Mazen Kerbaj is one of the creators of Lebanese encyclopedias that cannot be reduced to an artistic identity, for he is the storyteller, painter, visual artist and musician, but what unites the faces of Mazen Kerbaj is the connection of all his artistic and literary activities with Lebanon and its tragedies. From the launch of his diary in 1999 until the publication of his last book "Politics" in French in the French house of "Act Sid". It is another book that he places in the criticism of the Lebanese issue in different periods.
Mazen Kerbaj was known through the Arab and international newspapers (Al-Nahar, Al-Akhbar, Laurent Leitrer, and Le Monde Diplomatique) that embraced his own experience, which was discovered by the press through his electronic blog in which he used to publish his works. But internationally, he was known through the diaries of the July 2006 war, which he followed day by day in Al-Akhbar newspaper through his drawings, which he collected afterwards in his famous book "Beirut Will Not Cry" (2015).
The killer cogito
The philosophy of the French pioneer of modern philosophy, René Descartes (1596-1650), stems from the association of existence with thinking through the famous "cogito", "I think, then I am", and thus it exalts the mind as the basic problem of man and his indication. Even the body cannot reveal its existence except through the mind's perception of it.
He says, "I am not residing in my body like a navigator resides in his ship, but I am closely connected with him, and mixed with him so that I form a single unit with him, and if this was not the case, I would not feel pain if my body was injured, but I realize that with the mind alone, as the navigator realizes. Look, any ship malfunction. " On the basis of the saying of doubt as a mechanism for the perception of the world and the self, Descartes built his theory and rational philosophy in general.
In the front cover of the book, which is titled "Politics" and a half-face of a bearded man shouting "I think", Yohim Kerbage is in front of a simulation of the Cartesian cogito. But Mazen Kerbaj undermines on the second step on the first page of the book all of Descartes' rationality.
As the camera retracts to take in the full view, the same man on the cover shouts the Cartesian phrase "I think", uprooted his head and the phrase "I no longer exist." Thus, the artist prepares us to approach the Lebanese situation outside the Cartesian pattern, that is, outside of rationality, when he linked, from the first page, thinking to death, to put a new imperative for the thinking man through a new surrealist cogito, “I think, therefore, I no longer exist.” Thinking about Lebanon was linked to death in its various forms and faces.
The irrationality of Lebanese politics
Mazen Kerbaj's book deals artistically with various topics, including freedom of expression, slavery of foreign workers, sectarianism, distorted secularism, civil war, the July war, a small civil war (May 7), the war in Syria, refugees, religion, sex and drugs.
The book is translated into French, and Mazen Kerbaj has redrawn some drawings to comply with the book's publishing requirements. And within that artistic experience, he discovers the enormity of politics and his bloody face, when his old drawings that chronicle disasters and events that I think are emergency, exceptional and historical, become permanent fit for the situation, today and tomorrow due to the continuation of the policy itself. He says in an interview with him, commenting on this event:
"As I go through the drawings I drew twenty years ago, to prepare them for a book, I discovered, unfortunately, that each drawing looks like it was painted today."
Kerbaj free artist
Kerbaj's freedom does not appear in his lack of commitment to a literary genre or a specific art, and that he used the arts to write himself and not the other way around, because his freedom is also represented in his courage to approach the line of fire, the most sensitive topics in Lebanon that overthrew many heads, including Samir Kassir, who belongs to him in an oath from the book.
Kerbaj admits, in an interview with him, that he was expelled or suspended from all editors-in-chief of Arab and international newspapers, except for Samir Kassir. Therefore, he singled out diaries entitled "A week without a voice of Samir Kassir", diaries that he placed 15 years after his assassination to remind the world that the case of Samir Kassir is still open and alive as long as the perpetrators have not been tried and as long as the cases that Samir Kassir was defending are still in place.
Mazen Kerbaj restored the strength of the image and the power of its influence through the videotapes, as if the video tape art inherited the art of caricature, as the late Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali founded it, which is linked to criticism and dismantling the political mentality, but is also open to everything that is cultural, social and religious because all of this is in the management of the political scene .
Through the videotape, Kerbaj was able to convey to us the paradoxes that the Lebanese scene is experiencing among a postmodern people living in an ignorant political system.
