully concealed confession that the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) described in a sublime manner in her poem titled ”Night”:
”Like a white stone at the bottom of a well/ Sleeps within me a memory / I can’t, I don’t want to fight. Itis is joy; it is suffering (…) / I know that the gods have transformed/ Men into objects, without killing the conscience / So that this miracle of pain may live forever/ You are transformed into a memory.”
My brother gets carried away: “I will wake up my dead to know what echo my new scales have on the shapeless night they built as a clumsy architect by constantly thinking about their future… my metronome takes on wild forms, and it’s true that my watch is ahead of my age…” I would like to look at my end before others…’’
Most fictional writings describe a coming-of-age quest, a kind of confirmation or rejection of the choices made. On closer examination, renowned personalities and ordinary mortals alike feel, to varying degrees, the same anxiety and the same phobia: the fear of missing out on life. They write and make statements to assert their right to speak, to live in peace, and simply to value the common destiny.
Indeed, as the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008) did in his piece “Think of Others” (فكر بغيرك). This poem is part of his collection كزهر اللوز أو أبعد (2005): “When you prepare your breakfast, think of others (Don’t forget the grain for the doves) / When you wage your wars, think of others (Don’t forget those who demand peace) / When you pay the water bill, think of others (who suckle the clouds) / When you return home, think of others (Don’t forget the people of the tents) / While you free yourself in metaphors, think of others (those who have lost their right to speak).” While you think of others, think of yourself (Say: if only I were a candle in the dark).”
Black translates the need to illuminate, to revive visibility, and to sharpen vision. The desired light can do nothing against stubbornness… which means neither duty nor sacrifice. However, the reverberations give a flickering hope that resists annihilation.
During a speech delivered before the parliament of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011) went off script and fingerprinted the diplomats present, calling them spies and double-agents. A cold shower drowned the audience! Khadhafi was capable of throwing them in prison for allegedly attempting to harm him. And for good reason, he had written The Green Book (1975), which no one really read or took seriously.
In the Green Book Khadhafi presented his vision of democracy and politics in a populist and demagogic style. He was mainly afraid of being abandoned by his mentors, the Americans, who started to perceive him as a burden and an obstacle to their North African and Middle Eastern policy. Khadhafi no longer wanted to be used by the Americans, who had helped him come to power in 1969. The Americans intended to humiliate the Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-1970) and the Syrian Noureddine al-Atassi (1966-1970), already under the domination of Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000), who was preparing to seize power in 1971.
He was worried that the head of Russian diplomacy was constantly traveling to the four corners of the world. Pouting for a short instant, Lavrov replied that beside smoking several cigarettes a minute, he would take a nap on the plane. He wouldn’t have a choice. Duty and sacrifice are what they were. Lavrov enjoyed listening to himself talk, living and surfing through the smoke of cigarettes and the mists of this curse called “diplomacy.”
A rebellious flat may spoil a mesmerizing sonata
Duty and sacrifice encroach on the right to a serene and peaceful life. A former classmate of Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, asked him how he would manage to sleep with the immense burden on his shoulders.
Duty and sacrifice can be pretexts to promote the comeback of retired politicians on the stage with the hope of being noticed. Politically ejected, they cannot admit it on the social chessboard, which is very colorblind to their taste. According to them, duty and sacrifice would be worthless without a resurgence of fame, without a grain of salt they could inject regardless of its cost. Most of them have fizzled out; the miracle in politics is a hell of a joke.
Then, there is the Feast of the Great Sacrifice recently celebrated. Ironically, instead of reveling in the joy of family reunions, most people notice that the hierarchy has been disrupted. Parents and grandparents feel the emptiness around them. Their children and grandchildren visit them, but much later—the day after the party among the luckiest of them ended. They no longer listen to themselves living. Parents and grandparents become aware that all the sacrifices made out of duty are worth nothing in the eyes of their offspring.
Disheartened, A. H. writes, “I would blaspheme Proust, Flaubert…” I would tell them, with the tact of their words, that writing should live with a sick stomach, with the flatness of existence, and with that wise madness that makes the artist lock himself away in contemplation so that he can stage his own death like an enlightened Moses, even though he knows that the day after his complete work is a space of decrepitude and annihilation.’’
A. H. closes the debate by projecting himself into the salvific unknown, the unknown of denial and resurrection: “What a pleasure it is to find oneself under the shower of errors, transformed for the occasion into showers of light on a certain stage, and what a spectacle to see the spectators applaud their own errors…”
All of a sudden, A. H. regains his poetic fervor and recites: Ah, if you only knew / What a celebration! / Yet…/ I received without packaging/ A whole range of words/ To tan my skin/ To the arpeggios of woes… that crash down wildly/ On my Sundays without rest/ (…) Ah, if you only knew/ What a party/ Yet…/ I sipped it to the dregs/ Your intoxicating brew/ Your word with embellishments/ Woven at random with sounds/ Your gaze carried away by the winds/ Toward nameless landscapes/ The naked gaze that blinks in response to the welcome of newcomers/ To the new arrivals/ (…) And this evil…/ This headache/ This male without a female/ This misunderstanding behind a door/ This misunderstanding/ This pain undercover/ As a dish where/ Without resistance/ I served my head/ To pay for my head! Ah what a feast! / If only you knew!
Duty, sacrifice, hallucination…
My brother listened to himself living, and it was a pleasant sound, despite the weight of sorrow and the murderous revolt of not being heard in his eternal misunderstanding… badly stretched… Like Gorbachev, Arafat, Akhmatova, Darwich, Proust, and Flaubert, duty and sacrifice, according to him, come before everything else, even when it hurts.
The tragedy in messages of this kind lies in the fact that people do not perceive them timely, even as they hover over our heads, fill our scandalous solitude, and rage in anger at our passivity and indifference. If we became aware of it later, it would still be a learning experience as long as they would recognize their nonsense, their ramblings, and their inconsistencies. Transparent pride and blindness can only lead them to a wall…
However, the sheep and ewes recently sacrificed by subscribers to duty and sacrifice, at the cost of a deadly debt, have not had the chance to listen to themselves live. This bare truth applies to other packs, trapped by the rays of an artificial glow that draws from a blinding and torturous light.
The right to speak is a luxury that only pen worshippers and iconoclasts seize to challenge the fundamental truths based on vague values such as duty and sacrifice.
However, despite the illusion, speaking, confessing, and moving lighten the burden on people’s shoulders. The heart feels as if it is soaring, driven by an unexpected bliss… It beats so intensely that it embraces ecstasy with the hope to be reborn into life.
Nevertheless, the sheep and ewes recently sacrificed by subscribers to duty and sacrifice, at the cost of a deadly debt, have not had the chance to listen to themselves live. This bare truth applies to other packs, trapped by the rays of an artificial glow that draws from a blinding and torturous light.
The right to speak is a luxury that only pen worshippers and iconoclasts seize to challenge the fundamental truths based on vague values such as duty and sacrifice.
However, despite the illusion, speaking, confessing, and moving lighten the burden on people’s shoulders. The heart feels as if it is soaring, driven by an unexpected bliss… It beats so intensely that it embraces ecstasy with the hope to be reborn into life.
Yes, if only I knew… This divine serenade… This trap meant to be an evasion to find out about it more clearly. It was just a letter found in my archives… How many letters are out there in the book of our understanding or misunderstanding? Unfortunately, we close our eyes and inject ourselves with the elixir of seclusion.
