I was not born to know that I will die, but to love the innermost of God’s shadows.
– Mahmoud Darwish
I wrote this article while I was conflicted, between fear of its negative impact on readers and its benefit to those with suicidal thoughts, as some studies say that talking about suicide a lot incites it, which prompted doctors to add a question (Has the patient read a literary book about suicide?) to the list of questions asked to patients in assessing their risk of suicide. I try to overcome this negative effect by reducing the “poeticizing of suicide” that many writings promote. I do not want to add excitement to suicide and give it beauty, as some poets did, including Wadih Sa’adeh, who says: “The most beautiful of us are the ones who departed. The most beautiful of us are those who committed suicide. Those who wanted nothing and were not controlled by anything. Those who took one step into the river which was enough for them to discover water.”
Although my article is limited to the biographies of those who committed suicides, who are mostly writers and intellectuals who chronicled their journeys, it does not mean that the statement of the Bahraini thinker Mohammad Al-Ansari in his book The Suicide of Arab Intellectuals is correct: “Suicide is still mostly limited to intellectuals whose consciences are tormented by harsh conditions that also make their souls bleed.” It was as if his statement was a reference to the intellectuals’ monopoly over sensitive consciences and tortured souls, which is denied by suicide statistics and news that are increasing day by day.
The Burden of Question
The literature professor, Joseph Lebbos, gave me a collection of his works, including Brother’s Book, which he wrote after the suicide of his brother Alphonse when he was twenty-four years old. He was trying to examine the incident to find reasons for suicide that were never apparent to him before, suicide often leaves survivors burdened with the question: Why? What could have been done to avoid this?
Brother’s Book is divided into two parts, the first of which is titled: “I Wrote,” and it contains a comprehensive study of suicide, its justifications, and some of its history and the Christian position on it. The second section is titled: “You Wrote,” in which Joseph collected his brother’s papers and his thoughts written in his books and diaries, and even his quotes that he kept as life letters. The sentences we mark in books will be read after we are gone as our last letters. The German poet Paul Celan also underlined a sentence from Hölderlin’s autobiography that said: “Sometimes his genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart,” and then drowned himself in the Seine.
It is surprising that not much is known about the impact of suicide on people other than parents, such as siblings, friends, and professors, who are rarely included in the medical and social research that is conducted after each suicide. However, we find in this book the feelings of a brother who lost his brother, and the difficulties, concerns, and blame he faced by himself, even before society.
Feelings of guilt are common and harmful after suicide. Joseph laments and blames himself for not understanding the signals he saw his brother was sending before his suicide. “He used to look with this probing look, searching in our eyes for a look that would set limits for him, as the maze of mirrors had destroyed his true image. Sometimes, he would close his eyes or bow his head… I did not understand these signs until I read them in books… too late.” In order for it not to be too late for others, we need readings about the biographies of suicides, suicide books, and more.
And if he cursed his brother from time to time due to the feeling of anger he had left him with, anger toward others, toward himself, and toward those who left, he also cursed the society that was not satisfied with his brother’s departure for its mistreatment of him, and began to pursue him (i.e., society pursued Joseph) day and night. He and the rest of his family had to undergo investigations and interrogations, in their home and outside it, going around nursing their wounds between barracks and court, and from officer to another, begging for their brother’s belongings and searching for his books. As Joseph sees it, suicide is a shameful and humiliating act, the worst thing that can happen to a person, worse than execution, and worse than cancer! If the famous biographer Michel Leiris saw in the letter “S,” with which the word “Suicide” begins, a curved shape of a body twisting as it was about to fall, and a curved shape of a blade, then Joseph saw in the middle letter “h (ح)” the word “Intihar (suicide/انتحار),” an open slaughtered animal with blood flowing from its wound, and he heard a dying rattle in it.
He resorted to studying books that talked about suicide, searching in them for consolation, patience, and help to extract his brother’s writings. His mother expressed her sorrows and tears in the form of colors, and her paintings came out as aesthetic masterpieces resembling Lebanon’s popular songs. They decorated the hall of their house in which they received me when I visited them, so that each one of them could emphasize that knowledge is power, and that literature and art are a solace for sorrows.
