{"id":38252,"date":"2025-09-05T12:45:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T10:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=38252"},"modified":"2025-09-05T17:43:55","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T15:43:55","slug":"why-out-of-our-minds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/why-out-of-our-minds\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Out of Our Minds<\/em>?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Our senior editor in Beirut relates intimately to the theme of TMR 53, having experienced civil war.<\/h5>\n

\"\"<\/h4>\n

Lina Mounzer<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I was a child, growing up in a Beirut rent asunder by civil war, there was a phrase you heard often about a certain type of person. Sometimes it was a person in the street, wandering about in a daze. Sometimes it was someone shouting from a balcony, reciting in a language slightly off-kilter, both in syntax and rhythm. Sometimes it was a neighbor or distant relative who had suffered a tragedy so monumental, whose grief was so insurmountable, they were spoken to in the patronizing tones reserved for children, and referred to only in whispers.<\/p>\n

Majaneen harb<\/em>, they called them. The war-mad, or rather, the ones rendered mad by war. The word majaneen \u2014 plural of majnoun \u2014 is derogatory the same way the word crazy is derogatory: because of the haughtiness with which it is administered and the dismissiveness it is meant to convey. I am rational and in control<\/em>, it says. You are helpless before your own mind.<\/em> It doesn\u2019t strike me as farfetched to say that behind that haughtiness, just as behind every haughtiness, there is a kind of fear. The fear of the border guard: vigilantly patrolling the boundaries they\u2019ve drawn up, in this case between the rational and the irrational. Still, looking back, I am struck by the fact that it was such a socially-acknowledged fact: war made people mad. War, its attendant instability and grief, was a condition that made people lose their minds.<\/p>\n

Doubtless many of the people referred to as majaneen harb had pre-existing conditions, mental illnesses that had manifested or become harder to manage under the deprivations of war. But also, many had suffered the kinds of losses that create a parallel universe for the sufferer, one in which the world around them continues to appear as it once was while everything that grounded it in meaning has disappeared. And all of us, in that war, were living various kinds of erasure of meaning, what Joelle Abi Rached, in this issue\u2019s formidable centerpiece essay, \u201cTrauma After Gaza<\/a>,\u201d clarifies as \u201cthe erasure of the conditions (including symbolic ones) necessary for mental health, foreclosing the possibility of psychic well-being entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n

The theme for this month\u2019s issue, Out of Our Minds<\/em>, came out of that sense of psychic unease that so many of us have been feeling and expressing as we try to go about our lives in this moment of profound global crisis. There is an ominous dissonance between what is \u2014 burgeoning climate catastrophe, the rising specter of fascism in the West, the collapse of international humanitarian law, devastation and famine in Sudan, and nearly two years of genocide being livestreamed on our phones from Gaza, the world\u2019s leaders continuing to pretend at helplessness while simultaneously shipping weapons off to the murderers \u2014 and how we are meant to conduct ourselves \u2014 as though all were well: the past laid to rest, the present accounted for and the future assured.<\/p>\n

All of our writers this issue are, in one way or another, cataloging dissonance. In so doing, they question, cross, trample, or outright deny that artificial border between the so-called rational and the irrational. Some do this directly, while others take up the question indirectly, through short stories, essays, and a memoir. We have a wide range of pieces from across this region we call the center of the world: from Libya to Pakistan, with Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and Iran in between. We also have two essays from Sudan, a crisis that garners an amount of attention not nearly commensurate with the absolutely catastrophic level of death and destruction.<\/p>\n

In her essay, \u201cI Don\u2019t Have Time for This Right Now<\/a>,\u201d Re\u2019al Bakhit writes about the disquieting guilt of living safely in Istanbul while remaining deeply connected to her loved ones in Sudan. \u201cWhile others faced a real threat of being killed by axes and guns,\u201d she writes, \u201cI was grappling to find comfort from an invisible monster.\u201d She ultimately finds that comfort in her surrounding community, who together continue to celebrate the \u201chilo\u201d of weddings over Zoom, even as they mourn the \u201cmurr\u201d of loved ones killed in the war. Community is also profoundly important in Robert Bociaga\u2019s essay, \u201cWhy Wouldn\u2019t We Go Mad<\/a>,\u201d also about Sudan. He recounts the story of Maab, a woman living in an unknown location abroad, who, armed with only \u201ca cracked smartphone and a Facebook page linked to the Bahri Emergency Room,\u201d takes it entirely upon herself to extend \u201cpsychological first aid to survivors still stuck inside Sudan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our literary editor Malu Halasa deals with the same issue \u2014 the role of those administering psychological first aid from abroad to people stuck in situations of crisis at home. Regarding the motivation behind her piece, \u201cRemaining in Light, Iranians Search for Solace and Well-Being<\/a>,\u201d she writes: \u201cI have been thinking about Women Life Freedom protestors in Iran receiving therapy and psychological support from Iranian therapists and doctors thousands of miles away in exile for the last year and a half.\u201d She carried out a series of interviews with Persian psychotherapists as well as brothers Dr. Kamiar and Arash Alaei. \u201cI had been familiar with their story since their arrest in Iran in 2008,\u201d she told me. \u201cTheir determination and practical hands-on approach to humanitarian healthcare from HIV drug users in Iran and Yazidi women raped by ISIS in Iraq to Syrian medical students during the war and finally WLF protestors entwined in treatment for both mind and body. Researching, interviewing for, and finally writing the story was important for someone like me who\u2019s produced books on Iran filled with Persian culture and creativity. Those anthologies have been platforms for voices from the country but what about the voices and aspirations of those who have struggled and fallen silent because of the violence against them?\u201d<\/p>\n

