Sensory and psychological reverberations in response to "Middle Eastern hallucinations"

When delirium becomes a gateway to uncovering the truth, in a region living on a knife’s edge and buffeted by political, social, and psychological crises, the physician-novelist Ali Nidal Tuffaha, in his bold novel “Middle Eastern Hallucinations,” delivers a literary and philosophical outcry against the embattled Arab reality. The novel employs delirium and hallucination as narrative devices to deconstruct certainty and forge a new consciousness that transcends familiar narratives.

The author relies on the technique of polyphony, with characters alternating in recounting events in the first person, thereby endowing each character with their own psychological, linguistic, and childhood background. This multiplicity appears as a broken mirror reflecting the social and psychological fragmentation of the Middle East.

As a psychiatrist, the author’s profession is clearly reflected in the structure of the text; the novel does not confine itself to literary narration but transcends it into an intensive psychological reading that evokes pioneers of psychoanalysis such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

The novel explores the concept of “collective trauma” (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) suffered by Arab peoples following successive defeats and recurring political crises, attempting to answer the question: How does the Arab individual coexist with daily traumas and reconstruct their sense of self?

The novel delves into profound philosophical and political dimensions by examining the duality of “the tyrant” and “the savior,” and the interplay between religious text and folk music in shaping the Arab individual’s consciousness. It raises sharp questions about existence and consciousness, and the boundaries separating reality from strangeness, culminating in a final chapter that leaves the reader with an open existential interrogation regarding writing, life, and coma.