Ugliness and Suicide
One of the most famous authors who elicited sympathy from Arab readers for his tragic fate was Muhammad Rajaa Alish, who took his own life after a tumultuous existence. At 1:30 AM on a street in Cairo called Baghdad Street, Alish died by four gunshots, with only one shot finding its mark in his head, reducing his body to scattered remains inside his red car. In this manner, he bid farewell to the writing he had dedicated his life to, as well as the life he had cherished, after it had transformed from tranquility to turmoil, from light to darkness, from serenity to resentment, and from bliss to hell, after he screamed through two books that did not make any noise. His first scream was in the form of short story collections entitled Don’t Be Born Ugly. The second, with a stronger voice, more pages, and a clearer title, They Are All My Enemies. Both of them serve as his autobiography. It was a journey marked by neglect, mockery, ridicule, scorn, and hatred – one that required the reader to be armed with calmness, patience, strength, and fortitude to read it.
In his first book, Raja Alish appears steely, facing a series of successive explosions in his life, and he is surprised at himself so he wrote “I have not yet shattered or scattered on the ground. I am made of a material that can be quickly welded, designed to withstand the most extreme types of shocks and explosions.” But his sensitive soul and sensitive feelings are his real tragedy, his problem is “the blatant contradiction between my appearance and my reality. If they had distributed beauty to suit a person’s inner feeling, I would certainly have deserved a better appearance.” The same development was recorded by Cesare Pavese in his memoirs, which he wrote in the last year of his life immersed in endless pain, saying: “Here is the rhythm of suffering that has begun, in every dusk my heart contracts until night comes,” and then later, and not long before he killed himself, he wrote: “And now, even the mornings are filled with pain.” Suicide is a stop after a long road, not a sudden pit.
Alish had resigned from his job as a legal researcher at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1958, and his daily routine had become monotonous, beginning with breakfast in a Cairo restaurant, interspersed with going to the cinema, and ending with reading until late at night at home. His life continued like this until the idea of committing suicide came to him. He bought a weapon and began practicing shooting in the desert of Nasr City, in preparation for the end he chose for himself.
He began to arrange his affairs, thoughts, and dreams that he wished for after his death. He sent a letter to the writer Tawfiq al-Hakim, in his capacity as president of the Writers’ Union, offering him the wealth he possessed, with a strong desire to contribute to revitalizing the cultural movement. He wanted to allocate part of his wealth to the Writers’ Association and the Writers’ Union equally, and the other half to the page “Literature News,” because they are the only ones who published and interacted with his works, while dedicating his library, which includes more than 1,200 books. In continuation of the neglect he faced in his life, no one responded to him, so he decided to take another path, and changed his direction to writing an official will, perhaps they will hear his voice after his death, because they always refused to hear him while he was alive. So, he went and recorded his will and deposited it in an official report, then returned to complete the planning and scheming, and preparing himself to commit suicide.
The person closest to him before his suicide was the editor of the cultural page, Mustafa Abdullah, who read his works and published them, and wrote to ask the critics to engage in critiquing his works, which made Alish very happy, but the effort was not enough to prevent him from committing suicide, despite his delaying it for several months. In his book Souls on the Margins, Khairy Hassan reported his conversations with Mustafa Abdullah about their meetings that preceded the suicide and Alish’s justifications for that, such as the cultural community ignoring him and society’s hatred of his appearance.
The life of the writer was not financially harsh. Rather, he was living in luxury and owned a luxurious car. He even rented a private apartment before his suicide just to blow it up in revenge on society. But it is a depressing luxury that does not meet the needs of the soul searching for love, appreciation, and respect. He even said in the dedication of his novel, They Are All My Enemies. “I gave away my youth to women who did not love me, and I gave my friendships to men who betrayed me, and I lost along the way!”
