Hussian Bargouthi was a Palestinian author, essayist and philosopher born in 1954 in the village of Bokar, West of Ramallah. He died against the backdrop of the second Palestinian Intifada of 2002, but not courtesy of a bullet nor a missile. Bargouthi lost his life in Ramallah hospital on May first 2002, in odd familiarity with his death date after having his treatment for cancer halted across the Bridge at Jordan, denied authorisation, and subsequently denied existence by zionist border control. He spent most of his life in exile, between Lebanon, Europe and America until finally returning to Ramallah in the late 1990s, where Bargouthi spent some three years teaching at Al-Qudus university before his passing. Bargouthi’s works were diverse, usually dealing with different themes of displacement and identity. He manifested his philosophy in a range of works from poetry, theatre scripts, folklore lyrics to novels, essays and autobiographies.

The Blue Light is an autobiographical novel on the inner workings of Bargouthi’s subconsciousness. Bargouhti somehow manages to give readers an abstract understanding of the human self and life through the eccentric figures that come to aid Barghouti in his journey towards enlightenment. The Blue Light, far being a simple retelling of the author’s life as a postgraduate student in Seattle, almost unfolds in lessons. It opens with the author voicing his well-concealed fear of descending into madness. This sentiment devours the intellectual, disciplined Hussian in his obscure pursuit for reason in Seattle. His accumulated woes culminate and fail to find a saviour in the echo chambers of academia and its often detached, theoretical understandings of existence. Internally, Bargouhti suffers from a disfigurement of exile that is less relevant to the location and more relative to a feeling of meaningless or nothingness within his constructed identity in Settle, and perhaps from the book’s constant alterations between present and past memories, the author’s entire life commencing from the Palestinian exodus. 

In The Blue Light Barghouti reconfigures what Freud calls the ego by alluding to a process that Sufist philosophy describes as fanāʾ or the annihilation of the ego, mainly through his acquaintance with the Sufit Berry. The journey, or lesson one of the book, starts as a reflection on solitude. Bargouthi attempts to find meaning to his mislocated sense of nothingness walking in the forest, where neither conciliations nor distractions can intervene. He finds in his solitary disorientation a remedy as he frequents Seattle’s The Grand Illusion Cinema, The Blue Moon bar and The Last Exit café,  Bargouthi describes these hangouts as abandoned, places that have become home to a certain kind of people, the kind with complex approaches to life that “normal” individuals would immediately attribute to the insane. He is drawn to these places firstly on account of the establishments’ names and the memories or ironies each place’s name personally provokes. This begins to propel him into a rabbit hole of recollection and confrontation. Bargouthi alternates between memories of his childhood, with its legacy of fears, habits, nightmares, and present day illusions. His old attraction to the color blue was the cornerstone of that process, a color that seems to always trace its way back to Bargouthi.  expresses: “To me, blue is the color of alienation, of the unknown, of my childhood sky.”. He begins to look for the genealogy of the color blue, from definitions denoted by Buddhists to Suffits to the mythical tale of Zarqaa’ Al Yamama. His awakening, however, comes in the form of his encounter with Berry, a Sufist who had renounced any and all labels that confine him, even those of material. Although Berry could be dismissed as a simple, no-good homeless man, Hussien comes to discover himself through him; not as an inferior figure whose life is to be looked upon with pity and caution, but through Berry, Hussein comes to see a mentor who can finally be rid Hussien of his delusions with reality.  Here emerge the projections of self and reality that Barghouti is at odds to reconcile with at first, as he attempts to differentiate between the real Hussein and what Hussien claims to be true about himself, to understand both the esoteric and exoteric differentiations of viewing reality, which can either exclude people from self-realisation or promote it. Berry was differentiating between two knowledge, a knowledge that carries, and knowledge that is carried upon Hussein, mounting into a lumpful burden of doctrines and ideals.  Berry tells him: “This is the mind: Your golden cup. It is natural for the mind to be empty, and it is of emptiness’ nature to accept the outpour of any opinion, theory, doctrine, knowledge, feeling, or memories.  Distinguish the mind from its vessel, like you differentiate between a cup and the liquid it pertains”. 

“هذا هو الذهن: فنجانك الذهبي. من طبيعة الذهن أن يكون فارغاً، ومن طبيعية الفراغ ان يكون قابلًا لان تصب في اي رأي او نظرية او مذهب او معرفة او شعور او ذكريات. ميز الذهن و محتواه، كما تُميز بين الفنجان و الشاي الذي في الفنجان”

In the book, Bargouthi realizes through Berry, the burden of accumulating knowledge and of being an individual who is carried by knowledge. Barghouti starts to deconstruct the ways in which the progression of life comes to obscure the essence of existence in itself, articulating through his personal experience how giving unhinged authority to you constrains emancipation and limits progress to rehearsed narratives that seem to flow in a loop. He ends the book peeling off and reclaiming the masks of others, the masks we humans peg to be our own. And declares his ascendance to the blue light.

سأصعد إلى الضوء الأزرق عارياً, وحدي,”

ومن بعيد, حتماً, بقلبي,

سأعرف طيوراً أخرى تسري نحو مسراي ذاته,

طيوراً أحييها من بعيد,

سأقتل في نفسي كل حزن يكسر روحي,

“ويشكو من وحدة الرحلة, وأرقص.

“I will ascend to the blue light naked, alone

And from afar, certainly, within my heart

I will discern other birds fleeting towards my very same path 

Birds I greet from a distance

I will kill within my very being, every sadness that breaks my soul

Every sadness moaning the lonesome journey, and dance. “

The book attempts to clarify humanity’s biggest predicament: humanity itself. Humans and their assumed intellectual burdens which pillar their reassurances with the self and material, which often only pacify our anxieties that lay within generationally inherited givens. His self-realisation is also translated into us, the readers, making its universality indubitable. From the very first read of The Blue Light, and with each re-reading of it, a new aspect of self and sense assumes hold of its reader’s perspective, reorienting our perspectives from what is indeed real, what we have made to be real, and what one needs to do in that regards.