But one doesn\u2019t have to be a psychologist to be concerned by or involve oneself in another person\u2019s emotional distress. In fact, in Ay\u00e7a \u00c7ubuk\u00e7u\u2019s fable-like piece, “The Intersection<\/a>,” which dissolves into poetry at the end, it is the psychologist character warning against involvement, while the protagonist offers a different viewpoint, questioning what it means to care about one another and at the same time preserve our own centers of stability.<\/p>\n

Our three short stories in this issue all use point of view to great effect in order to prod at that center of stability in both self and other. In Safa Elnaili\u2019s short story \u201cThe Midday Ghoul<\/a>,\u201d inspired by a Libyan folktale, a mother\u2019s behavior, \u201clike spring in Benghazi, unstable,\u201d is rendered in sinister light through the eyes of her neglected daughter. Kulsum, the main character in Farah Ahamed\u2019s \u201cA Safe Place<\/a>,\u201d is on the other side of that gaze. Languishing in jail, she is called crazy by those around her for insisting on her innocence. In the story, as often happens in real life, \u201ccrazy\u201d is determined by consensus of the majority, even when it is an outright erroneous representation of the circumstances at hand. In Deena Shehata\u2019s \u201cGirl Cat Wolf Under the Bed<\/a>,\u201d translated from the Arabic by Rana Asfour, the fairytale villain figure of the wolf is recast, by a young girl seeking comfort, as kindred spirit. What is meant to inspire fear becomes the thing that helps defeat it.<\/p>\n

Fear is the portal through which the editor of Markaz Bil Arabi, Mohammad Rabie renders a meticulous psychological self-portrait in his essay \u201cAll the Old Fears<\/a>,\u201d translated from the Arabic by me. He painstakingly recounts the cycle it engenders, from which there is no letup or exit, but whose temporal qualities might be subject to change.<\/p>\n

There is no letup or exit from the grief of the current moment either. The darkness of Gaza, of watching an ongoing genocide in Gaza, of watching famine ravage Gaza, while also watching the mainstream media downplay or obfuscate or outright deny the ongoing atrocities was foremost in our minds as we put out the call for this issue. There is no letup from the grief \u2014 nor should there be. But then how do we look for the light that might guide us toward a future whereby we might exact some measure of justice; the light to illuminate how such a thing might even be possible?<\/p>\n

Perhaps the only solution is to look for it directly within the darkness. As Editor-in-Chief Jordan Elgrably discovers in his interview with Syrian artist Sara Shamma<\/a>, \u201cthe grief, the emotion, the madness\u201d of the artist\u2019s work is ultimately \u201cthere to remind you of the light.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, too, even in this issue\u2019s darkest pieces, there is a glimmer of light. In my conversation with Michael Fakhri<\/a>, a dear friend and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, he insists on avoiding the word \u201chope,\u201d instead using the word \u201cfaith.\u201d In order to arrive at the new world, we must find meaning, he tells me. Back to the idea of meaning, then. But how? How can meaning be found when we are still trying to tear down the illusions that held aloft the old world? Madness might just be the way. For what we call madness, Robert Bociaga calls \u201cintelligence in crisis.\u201d Because \u201csometimes,\u201d he writes, \u201cto go mad is not to lose yourself \u2014 but to stop lying to yourself. To admit the world is unbearable. [\u2026] In this way, madness is clarity. A refusal to conform to illusions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea of \u201cmorosophos,\u201d or \u201cwise madness\u201d has been carried over from classical Greek thought into a common literary trope. The mad sage is the one who bucks the conformist illusions of modern society in order to perceive the fundamental truth at the heart of existence. Watching a genocide unfold before our very eyes has given everyone \u2014 everyone willing to look, that is \u2014 a touch of morosophos. Gaza has made a comforting illusion all but impossible. \u201cPalestine has become a symbol,\u201d writes Joelle Abi Rached, \u201cthat exposes the paroxysms of hypocrisy and the language of double standards that defines today the Western liberal order as well as the reductionist vocabulary that pathologizes the other within a moral and spiritual wasteland.\u201d<\/p>\n

As you read through this issue, or as the pieces add up, and are read through, against, with, and atop one another, a map begins to emerge of a way out of that spiritual wasteland. It is to embrace, rather than flinch from the grief. Grief is ultimately an opportunity to perform a deep examination of the self and the world; of the self in the world. Thus, one might arrive at the possibility of change as a real choice; a choice earned and made not just despite, but through the experience of grief itself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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