He was over forty years old, and described himself by saying: “I am a man without a woman, without a wheat field, without a bottle of wine, without a ball to play with, without bright memories, without a path to the future. On my grave will be written the following phrase: Here lives a person who died while he was alive. I am a man who is chased by laughter and dogs, as in people’s laughter and dogs’ calls. I am a man whom women curse in the street and love in bed. I am a king dressed as a beggar. A thinker who plays with a small child’s doll. A jester who vainly tries to remove the mask of laughter from his face, for nature has placed it there firmly, binding it to my features forever.”
The problem with the ugly person, as spoken about by those who suffer from it most, is that others stalk him, constantly reminding him of his deficiency, by looking at him with astonishment if he tries to live life as a normal person. This continuous humiliation leads to the exaggeration of the problem facing him, the decline in interest in normal life, and the collapse of steadfastness.
Raja Alish had no other request in his life that he lived for and wished for, except for people to smile at his face, perhaps a smile would be a lifeline. When he realized that society was too stingy to fulfill his small request, he made his final decision to leave life and commit suicide. Alish was not the only writer who suffered from an ugliness complex, this was shared by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who had an ugly appearance, and who wrote when he wanted to sleep the phrase, “I only appear to be dead!” and puts it next to the bed. He wrote a fictional story called The Ugly Duckling, about a chick whose appearance is ugly, but which quickly becomes very beautiful when it grows up to be the most beautiful bird, as if he hopes it will be him.
On the other hand, suicide may be a reason for the spread of the works of those who committed suicide, as the sympathy of readers and the tragedy that accompanies the news of the writer’s suicide prompts them to interact with his works, and even motivates publishing houses and critics to invest more in his works, commercially and critically, than they deserve. As is the custom of a society that values the dead more than the living, critics’ voices rose in their evaluation and praise of his works after his death, and publishing houses reprinted his works. In a statement of consolation, Naguib Mahfouz said about him: “We do not accept that anyone’s poor condition reach the point of disintegration. Therefore, a person must face the difficulties of his time with strength and patience that will help him continue living.”
The Drawing at the End
Van Gogh said: “A work cannot be moderate, valuable, and colorful at the same time. You can’t be at the Pole and at the Equator at the same time. You must choose your own line, as I hope to do, and it will probably be color.” He depicted “Wheatfield with Crows,” in which he committed suicide in a similar place to it, as if his last painting was a farewell speech: A burning field under the sun, brimming with life and glowing with goodness at one end, and at the other end, despair and death. Fiery golden spikes with their twisted necks merge with a dazzling blue sky that portends a secret, a storm. Flocks of black crows cover the face of the sun and swoop down crowing in the field, as if they were coal ash remaining from nothingness, and messengers of death that the field cannot repel. In the middle of the painting is a red dirt road mixed with green, winding, extending until it disappears into the distant depths. A path open to infinity. The artist fired the last arrow in his quiver and it went through his flesh. Two days later, Gogh dies!
The last painting by Nicolas de Staël, a painter of Russian origin who committed suicide by throwing himself from the window of his art studio, was a vast painting that celebrates silence, but it was titled “Le Concert.” The background was a deep crimson, evoking the color of blood. In the center stood a massive black piano, resembling a tombstone. Suspended alone in the air was a yellow violin. The musician himself had already departed the scene. De Staël had opened the window of his studio and taken his own life by throwing himself out into the empty space beyond.
Writing and Suicide
Goethe mentioned in his autobiography, Poetry and Truth, that although he was certain of the speed of the gun’s impact, he was unable to use it in his suicide attempts, and he refrained from it after expressing his grief and pain over the separation of his beloved Werther in his great novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. For a while after the collapse of his love, he was thinking about suicide. He kept a dagger under his pillow, trying to summon the will to plant it in his heart, but he failed every night. When he was certain that he was unable to commit suicide, he decided to write the story of failed love in a novel, and to kill its sad hero. Even if the book prevented its owner from committing suicide, it became the driving force of a flood of suicides, to the point that it was banned from circulation in Italy, Germany, and Denmark after it was found near suicidal people. Goethe’s experience confirms that literature can replace suicide, and that writing is an expression of ideas and a test of them on paper instead of reality. Literature is a rebellion against life, an open document of protest. This is what Goethe tried to convey through the novel, but the readers understood it incorrectly, which led him to regret this understanding, and that they should have written, not committed suicide. If suicide is an escape to death, then writing is an escape from death. But is writing always a savior?
The Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima wrote his first works at the age of sixteen. Over the course of his life, he produced one hundred literary works, many of which achieved great critical and commercial success. He began writing what would become his magnum opus – the four-part novel, The Sea of Fertility. In the process of writing, he poured into it the distillation of his lifetime of experiences, both as a human being and as a writer. During the writing, Mishima confided to his friends that once he had completed the novel, he would have nothing left to say to the world. In that eventuality, he hinted, the only course of action remaining to him would be to take his own life!
His friends did not take him seriously. It took Mishima five years to write his major work, and as soon as he finished it, he announced that he would commit public suicide, in protest against the invasion of modern Western values into the lives of the Japanese, and the waste of Japan’s traditional heritage in thought and behavior. On the appointed day, he calmly wrapped a cotton belt around his waist, then grabbed his traditional sword, sheathing it firmly in his stomach, he fell to the ground, bleeding, and around him were photographers and news agency reporters recording the moment of suicide, without any intervention or attempt to prevent this great writer from ending his life, even though he was only forty-five years old!
After he died, some critics said that he was sincere in his sadness about the departure of some Japanese people from their ancient traditions and them being influenced by Western behaviors. Some said that, in fact, he was responding to an obsession that haunted him for most of his life and demanded that he commit suicide, while others said that if he had lived a hundred years after his death, he would not have written anything beyond his quatrain, in which he reached the pinnacle of his literary achievement. He must have felt that he would not be able to write anything better than it, or come close to its level, so he knew that the end had come, and he chose his end before he was tormented by the depletion of talent and the inability to continue.
Virginia Woolf, who suffered from bouts of mania and depression, wrote in her first two suicide letters to her husband: “I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.” A few days later, she wrote again in an attempt to ease his remorse after her suicide: “Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life.” Woolf was raised in a family afflicted by manic-depressive illness, and suicide was always her first instinct, as “But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms.…These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters.…One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.” She ended her second letter to her husband by wishing him well without her and asking “Will you destroy all my papers?” She then filled her pockets with heavy stones and walked into the river. Her relationship with water is not fleeting, rather, it is an original theme in her works that was supposed to be taken into account before ending her life. In her first novel, one of the characters declares: “I’d give anything for a sea mist,” and in the novel Between the Acts, the heroine ends up with this portentous confession. “Down the ride, that leads under the nut tree… That the waters should cover me.” Wolf’s life was nothing but continuous skirmishes with losses, successive cultural and emotional disappointments that confirm Al-Ansari’s analysis of the motives for the intellectual’s suicide.
As for Sylvia Plath, she was living a rather routine yet content life with her husband Ted. However, she began to grow weary of her reliance on him and her inability to achieve cultural recognition apart from him. Then she discovered his infidelity, which drove her to tragically take her own life by placing her head in the oven. Plath’s work is not large, but it is profound. She left a single novel that resembles an autobiography, diaries, letters, and several poems. Even if she did not write her autobiography explicitly, the diaries and letters are part of biographical literature. They also present the important stages that contributed to sculpting the path of the psychological formation of the personality. They also present a picture of the developments of the personality and its transformations from love to hate, strength to weakness, and enthusiasm for life to withdrawal from it, and joy to depression. Letters are a journey into unspoken or hidden history, especially because they carry the character of privacy between the sender and the addressee. The primary basis for her writings is secrecy by not broadcasting them to people, and then they take on the character of honesty in disclosure and boldness in frankness and openness, more than writings that belong to pure autobiography, as the latter is surrounded by many constraints that prevent telling pure honesty.
