“If the Sun Sinks” – A Song for Gaza (VIDEO)

By Haidar Eid

This moment in Palestinian history is a mixture of extreme pessimism at the horror inflicted on the heroic people of Gaza by the Israeli genocide, but also a moment of relative hope as the growing resistance creates a new paradigm: one of liberation.

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

Amid the horror of ongoing genocide, one loses the ability to invent anything creative: it is about survival, and only survival. But this is the darkest moment before the dawn.

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

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

The songs are performed by Haidar Eid

When the sun goes down

And when a dark wave hits the world

In a sea of ​​clouds

And you lose track

From the road ahead

Oh Wanderer

Oh Wanderer

You have no direction (left)

Except the eyes of wisdom

(The Palestine Chronicle)

– Haidar Eid is an associate professor at the Department of English Literature at Al-Aqsa University in the Gaza Strip. He wrote this article to the Palestine Chronicle.