Mubarak Kamal’s A Slow Suicide is the book I read the most this year, perhaps four times in editing its drafts until it saw its way through publication. How much I was honored to have edited it, and how I am proud of the author, is very clear now. What is clearer however is that I finally have a book in my library that describes the errors of our social lives in Kuwait satisfactorily. There were many attempts by many previous Kuwaiti writers, who wrote fiction that addressed facets of our lives here, but none could as accurately capture the dread of lethargy here, where, as Sweeney in Eliot’s poem, we are condemned to live trifle lives unadorned by great victories: We are not allowed the freedoms to live the lives that would make us proud, if not satisfied, albeit, completely.

Kamal’s novel is a special book because it talks about the special problems of the individual Kuwaiti, qua Kuwaiti, unsatisfied with his life, his efforts at improving it constantly frustrated, his outlook is bleak, and yet he is constantly being told to cheer up and accept his fate. It is the kind of life many of us, in the middle class, live, trapped in our daily practices, bound by governmentally approved lives we do not wish to continue to entertain, but have no other choice should we continue to prize our well-being. Nothing unapproved by the state used to be the fascist’s call: It is our way of life now.

                The novel revolves around an unnamed protagonist, working as a lowly editor in a news agency. It starts with a (the) bang, where our friend breaks his desktop computer, attacks his Egyptian colleague, and destroys the workplace in an explosive frenzy. After the bang, and before its reinstatement, the novel becomes a whimper. It follows our anti-hero’s earlier days as a student to explore how he has ended up in such a situation. One can’t help but invoke Solzhenitsyn’s ominous question: “I am responsible for all of this; but how?”

                The remarkable things in the novel lie mostly in the lost yearnings of the protagonist, his muffled longings to be free, to love, to be loved, to become something, to fashion himself in any likeness that would be of substance. How he hated in envy, how he wanted the love of women whose only virtue was that they were less mediocre than the rest, anchoring to the least denominators; how he resented his peers for their superficial successes, since he had no great dreams of his own nor could actualize them had he had them. His escape, whether in substance abuse, alcohol consumption, asking for the services of call girls, or simple mean obtuseness, cannot rectify the situation he has been trapped in. We wonder how much of it is really up to him, how much to his surroundings. Should we be compassionate, should we pity him, or should we look down on him as a man who refused to carve his fate from the marble of his circumstances?

Surra,
December, 2023.