A close reading of Sylvia Plath’s letters reveals numerous confessions and statements expressing a desire for suicide that predate the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. In tracing the evolution of her letters from the beginning of her relationship with the poet who would become her husband – a man she was enamored with from their very first meeting until the end of her life – one uncovers a world of complexity surrounding the life of the intellectual, far removed from the idealized image that readers often construct. When I say that her only novel, The Bell Jar, is like an autobiography, it seems like a reflection of the transformations in her relationship with her husband. The heroine of the novel is an American girl named Esther Greenwood, in the prime of her youth, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The heroine’s life did not predict this fate, and it is the same feeling that Sylvia felt when she met the poet who would be her husband. Her description of him in her letter to her mother confirms the paradox that her life later became.
Disappointment of Hope
In his book The Suicide of Arab Intellectuals, Muhammad Jaber Al-Ansari identifies two overlooked factors that he believes contribute to the rise of suicide among intellectuals, rather than the oft-cited reason of cultural disappointment. The first factor he cites is a lack of harmony – a profound disconnect between the individual intellectual and others, the world, and even their own self. The second factor is emotional failure – an inability to form stable, meaningful emotional relationships that could serve as a “secret thread” tethering them to life when other connections are severed. He calls in another place: “O you lovers, be where you are among your loved ones, during the time of the loss of loved ones, so that suicide does not increase in our nation.”
Suicide may sometimes be a veiled expression of hope, cloaked in the darkness of despair. This is because the chasm separating reality from aspiration has grown so vast, with ambitions soaring far beyond the confines of everyday life. In this sense, the paradox of unfulfilled hope can be seen as a root cause of suicide. The suicidal person, regardless of his motives, hopes for a lot of improvement, whether he was hoping for it during his life and did not find it, so he decided to quit life. This is common in emotional suicides, but in cultural suicides, it is a message of hope for what comes after life. The person who commits suicide then hopes that the effect of his suicide will change the reality that he leaves, even if his message for change is a departure from the right choice.
The Poeticism of Suicide
In her book, Death will come and it will have your eyes, the Lebanese poet Jomana Haddad translated the poems of 150 poets who committed suicide in the twentieth century, from 48 different countries. After she witnessed her grandmother lying on the ground when she was five years old, she took it upon herself to gather the works of poets who committed suicide in one book, to console themselves after they had lost those who console them. All of this was in search of an answer to a question that she repeated with sorrow and oppression a hundred and fifty times: “Why does someone commit suicide?” Although most of the book’s texts call for pessimism, full of melancholy, and celebrates death, it is an example of poetry thrown at the edge of life. Some researchers found in it characteristics from which the identity of the suicide seeker might be discerned, so he could be brought back from the edge.
Haddad creates two somewhat contradictory images in the book. One is the most tyrannical, as if it glorifies suicidal death, or often sides with making it an almost heroic choice or a stance against empty life itself, and this appears in the poetic quotes towards death in the introductions to the chapters. The other image that contradicts this magical, attractive image is when Haddad asks: “Is suicide poetry?” and she answers: “I kept seeing suicide as poetry until I saw it. I mean until I saw it with my own eyes. When we see mutilated and torn bodies, there is no longer the poetry of the act, but rather the ugliness of the result itself,” recalling the scene of her grandmother committing suicide, and reviewing the various forms of suicide, most of which were cruel.
The Darkness of Depression
The primary driver behind suicide is depression. Matt Haig battled with depression for ten years, which led him to attempt suicide multiple times. During this period, he tried various treatment approaches, medications, and self-help books, chronicling his journey in the insightful book Reasons to Stay Alive. While Haig acknowledges that human experiences are deeply personal and not easily comparable, reading about others who had suffered from depression and overcome their despair gave him a sense of reassurance and hope. This is the key reason he wrote his book – he wanted to provide that same sense of comfort and optimism to his readers. This is the reason for writing his book, as he says: “I believe that. Because it was, in part, through reading and writing that I found a kind of salvation from the dark. Ever since I realized that depression lied about the future I have wanted to write a book about my experience, to tackle depression and anxiety head-on. So this book seeks to do two things. To lessen that stigma, and – the possibly more quixotic ambition – to try and actually convince people that the bottom of the valley never provides the clearest view. I wrote this because the oldest clichés remain the truest. Time heals. The tunnel does have light at the end of it, even if we aren’t able to see it. And there’s a two-for-one offer on clouds and silver linings. Words, just sometimes, can set you free.”
