For those who are not meant to survive, how do you imagine happiness?
For those condemned to the terrifying rhythms of imminent death, how do you cheat the fate of a tragic end?
When living is impossible, how do you smuggle life back in?
For decades, Palestinians have rehearsed a form of suspended living haunted by the menace of death, grief, and erasure. For months now, we have been intimate, and now fatigued, witnesses to the brutal flows of what life under genocide looks like.
What else is there to know? What part of your body has not shuddered yet? What part of your soul is not dead yet?
How many more standing ovations to war criminals will you tolerate before you realize that in this age prophets of peace are arsonists in fire brigades.
I recently wrote about the impossibility of Palestinian pain and issued a narrative scream to denounce our collective debility to save Gaza.
But today, I wish not to write about Palestinian sorrow or grief, however rightful these emotions can be for a people abandoned to the evil calculus of empire and the callousness of a post-factual age of endless information and no spine.
Instead, I wish to insist on Palestinian happiness as radical protest.
When you are not supposed to exist, to be who you are, to live in your own land, to be with your own people, to name your villages and towns, and to roam freely without the humiliation of checkpoints and curfews, imagining happiness becomes an act of radical rebellion, a transgressive practice of stubborn freedom.
What does a happy ending for Palestine look like, feel like, amid a daily ritual of total eradication?
Palestinian poet Mahmood Darwish once said that “if happiness should surprise you again, do not mention its previous betrayal. Enter into the happiness, and burst.”
Between the burst of impending death and the burst of contingent life I write today to sound the burst of Palestinian happiness.
The images of wailing mothers, starving children, and charred bodies under the rubble across Gaza evoke tremendous pain, but insisting on the right of Palestinian joy is a way to refuse the eternal image of the suffering Palestinian, a colonial cliché of a meek object of history upon whom the world simply unfurls.
Through these lines, I wish to celebrate the Palestinian pursuit of happiness in a necropolitical world. As Gaza tragically turns into rubble and dust, I refuse to only narrate its pain and prefer to shout its glimmers of joy.
Palestinians have survived the worst because of their ability to create and imagine joy beyond the crushing duress of occupation. Smoldering acts of life like family gatherings, cookouts, olive farming, newborn celebration parties, building homes, gardening, schooling, skating, singing, dancing, painting, writing, and acting, persist in an environment under total siege.
Take the Palestinian refugee camp as an example of this extraordinary resilience. Whether inside or outside Palestine, camps are not just overcrowded, ill-equipped, and isolated ruins of eternal transience. They are also places where intense living occurs, where refugees create stability to defy a condition of permanent temporariness, and where happiness takes on a vital and urgent sense of survival. To be happy is necessary to tolerate a deformed existence, to defy an inescapable destiny of total uncertainty and delayed salvation. To find joy again is to reassemble what has been destroyed and preserve an attachment to a memory besieged by erasure.
I want to live in a world where Palestinian joy is not a dream eternally deferred to an impossible tomorrow…One example of this persistent impulse is the work of Palestinian artist Salim Assi who draws moving illustrations of pristine Palestinian cities and landmarks with undestroyed skylines embraced by a calligraphic rendering of their original Arabic names. Assi, who grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon, practices a form of defiant art that insists on preserving a utopian memory of Palestinian heritage in the face of constant destruction and heartbreak. History for him is never just a heap of ruins but rather a site of abrogated futures and joys that must be made visible and felt again.
Like Assi’s insurgent play on the politics of time, Larissa Sansour’s art media practice creates a fantasy future world for Palestine in the sky. Sansour’s futuristic visuality uses both a utopian and dystopian projection and proposes a fugitive act of imagining Palestinian post-return futures beyond the bordered configurations of the nation-state. In her sci-fi short film Nation-Estate, Sansour builds a speculative world in which Palestine and everything that is the object of colonial destruction exist free once again but this time through a vertical trip in a futuristic skyscraper.
In this sarcastic display called Living the High Life, escalators and elevators mirroring the bordered aesthetics of the airport, take travelers through levels defiantly labeled: Schools and Universities, Olive Grove, National Archives, Heritage Museum, Jenin, Gaza City, and Permits and Passports. Sansour locates an imagined happy ending by projecting the solution of Palestinian statehood high in the sky as she did in a previous short film entitled Space Exodus in which the artist, filmed as an astronaut, plants the Palestinian flag on the Moon suggesting that Palestinians can only experience freedom on another planet.
