By Haidar Eid  

This moment in Palestinian history is a combination of extreme pessimism due to the horror inflicted on the heroic people of Gaza by the Israeli genocide, but also a moment of relative hope as the rising resistance is creating a new paradigm, one of liberation.

Late Palestinian novelist Emile Habibi, in a different context, coined the term “pessoptimism” to express this contradiction between what Antonio Gramsci called “the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will.”

In the midst of the horror of the ongoing genocide, one loses the ability to come up with something creative: it is about survival, and survival alone. But this is the darkest moment before dawn.

This “contradiction” was beautifully captured by the late Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Negm, in his greatest poem “If the sun sinks”, and composed by his comrade Sheikh Imam Issa.

We decided to perform it in Gaza before the genocide, not knowing what was going to happen to our homeland at the hands of the barbarians of the 21^st century.

The songs is performed by Haidar Eid

If the sun sinks

And if a dark wave extends over the world

In a sea of ​​clouds

And you lose sight

Of the road ahead

Oh walker

Oh wanderer

You have no direction (left)

Except the eyes of  wisdom

(The Palestine Chronicle)

– Haidar Eid is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at the Al-Aqsa University, in the Gaza Strip. He is a research associate at the Center for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.