He stood on the edge of the cliff for some time, gathering his resolve to die, then gathering his resolve to live, to be or not to be. There, death was very close. A small amount of fear was needed to move the scales, but the small amount of courage he possessed prevailed on the scale of life. “In the end, a person needs to have the resolve to live overcome his resolve to kill himself,” as Albert Camus says in A Happy Death.
What the depressed person is looking for, according to Matt Haig’s confession, is not happiness. “They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain. To escape a mind on fire, where thoughts blaze and smoke like old possessions lost to arson. To be normal. Or, as normal is impossible.”
Matt Haig believes that life always gives us reasons to keep going, if only we listen hard enough. Those reasons may come from the past, from the people who raised us, or perhaps from friends or lovers, or perhaps from the future, or possibilities at whose doors we might knock. Haig’s core advice is: “Let’s talk. Let’s listen. Let’s encourage everyone around us to open up, to talk and listen. Keep adding to the conversation. Stay on the lookout for those wanting to join in the conversation… it is not something you have to blush about, it is a human experience. It is not you. It is simply something that happens to you. And something that can often be eased by talking.”
In Conclusion:
Suicide is a sigh of despair, a lack of meaning and justification for existence, and an invasion of sterility in daily life. The reasons behind it are numerous and complex, difficult to fully comprehend. All segments of society share culpability in both causing and resolving this tragedy. Whether we heed the advice of Bahraini thinker Muhammad Jabir al-Ansari, in his book The Suicide of Arab Intellectuals, invoking religious texts affirming that God does not burden a soul beyond its capacity, and that we are called to consequential action rather than mere effect – or we embrace the conviction of Lebanese-French thinkerr Amin Maalouf, who argues, in his book The Disruption of the World, that claims of cultural backwardness do not mean the inevitable loss of time – we must not succumb to or preach despair. It is not permissible to preach despair, for there is still hope for change, and a better life requires patience, boldness, and imagination, instead of wishing, fear, and complacency, or discontent and running away, which does not solve problems but rather abandons them.
When considering our approach towards others, we must remember that someone contemplating suicide is likely acting from a place of accumulated despair, disappointment, and extremely difficult circumstances. These burdens can leave them feeling utterly powerless. It is often the result of the combined weight of these factors that causes the collapse of a person’s emotional resilience. The poet Anne Sexton expressed this in her book Live or Die, which she wrote before she committed suicide: “But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.” Therefore, we must be attuned to their circumstances and their language, such as threats of self-harm or suicide, attempts to obtain medication or weapons, talking or writing about death or suicide, constant complaints about life’s meaninglessness, and other signs that vary between individuals and personalities. Therefore, the Guide for Initial Help for Mental Health recommends that if someone notices these signs, they should directly ask the person about their suicidal thoughts or intentions, rather than avoiding the topic. After inquiring, it is important to convey your concern and desire to help, as suicidal ideation is often a desperate plea for aid and an attempt to escape intense psychological pain. Because suicidal thoughts are often – according to the evidence – a request for help and a desperate attempt to escape from problems and painful feelings. It is necessary to encourage the suicidal person to speak and leave most of the conversation to him without argument or threats. Holding on to life requires knowing that someone wants us to hold on to it. She also recommended not to use threats or play on feelings of guilt, such as saying that you will ruin the lives of your loved ones if you commit suicide, and not to lecture him about the importance of life and that suicide is wrong. Do not try to fix his problems, as it is not about the problems as much as it is about the amount of psychological pain that these feelings caused him. Do not leave him alone and be sure to seek professional support for him even if he refuses.
I am not in a position to propose solutions for the alarming epidemic of suicides around the world, that is a task that must be taken up by healthcare professionals and social researchers. However, my aim is to help erect safeguards against this raging tide and reduce the number of those drowning in it, as well as to overcome the community’s reluctance to openly discuss this worsening crisis and shed light on its underlying issues.I conclude with a verse from the poem Disenchantments by poet Douglas Dunne: “Look to the living, love them, and hold on.”
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