Or consider the poetry of Fady Joudah, a Palestinian poet and physician who, just like the philosopher doctor Frantz Fanon, uses words to find a lightness of being for those who experience life only under violent tones. In his last collection with the enigmatic title […], Joudah plays on the unspeakability of the moment and the toxic reticence of institutions and individuals alike to stop a genocidal war against Palestinians. Like Sansour, he addresses a future reader debilitated by an impossible present and plagued by the imminent death and erasure of his fellow Palestinian. I write for the future, he says,
because my present is demolished
I fly to the future to retrieve my demolished present as a legible past
To see what isn’t hard to see
in a world that doesn’t
Joudah clings to the hopeful salvation of the future with the same tenderness Palestinian farmers hug their olive trees when Israeli settlers come for their destruction. Like the age-old olive tree, the language of a better tomorrow is the last available balm capable of healing Palestine from the staleness of its present. Joudah’s lines bristle with a delayed sense of joy that cannot be grasped in the deceptive now. His recourse to the day after is uneasy but it portends an infinite capaciousness of Palestinian life and joy that transcend the misery of daily life.
And yet, to fight the unthinkable in the past few months, Joudah shares stunning images of willfully joyful Palestinian children on social media trying to make life despite the devastating toll of the war. With the rubble of destroyed buildings in the background, these images parade smiling kids defiantly dressed in the best of Palestinian embroidered attire, eating watermelon, lining up for scarce food with their empty pans, and hugging precious jugs of water. Joudah comments in deeply lyrical tones:
May you pass down this gorgeous dress to your own. May the dress be worn by generations of them and never be worn out. Free. Everything about you
What Children killers hate most is to see the children they did not kill dressed up beautifully by their mothers. Because their childhood will triumph.
Watermelon happiness
Watermelon to the rescue
Watermelon masks the unspeakable.
Impotent photos.
Are you saying:
who smiles in a genocide?
who asks such a question:
that is the question.
In the harshness of this pit, Joudah’s words struggle to wrest a fragment of the sublime out of these kids’ fearful eyes and piercing gaze. Yes, they are smiling in a genocide, and yet their jubilance kindles an inextinguishable and glorious fire for life.
But what prompted me to write about Palestinian joy is the remarkable resolve of one of my graduate students who pioneered a heart-rending storytelling project that uses 360-degree technology to showcase the richness of quotidian life under occupation in his native Gaza.
Conceived before the current war, the project, entitled the Phoenix of Gaza, offers an immersive travel experience through the main streets and landmarks of the city: the beach, the first skateboard park, the most popular café, the Church of Saint Porphyrius, the main bakery, and other sites.
I want to live in a world where a Palestinian mother can sing her child a lullaby as a pledge to a peaceful night’s sleep…Inspired by the famous verse of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “we love life whenever we find a path to it,” the project brings together a team of scholars, photographers, journalists, and technicians to find traces of “normal” life under impossible circumstances of survival in refugee camps and in the streets of Gaza. The result is a series of cheerful videos that provide a multi-dimensional account of the challenges and the permanence of life despite the severe precarity of everyday reality.
One of the most moving videos of the VR tour is witnessing the narrow enclosure that is Gaza following a teenage skater through the streets of the city in a riveting display of fleeting freedom. The original audio of this video has been recently replaced with new audio of the war, of people’s screams and the noise of building collapsing to remind viewers of both the fragility of hope in Palestine and the indomitable spirit of a people who breathe life in a place others insist on turning into a lifeless pit.
Since the war began last October, The Phoenix of Gaza has tragically become a project of painful documentation of loopholes of beauty in Gaza prior to the massive destruction that claimed the lives of thousands and decimated large numbers of residential buildings and important cultural and religious sites in the city. Despite this heavy toll, this project insists on boasting life on the run, on finding music again in a dissonant world, and on memorializing sites which once served as places of happy encounters, social gatherings, and joyful memories.
Life for this Gazan student in America, forced to witness the genocide of his own people through the cruel distance of a screen, is an aspiration unleashed by an impossible desire to live. His quest of happiness in the wrecks of his stolen land is the lyrical longing for an existence freed from the burden of survival and the desolation of eternal anguish.
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I write these words skeptical about the power of language to do anything in the wake of a genocidal war that has not abated despite demonstrations, encampments, hunger strikes, statements of denunciation, UN resolutions, and international court indictments. The despair I feel in writing these lines is overwhelming and it makes me want to turn off all language, and yet I find inspiration in writers and artists who continue to fight through word and rhyme.
I want to live in a world where we can finally hear Palestinian laughter unburdened by the promise of a cruel future…We live in a time when knowledge is futile, when information is everywhere yet it remains hollow. In times like these, as Aretha Franklin would say about her poignant musical performances: let me give you something you can feel because knowing is impossible.
Knowing Palestine is impossible despite the ubiquity of information, despite the horrors of daily documentation, and despite the chilling reports of major human rights organizations.
How else do we know Palestine? I humbly offer you these throbbing words, these restless lines that deny all of us peace until Palestine is free.
I know of no other way of writing. I possess no other tool to plead.
All I have is the fantasy that words come with a euphoric charge, wounds and all.
