Critics argue that what distinguishes the Surrealist school in art and literature is its rejection of reason and the rules of logic. They explain that the strange images created by Surrealist artists are meant to draw our attention to the existence of another reality beyond our own: the realm of the unconscious, the world of dreams.
Some compare the relationship between dreams and reality to a distorted yet truthful mirror. Dreams, they say, do not emerge from nothing. Rather, they rework and reshape what we experience in our waking lives, but in a symbolic language.
For Surrealist theorists, the visible reality we experience while awake is only half the truth. The full truth, in their view, lies in merging the waking world with the world of dreams to create what they called "super-reality," where people are freed from the constraints of time and space. Space limits movement, and time limits existence.
What no reasonable person disputes is that the surrealism of art and literature is no stranger than the surrealism of human reality. Reality often surpasses surrealism itself, becoming more unrestrained and bizarre than anything a Surrealist artist could imagine. This paradox has led many thinkers and writers to observe that surrealism did not invent the strange, it merely borrowed it from reality and rearranged it. Human reality is not simply a sequence of logical events. It is full of what might be called "direct surrealism."
Applying this concept to Libya today goes to the heart of everyday life. The country's political and social landscape has become something resembling a living Surrealist painting, where contradictions coexist and boundaries dissolve.
In Libya, this "direct surrealism" takes many forms. The most striking, in my view, is the extraordinary coexistence of opposites. One thing and its opposite exist side by side within the same frame. Displays of luxury at their most extravagant stand alongside extreme poverty, waves of migrants, recurring power outages, banks without cash, and persistent security threats. Yet life, by its very nature, does not stop. It presses on with all its daily bustle, as though people were living in two parallel worlds at once.
Libya today is in a state that cannot be explained by political science or logic alone. It is a condition in which dreams and nightmares, reason and irrationality, overlap and merge, creating, if one can call it that, a lived surrealism that people breathe every day as they struggle to adapt to its contradictions.
In the past few days, and without warning, another extraordinary touch was added to this surrealist canvas: an announcement from Geneva, Switzerland, declaring the selection of a new figure to head what was described as a "unified Libyan government." The government announced from that distant city, both geographically and politically, would become a third government alongside the two already in place: one in western Libya and the other across the country's east and south. The man announced as head of the Presidential Council was identified by some as Mustafa Al-Majdoub and by others as Mustafa Al-Mishay. The man's identity remains unknown. Some, mockingly, have compared him to the extraterrestrials described by the late Egyptian writer Anis Mansour in his book Those Who Descended from the Sky. In fairness, however, he is neither the first nor likely the last name to "descend from the sky" in Libya since February 2011.
The unexpected announcement came at a particularly notable moment. The country was already debating a US initiative, led by President Donald Trump's son-in-law Massad Boulos, to merge the two existing governments into one. As supporters and opponents argued across the media and social media platforms, news suddenly emerged of a third government being formed. The debate quickly shifted from disagreements over the mechanics of unifying the two governments to questions about the identities of those who had suddenly descended from the sky to announce a new government, who was backing them, who had organized the Geneva meeting, and who was financing it.
Notably, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya denied any involvement in either the meeting or its organizers. Meanwhile, the unidentified organizers of the initiative insisted that it stemmed from an "independent Libyan will," free from international processes.
To speak of an "independent Libyan will" after more than fifteen years during which foreign powers have dominated Libya's decision-making and controlled its political trajectory represents, in itself, the height of surrealism in the Libyan landscape.
Some viewed the initiative as a sincere national effort to break the political deadlock. These are the dreamers, or more accurately, the deluded. Others argued that it lacked any legal or constitutional basis that could give it genuine representative legitimacy. They are viewing the issue through the narrow lens of law and constitutional procedure in a country where there is neither law nor constitution, except the law of the gun. So far, neither any official Libyan authority nor any international body has taken a definitive position on the initiative.
In my view, the prime minister of this third government and the members of his cabinet are nothing more than a cardboard façade for a range of foreign, Arab, regional, and domestic actors that have spent years operating behind darkened curtains, seeking to further muddy the waters and deepen the crisis in order to preserve the status quo.
