{"id":31835,"date":"2024-03-03T13:00:42","date_gmt":"2024-03-03T11:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=31835"},"modified":"2024-03-03T13:00:42","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T11:00:42","slug":"do-or-despair-political-action-in-my-great-arab-melancholy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/do-or-despair-political-action-in-my-great-arab-melancholy\/","title":{"rendered":"Do or Despair: Political Action in My Great Arab Melancholy<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

What are we to do with expressions of melancholy, political depression, or despair at a moment when there are so many reasons to feel the <\/span>unspeakable<\/span><\/a> and so much need to take action? Where does melancholy intersect, if at all, with the rage we might consider more appropriate for an issue entitled BURN IT ALL DOWN? What acts does melancholy foreclose? And which does it engender?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

My Great Arab Melancholy <\/span><\/i> by Lamia <\/span>Ziad\u00e9<\/span>
\nPluto Press<\/span><\/a>, 2023
\nISBN 9780745348155<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Katie Logan<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Lebanese author Lamia <\/span>Ziad\u00e9<\/span> uses the word \u201cmelancholy\u201d to describe two of the many figures who populate her similarly titled <\/span>My Great Arab Melancholy. <\/span><\/i>The first is the young King Faisal of Iraq, deposed and assassinated at 23 years of age, whom <\/span>Ziad\u00e9 refers to as a \u201ccharming child, asthmatic and melancholic,\u201d and later, a \u201cmelancholic teenager.\u201d The second is the Shia Imam Musa al-Sadr, whose 1978 disappearance in Libya figures in Ziad\u00e9\u2019s telling as one of the great tragedies of modern Lebanese political history. \u201cHis face,\u201d she writes, \u201cmarked by great kindness, betrayed a certain melancholy.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
My Great Arab Melancholy<\/em> is published by Pluto Press<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These figures, along with the cemeteries, mausoleums, and museums Ziad\u00e9 visits throughout the illustrated volume, prompt a reckoning with the concept of melancholy. <\/span>After all, what Malu Halasa calls the book\u2019s \u201cevocative title\u201d is one of the many reasons she listed it among her <\/span>most anticipated books of 2024 in this publication.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What characteristics does <\/span>Ziad\u00e9 read into the \u201cmelancholic\u201d dispositions of two key figures, who seem to share very little but their presence in an expansive, ever-shifting version of Arab historical narrative? Does melancholy indicate a particular orientation toward the past or present? <\/span>And this line of questioning leads me to consider the weight that single word asks the text as a whole to carry: What are we to do with expressions of melancholy, political depression, or despair at a moment when there are so many reasons to feel the <\/span>unspeakable<\/span><\/a> and so much need to take action? Where does melancholy intersect, if at all, with the rage we might consider more appropriate for an issue entitled BURN IT ALL DOWN? What acts does melancholy foreclose? And which does it engender?<\/span><\/p>\n

These are urgent questions that have only become more so since <\/span>My Great Arab Melancholy<\/span><\/i>\u2019s initial French publication in October of 2017. The trajectory into English itself has a tinge of melancholy as timelines are unsettled and forces of the market made clear. It\u2019s a familiar story of awards circuits enabling translation \u2014 the text received a 2022 <\/span>PEN Translates Award<\/span><\/a>, and translator Emma Ramadan successfully applied for an <\/span>NEA Translation Fellowship<\/span><\/a> to work with both <\/span>My Great Arab Melancholy <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>Ziad\u00e9<\/span>\u2019s more recent <\/span>My Port of Beirut <\/span><\/i>(2021). And while <\/span>My Great Arab Melancholy <\/span><\/i>is the earlier text, <\/span>My Port of Beirut <\/span><\/i>preceded it into English, suggesting a murky timeline in which <\/span>the devastating explosion of August 4, 2020<\/span><\/a>, is absent and yet haunting the English translation of <\/span>Melancholy.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