I wish to brighten up the language we use to speak of Palestine because grace and sweetness will always triumph over the grotesque and the ugly.
I wish to stretch words to squeeze the faded nectar of a boundless life.
I wish to convert letters into joyful notes awaiting a cheerful composer’s touch.
I wish to mute language to hear the soundtrack of a quiet Palestine.
Life persists in Gaza despite the grim tones of our news and politics. Writing lyrically in the wake of utter devastation is a way to repair the fraudulent neutrality of our journalism and spare us from the horrid complicity of our politicians.
Can we write lyrically after Gaza? Can we sing and weep at the same time?
Yes, and we must because words during genocide cannot be a transaction, a commodity in an interminable spectacle of a pointless reportage. Words during genocide must bleed so we learn how to weep with a purpose. They must hemorrhage so we know how to believe in something. And they must sing to remind us, as the Palestinian author Ibrahim Nasrallah writes, that we “have feet still capable of dancing.”
Today, I write about Palestinians who, as Fred Moten says of Black performance, make falling look like dancing. This is a special dance of a people scripted not to survive, to be villains in a world where heroes dance around dead corpses.
And yet Palestine lives in spite of, or dare I say because of, falling.
When Aretha Franklin sang “Amazing Grace” at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles Church in 1972, she didn’t just sing a song. It was an astounding parade of revolutionary beauty to lift a people who can still sing no matter how history weighs on them. That resolve of impossible joy in the dazzling voice of Franklin and the euphoric sounds of the Southern California Community Choir resonates deeply because it insists on reclaiming a stolen life, a lived experience warped by the unrelenting fury of anti-Blackness.
That night, Franklin translated a popular hymn into a subtle act of fugitivity, an elegant and dignified form of protest that is unsullied by the hand of the perpetrator.
Through many dangers, toils and snares,
We have already come.
T’was grace that brought us safe thus far,
And grace will lead us home.
It is as if the entire church had decided to look elsewhere and allow the vigor of grace to rise above the lash of the terrible. Singing is the winning of the wretched, not their escape from the ills of history. It is the riotous harbinger of triumph when triumph is impossible. It is the furious rose that grows through the cracks of empire.
Palestinians are animated by a similar singing and dancing drive uncontained by the horrors of their daily reality. You wouldn’t know about it because all we see is terror and death, but Palestine is life first and life last.
As Mahmoud Darwish, a poet who sang his lines, wrote,
And we love life if we find a way to it
We dance in between martyrs and raise a minaret for violet or palm trees
We love life if we find a way to it
And we steal from the silkworm a thread to build a sky and fence in this departure
We open the garden gate for the jasmine to go out as a beautiful day on the streets
We love life if we find a way to it.
I do not wish to romanticize Palestinian resistance or dilute its impact. You may ask why I write about joy during a ravaging war. It’s not a toothless Palestine I advocate for. I only ask how we can write Palestinian dreams instead of insisting on Palestinian pain. We see that entire region through a thick fog of suspicion and mystification denying its people their own history and treating them as pathologies waiting for rehabilitation. I only wish to write against a chorus that stunts Palestinian life and mutes its living drive.
Why do they think they can stop people from loving to live?
Reclaiming happiness is to defy this compulsion of Palestinian physical and social death. Writing about joy amidst terror is, as Audre Lorde would say, a way of stretching the definition of winning to the point where there is no losing anymore. Palestine is not a problem to be solved. It is a life awaiting no approval. The chorus on Palestine must change because our eyes cannot hoard spectacles of pain.
These might be just words on a page, but there comes a time when the hum of beautiful words can soothe the ugliness of the world, when the solace of language can take over from the rumbling of war. Words have a charge to move and persuade, so let me shout these words as if they were sacred rights on a universal declaration that works for everyone.
I want to live in a world where Palestinian joy is not a dream eternally deferred to an impossible tomorrow…
I want to live in a world where Palestinian freedom is not a gift others bestow as arbiters of the living…
I want to live in a world where little bodies like that of six-year-old Hind Rajab are never ever rattled with 355 bullets…
I want to live in a world where a Palestinian mother can sing her child a lullaby as a pledge to a peaceful night’s sleep…
I want to live in a world where a Palestinian poet does not have to write poems announcing his impending death to his child…
I want to live in a world where we can finally hear Palestinian laughter unburdened by the promise of a cruel future…
I want to live in a world where we only quote Mahmoud Darwish’s love poems like “Wait for Her” and “Rita and the Rifle,” the exquisite poem about his impossible love affair with an Israeli woman he met in Haifa…
I want to live in a world where the Middle East is not reduced to maps of pain and fields of oil…
I dream of a world where Palestine meets its happy ending at last…
Writing and wishing anything else is only mispronouncing P.A.L.E.S.T.I.N.E.
