Dr.. Fahmy Jadaan*
“You can rebel against death, you can defeat it if you wish.. The being dies when he wants it.. He is the maker of his destinies, he is the maker of life.. He is the beginning, the end and the body.”.. I came back because I decided not to die! But also: “The death that was stopped by the divine hand was a warning yellow card, after which there is nothing but the red card that takes him out of the match!”
Then it represented the logic of the “message” – and the “deliverance” emerged – as it is an encouragement to drink from life until intoxication, and to enjoy freedom and pleasure until the last breath, and what is available from pleasure, bliss and natural joy without borders, and as it is an invitation to a free and happy life.
This is the philosophy that hides in the depths of the wonderful fictional text edited by the fingers and spirit of Musa Barhouma in the novel (I laughed again), which was recently published by the Arab Institute for Studies and Publishing in Beirut.
The text “recounted” what was presented to him from an event of a “liminal” nature that required him to fall into the ordeal of fate, and stand on the brink of existence, or non-existence, in front of this thing that all philosophers applied to say that it is: “indeterminable”, that is, death.
An impressive artistic narrative
This event is personified in the novel behind a dazzling artistic narration, in which the writer continues, using his voice, and with a group of other voices, the facts of the “ordeal” and the aches, pains, confinement, suffocation and explosion at the edge of existence-nothingness, in a precise and transparent language that realizes the depths that only eyes can reach. A piercing heart armed with sentimental feelings that only a spirit that is immanent and transcendent at the same time can express and reveal, and a penetrating intelligent mind capable of accurately expressing the most accurate feelings, convulsions, obsessions, ideas and visions.
This narration is not just an accurate and delicate narration of the symptoms of pain, misery, and physical and psychological pain that overwhelm the afflicted in his affliction, but it is, in its deep extent, with a radical meaning that dissolves in our existence in the world, and defines a position in front of this ultimate event; Death occurred.
In the presence of this event, or on its periphery, two positions are diagnosed and met – two radical visions: the first is a natural, immanent, closed position, the second is an ontological or existential position that is “separated”, open. A situation that refers everything to the immanent nature and its laws, and a situation that sends everything to a transcendent existence, Ali, my God. The first: It is the one to which materialist philosophies relate, since the Greek Epicurus and Lucretius the Roman, and ending with modern natural and “human” philosophies that strike at positivism and materialism.
The second: It is the one that relates to idealistic and spiritual philosophies since Plato and the religions of revelation to our days.
In the vision that this narration is based on, it appears very clearly that the narrator represents the first vision. Lucretius’s view in particular, is bolstered by Sartre’s concept of being.
our presence in the world
This means that our existence in the world is a final, fleeting existence, in which we only have to associate it with pleasure and freedom. What is the consequence of this position and its opposite? Courage, steadfastness, resistance, and contempt for the event of death, in the first case, and awe, fear, apprehension, terror, and arming with faith, in the second case. The first does not care about death, and the second is about hope.
In the narration of Musa Barhouma, the “afflicted” chooses resistance and contempt, and points to death as “the middle finger of the hand.”
The injured escaped from the incident of death, as he was cured by the intervention of science in his medical biological cuticle. The patient came back to life as if nothing had happened. This was accompanied by a flood of human reflections and revelations, which seemed to be a hymn that glorified life, spirit and hope. And this is what was revealed, in particular, in the last pieces of the novel, where the writer issues a personalized human wisdom full of joy, fun, joy and happiness, which is a paean to life, joy and happiness.
Death occurred
Certainly, what you refer to (I laughed again) represents a choice made by the author-narrator, Musa Barhouma, among the options presented humanely in the face of the “death event.” It is an option that says – if I do not claim – that we can rebel against death and defeat it ourselves! Because, as the existential philosophy goes to, we are the makers of our destinies and life, and we can decide not to die, so he dares to say: “I came back because I decided not to die”! Certainly, this saying seems to me “poetic” and “sentimental,” much more than it is a rational, scientific, demonstrative saying. Nevertheless, I tend to accuse him of contradiction, for saying: “The divine hand stopped death with a warning yellow card, because I think that it is one of Moses’ funny “exaggerations”! I also know very well that our ability to make our destiny has limits and limits, and in many cases it is nihilistic!
However, what is included in the chapter on “the ultimate event” is that delving into the “event of death” has faces and faces, and one of these essential faces is that life, by its nature, is associated with death, and that a crowd of philosophers – among them the Canadian Arab philosopher, and Western philosophers ; Heidegger, Janklevich, and Jacques Derrida talked about the “compound” of life and death, and Derrida himself refused to use the expression: life and death, and insisted on raising the “waw” between the two terms, and attaching to the term: “life and death.”
However, the novel (She Laughed Again) does not claim to be a technical “philosophical saying” about the event of death, and it remains attached to an artistic “creative” narrative that has its nature, dimensions, and purposes. This has been achieved for me, in an attractive, interesting, sentimental, and authentic way.
An Arab thinker
