The wisdom of madness: The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi

Blue is a colour with multiple manifestations and meanings in various contexts and traditions—the light of the sinful self for the Sufis, the colour of creative energy in Tibetan Buddhism, the destructive enemy of the God of Wisdom for Zoroastrian Persians. Blue is also said to be an antidote to sexual excitation and it is said to calm the nerves. That may explain some of the hold that the colour has on Hussein, the narrator of The Blue Light and a man beset by questions about his own sanity, but the roots of his attraction run much deeper:

For me, blue is the color of estrangement, the unknown, and of the childhood sky. And there is, also, blueness to all my ill wishes. When I learned to play the piano, I composed a short magical piece, played it for a while, day after day, without knowing the secret of my love for it, until one day I read a book by a Black musician who claimed that each note has a specific color to it. And each composition, too. One of Mozart’s sonatas arouses in the listener green or blue or . . . anyway, I looked around for the color of that magical note of mine and was astonished to find that it was blue.

This posthumously published novel by Palestinian poet, writer and essayist, Hussein Barghouthi (1954 – 2002) walks along that troubled path between fiction and autobiography, arriving at what might best be described as a memoir with hallucinations. It is a delirious account of a man desperate to make sense of himself and his unusual way of thinking. Or, as Mahmoud Darwish says, on the blurb on the back cover: “[a] peculiar mix of confession and contemplation, hallucination and mythology, reality and the unrevealed. A mix of personal stories and mystic leaps, of madness that claims wisdom, and wisdom that only madness can transubstantiate.”

The Blue Light is inspired by Barghouthi’s time in Seattle, Washington where he pursued graduate studies in Comparative Literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As someone who had long felt different from others, he finds himself, in this foreign land, frequenting three establishments—Grand Illusion Cinema, Last Exit Café and Blue Moon Tavern—attracted by their names and by the company of the mad, eccentric and disenfranchised characters he finds there:

Strange how a place seems like a ruse, sometimes. I found myself wandering these three joints looking for myself, not among books, I was sick of books, but among the shady and the crazy, the homosexuals and the punks, where maps are clearer, more precise, and more exciting, or where at least I, as one of them, didn’t have to talk to anyone. For a whole nine months I talked to no one. I knew no one.

Terrified of madness and hiding his fears beneath a mask of sanity, Hussein does begin to engage with some of the offbeat, often homeless, regulars and even falls, briefly and cynically, into the bizarre world of the Church of Dianetics, but his search for his real identity changes course dramatically when he meets Bari, a Turkish-American Sufi from Konya. Introduced through a mutual friend, he is dynamic and given to loud laughter, strange stories and odd mannerisms. From their first encounter, Bari’s intensity and sea deep voice, “free as a roar,” reminds Hussein of an early experience of  his near drowning that birthed a recurring dream of being chased by a giant wave from a beach in Beruit to his childhood mountains in Ramallah. Among other memories, the Sufi’s laughter woke up the sea.

But Bari is elusive. He responds indifferently to Hussein’s questions and speaks little about his past. The two men often play chess at Last Exit Café, an environment where most of the patrons are mentally ill and he is thought to be just another “space case.” Yet Hussein becomes convinced that his madness “was something more than the usual madness.” He is drawn into Bari’s world even if, or perhaps because, it seems inaccessible. The secret he thinks is one of language, reasoning that: “Words meant something entirely different for him than they did for me.” So, he dedicates himself to deciphering Bari’s meanings and falls into a strange project to create a dictionary. For example, one day Hussein is confronted by the Sufi who says: “Man, your blue bird came to me last night. Stop him.” Caught off guard, Hussein fashions a response that appears to satisfy him, but the question remains—what does blue mean to Bari? What about his odd chants and expressions?

After much reading and exploration, an endeavour tinged with as much madness as those of anyone else around him, Hussein discovers what he believes is a key, a phrase he’d heard from the Sufi before. Waiting until the right moment presents itself at the end of a chess game he exclaims: “Return the blue light naked to its house.” The arrow strikes its target. Bari demands to know what he wants. Hussein holds his own, and in response confesses that he is afraid of losing his mind. The door is opened, Bari invites him in.

Thus begins a closer relationship. One damaged soul to another, Hussein seeks answers from the enigmatic, often volatile, Turkish American through what unfolds very much like a game of riddles that forces Hussein into a closer examination of his own past and a dissection of the history of his own fear of madness. Memory, mythology and cultural heritage merge as he engages with and responds to Bari’s mystic pronouncements. His Palestinian identity and experiences living under occupation have only heightened the estrangement and alienation he cannot escape, no matter where he has lived. In Seattle, this Sufi who proudly claims to belong nowhere, may finally trigger Hussein to loosen the tangled threads of thoughts threatening the clarity of his mind. Consider an early discussion about physical bodies and the mental bodies—spirits—that can visit one over great distance, during life or after death. This reminds Hussein of the culture of the dead in Palestine where death is so readily at hand. The ghosts or mental bodies of the dead are frequent household guests:

These spirits visit me long after their bones had turned to eyeliner dust in a land where the dead dominate the living, the past governs the future. That’s the authority of memory in a region whose depth is measured not by centuries but by millennia. Memory is a dangerous thing, a laboratory of ghosts. Didn’t Ishtar, a few thousand years ago, in the epic of Gilgamesh, didn’t she threaten to “open the gates to the underworld” and let the dead share their meals with the living? We can’t live with this kind of deep memory and can’t live without memory either, so what’s the solution?

The community of outcasts and assorted spiritual personalities, Bari included, that Barghouthi brings to life in The Blue Light, a rich, sometimes wild, creation of fiction and memoir, is a brilliant backdrop against which he, through his narrator, is able to navigate a personal crisis of identity within the cultural and historical crisises of his people. In a foreign country, with a foreign language, and a sage with a vocabulary of mysterious provocations and commands, he inches toward self-understanding. Along the way, there’s a plenitude of wisdom and insight for anyone travelling alongside him.

The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi is translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah and published by Seagull Books.

Author: roughghosts

Literary blog of Joseph Schreiber. Writer. Reader. Editor. Photographer. View all posts by roughghosts