Lebanon paradoxes
Mazen Kerbaj criticizes the behavior of the bourgeoisie and the wealthy classes in general from the people's miseries. They meet in luxurious spaces and wear the most expensive fashion in order to talk about their distress from the impact of war. In a picture titled "Life in Black", a woman responds to another woman sitting to her drinking coffee, she reminds her of the horror of the explosions by not remembering her Because she became mentally tired because she all the time wore black and two bags of international brands appeared on their sides.
In another image titled "Lebanon: Winter Necessities", we see a picture of a shirt with a comment for the good times, a jacket with a comment for the bad times and a picture of a flak jacket with a caption for all times. In reference to the fear that the Lebanese live through all the time.
In the story "Meanwhile Lebanon", Kerbaj mocks the consciousness of the Lebanese who is not aware of the underdevelopment of his political system. Through 5 pictures, he presents 5 situations of the Arab world on television, where the revolutionary masses appear on Egyptian television, Libyan television, Tunisian television and Syrian television, and the Lebanese television shows a Lebanese citizen who follows Everything and he says, "If only we had a dictator for the people to revolt against."
In his criticism of the intellectuals' stance in the Diaspora and their resignation from their roles towards their homeland, Kerbaj draws a large picture at the end of which he wrote "In Paris", in which a Lebanese intellectual appears seated sipping his cup, saying, "It is time for intellectuals to return to Lebanon." Under the main picture is a black tape written at the end. In Beirut, "and at the other end, a gravestone appears on which" the deceased "was written.
In his critique of freedom of expression, Kerbaj draws, under the phrase "Yes to Freedom of Expression," the figures of the military, a representative of Christians, a representative of Muslims, and the head of state, to place under it a long list of prohibitions.
Kerbaj works in his works on irony and highlighting the paradox that the Lebanese live in in various social, cultural, media and political fields. Kerbaj hardly leaves a glimpse of the features of Lebanese daily life without extending it to his sarcastic criticism that highlights the enormity of living in Lebanon, in light of a sectarian political system that led to giving Legitimacy for all the paradoxes and the commission of all the follies on which the reality of corruption in Lebanon is based and which today led to a state of bankruptcy that in turn led to this big explosion that he is experiencing today.
Kerbaj's works seem at the beginning as an attempt to fix the moment by virtue of the fact that through the art of the diaries he approximates specific events, but the repetition of these events makes the artwork beyond its historical moment to become a contemplative work in existing and continuous situations in time, as the civil war does not leave the minds nor does it leave the possible. The Small Civil War May 7, 2008 The Great Civil War, and by that it tends to be an ideology and a culture that stands in the way of civil peace and political change. Every attempt for change takes away the old guns, a reminder of the fragility of the situation and the solidity of the sectarian states under which the state of Lebanon is afflicted.
Beirut 2050
Kerbaj does not complain even as he draws "Beirut 2050", which he sees as having reached the height of the dispossession when its people lose their Arabic, not even French, which becomes a foreign language, and they only speak English. A people who lost dealing with their national currency and started to deal directly in dollars.
"I feel that I have lost legitimacy because I criticize what is happening in Lebanon because I live in Germany," Kerbaj said in one of the interviews, noting that he used to criticize those who talk about the internal situation from their safe places of residence abroad. Can he really be silent as an artist about what Lebanon is going through while in Berlin?
Mazen Kerbaj responds to our question on his blog and Facebook page with a new work on June 30, in which he draws a satirical picture of the revolution's slogans turning from "We all mean all of us" to "We all mean all of us", where the people of all sects appear with banners raised "stolen" and "Broken", "humiliated" and "deprived", in an assertion from Kerbaj that residency in the Lebanese question is not linked to residency in it. The most displaced country in the world and whose population lives twice as much outside it, can only make another Lebanon outside it.
On August 4, Kerbaj publishes an act representing an explosive head in a television staff in the news bulletin, commenting, "My head is unable to understand what happened," and below in a small tape, "Beirut has disappeared." How do we read this new work in contrast to his diary of the July War, which he put under the title "Beirut Will Not Cry"?
Does the image of the exploded head in the book from years ago simulate the second image of the exploding head that narrates the Beirut explosion? Was Mazen Kerbaj's book a prophecy of what Beirut 2020 lived and that the Beirut explosion was the result of the revolution? Is the revolution other than the thinking that he warned against in his book "Politics"? With a little tweak, we will write instead of Kerbaj, as we remember all the revolutionaries who were harvested by bullets and explosions in Lebanon, from Samir Kassir to Gebran Tueni to Rafik Hariri to the child Alexandra Najjar, "I revolt, so I no longer exist."