about fatigue

In the middle of it "about fatigue," the Austrian Peter Handke, Nobel laureate, describes snippets of our current days, in an identical way, without the need to get to the core so that its interpretation and what we might imagine under the current situation are correct, because "fatigue gives the distracted the key to salvation," while the owner of "ordinary misery" makes his biography with fatigue a collective text, not because he seeks to evoke emotion in the hearts of his readers, but because "fatigue tells the story of the other, even if I know nothing about him"! This short book, which Handke finished writing in 1989, could serve as an autobiography, revealing much of the life of the controversial writer, who grew up in a poor family in the Austrian countryside, and understood the meanings of fatigue at a time when he needed to play with children, be irritable like teenagers, and reckless like youth. The owner of "the big accident" was a boy pushing a handcart loaded with stones, up to the site of their new house that his father wanted to build. "I was just staring at the rough gray stones I was transporting in the cart, and at the gray cement vapor that surrounded me, and at the joints connecting the wooden planks I was stepping on (...) My hands were swollen, and my toes burned from the cement that seeped into them. I wasn’t sitting on the chair, but collapsing onto it (...) This fatigue did not allow me any rest; as soon as I lay on the bed, I would wake up at dawn to start working again. My sense of fatigue increased day by day, for that hardship deprived me of the very feeling of life to the extent that the early morning light and the gentle breeze became a clear warning of no escape from that living death." During his adolescence, during his studies, Handke worked morning shifts in the freight room of a major store. "I would wake up at four in the morning to catch the subway, then urinate in an empty jam jar so as not to disturb the family members, and then leave without washing. I worked in the weeks leading up to Easter and Christmas, in the freight room on the top floor, under artificial light, where I unpacked cardboard and cut it into large rectangles with a huge cutter to be used to support new cartons (...) My new feeling of fatigue was evident when we stepped outside the store, each heading his own way after the work shift ended. I was drowning in fatigue alone; my glasses covered with dust, and my shirt collar dirty and wrinkled. I found myself looking at the street I knew with new eyes, no longer considering myself one of those passersby heading to shops, or the train station, or the cinema, or the university." Handke grants the word "fatigue" broader meanings than just exhaustion or pain; he sees two types: malignant and good. The first relates to what affects the soul, and the second records the hardship of living that he was forced to endure to complete his life, but the latter is also deeper than "kitsch" suffering; it is more connected to humanity, creating its epics, uniting it, and even paving the way "for the epics of other creatures, even animals." Perhaps that fatigue is what made a person feel excluded from society and walk alone in the opposite direction of all humans, or later, because of his act of writing, he thought he was "not accessible to society, and to everyone around me," uniting with that which he felt he did not belong to, because we "share fatigue together"? But that desire contained in the last description sharply conflicts with his ambiguous relationship with the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic, and perhaps makes it incompatible with the positions of many writers who supported dictatorship for various reasons, because he sees that "under the rule of corrupt people, it has become difficult for minorities (despite their numbers) to gather and form together a 'people of fatigue'." Peter Handke, in constructing his text, relies on the question-and-answer format, and while he describes the insistence reflected in the questions and answers with a dull style that "fits the problematic of fatigue I raise" as if it is a rebuke directed at himself, it also seems like a burden that the bearer is burdened with and wants to push away. The concept of "fatigue" carries within it the meaning of "heavy burden," and its effect on everything around it. Therefore, the interpretation of the author of "A Short Message for the Long Goodbye" of the world, love, and capitalism is based on his understanding and experience of fatigue in its various forms and meanings, narrow and broad: "In the past, we used to take things in their own frame, and over time, we could only take things in relation to us. But the types of fatigue I deal with here renew that old concept, and connect it to speech. The thing is what it appears to be, but during fatigue, it cannot manifest alone, but must be linked to other things, even if few." (*) The book was published by Safsafa House in Cairo, translated into Arabic in a distinguished translation directly from German, by Dr. Radwa Imam. - Ahmed Shawqi Ali