No matter the order, both texts showcase <\/span>Ziad\u00e9<\/span>\u2019s preoccupation with sense-making through the acts of amassing and collaging. Her narrative approach is at once intensely personal \u2014 <\/span>my <\/span><\/i>port, <\/span>my <\/span><\/i>melancholy \u2014 and yet collective, as her illustrations expand to include the histories and archives of people across the city, country, and region.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Writing for <\/span>ImageTexT<\/span><\/a> prior to the work\u2019s English translation, <\/span>Carla Calarg\u00e9 and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek eschew the term \u201cgraphic novel\u201d in favor of an \u201cillustrated book with a spatial infrastructure resembling the genre of the travelogue.\u201d Elsewhere, they refer to the text as an \u201calbum.\u201d These generic designations suggest a reading experience that consistently implicates the reader. <\/span>Despite the \u201cmy\u201d of the title, both the French and English versions of the text use a familiar \u201cyou\u201d throughout; table of contents and indexed maps prepare readers to travel alongside<\/span> Ziad\u00e9 during this geographic and temporal journey.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A journey this book is, as Ziad\u00e9\u2019s recollections drift from actual travels in South Lebanon, Beirut, and Egypt to historical events and memories from Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan. The \u201calbum\u201d designation rescues the text from maintaining a strict or linear itinerary. Albums\u2019 logics are more associative than a travel narrative\u2019s, and one is less likely to read than encounter an album. Whether a photo album or album of music, there\u2019s a participatory obligation to activate the text by returning to it, revisiting favorite sections and discovering new material each time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Approaching <\/span>My Great Arab Melancholy <\/span><\/i>as an album or archive prevents it from feeling unwieldy. Ziad\u00e9\u2019s efforts to catalog an expansive archive of Arab history \u2014 including the assassinations and downfalls of key political leaders, as well as decolonizing resistance movements across the region \u2014 are designed to feel overwhelming. She impresses upon readers the impossibility of a starting point or single narrative arc to this history. Instead, she asks readers to register rhythms and patterns. By paying attention to a range of moments at which a different future was possible and then demolished, she performs the work of critical melancholy, which doesn\u2019t just echo current conditions of grief, rage, or despair \u2014 it opens us up into something painful, fierce, and connective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One way to understand the project Ziad\u00e9 has taken on is by turning to the long history of melancholy in Arab thought, though she herself does not reference this scholarship. <\/span>Moneera al-Ghadeer<\/span><\/a> traces a version of humoral theory through the philosophical and medical inroads of Avicenna (Ibn Sina), just as <\/span>Nouri Gana<\/span><\/a> points to configurations of melancholy in Lebanese Marxist intellectual practice. Borrowing from Husayn Muruwwa\u2019s 1982 distinction between \u201c\u2018lethal sadness\u2019 (<\/span>al-huzn al-qatil<\/span><\/i>, the sadness that paralyzes and immobilizes), and \u2018militant sadness,\u2019 (<\/span>al-huzn al-muqatil<\/span><\/i>, the sadness that fights back),\u201d Gana also characterizes melancholy as having one of two qualities. The <\/span>melancholic <\/span><\/i>is \u201cself-reflexively principled, persistent, and proactive\u201d while the <\/span>melancholite <\/span><\/i>remains \u201cuncritically reactionary, impulsive, and counterproductive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

If mourning is the act of processing a loss and incorporating it into our sense of reality, melancholy is a refusal.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Gana\u2019s work helps readers understand Ziad\u00e9\u2019s critical approach to melancholy\u2014and to see its potential. He concludes that \u201cmelancholy attachments to incomplete losses are very taxing psychically but affirmative politically insofar as they keep under close scrutiny the historical injustices of which these still unfolding losses are the product.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

After all, in a gross simplification of Freud\u2019s work on the subject, if mourning is the act of processing a loss and incorporating it into our sense of reality, melancholy is a refusal. The complexity of a loss, the scope of the feeling, and the ongoingness of the event mean the loss cannot be accepted. It is pathological, to use Freud\u2019s term, because it is a refusal to normalize.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Resisting acceptance, refusing normalization, is political work. It\u2019s the reason <\/span>Sara Ahmed<\/span><\/a> refers to the \u201cmelancholic migrant\u201d as the figure who is chastised for naming \u2014 and thus refusing to accept \u2014 racism. The melancholic migrant tells us: \u201cDon\u2019t get over what is not over. Just in case we need a reminder: the <\/span>dominant <\/span><\/i>way of telling the story of the British empire in Britain has been as a happy story. That dominant happy view of empire is enforced through citizenship, by which I mean, to become a citizen is to learn that positive view and to be required to repeat it.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To be a melancholic migrant, a melancholic traveler, a melancholic narrator is to resist repetition of the dominant story. Instead of suturing together, Ziad\u00e9 fends off closure. An attempt to move past melancholy, to sanitize or iron it out, risks either reinforcing the pre-existing narrative or creating a new one from a reactionary position. Those perils, as <\/span>Lina Mounzer has explained in this publication<\/span><\/a>, include justification of unspeakable acts: \u201cIf the recent history of Western warfare has taught us anything it is that if your anger is righteous enough, then any violence born of that anger is righteous, too. Thus you may engage in mass slaughter and remain mostly blameless in the eyes of the world. Those that have been slaughtered are not people, after all, but human animals.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As Ziad\u00e9 demonstrates throughout this dense text, remaining with melancholy is a way of holding onto moments of potential. <\/span>My Great Arab Melancholy <\/span><\/i>is especially attentive to historical fulcra, those occasions just before the possibility for a more unified or liberated future is foiled. For Ziad\u00e9, these include the election of Ali, the Shia leader and Muhammad\u2019s cousin and son-in-law, to the caliphate; the \u201cexceptional and forgotten moment\u201d of Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizing the Suez Canal; and the period just following Bashir Gemayel\u2019s election to the Lebanese presidency. Of these moments, she writes, \u201cthe reconciliation of believers seems possible then,\u201d and \u201ceven the most skeptical allow themselves to dream.\u201d Of course, each of these moments warps into failure with the assassinations of Ali and Gemayel, and Nasser\u2019s 1967 defeat.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ziad\u00e9 doesn\u2019t ignore the outcome of these stories but refuses to treat them as foregone conclusions. She seeks memorial practices that insist on the still unfolding nature of these losses. She lingers in places where the act of commemoration is lived and complex. Her travels begin in South Lebanon just after Ashura, the annual mourning of Husayn\u2019s death. Observing the vestiges of the festival, Ziad\u00e9 seems particularly drawn to the detail with which observers recreate the Battle of Karbala and the ways in which banners and visual markers change the region\u2019s landscape.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Beginning with Ashura foregrounds the kind of collective, repetitive, and hyper-present mourning rituals that Ziad\u00e9 gravitates to throughout the project. She visits \u201cfunereal and marvelous\u201d cemeteries, where parents bring tea and picnics to sit with their lost children. She hears the story of Nada, a woman whose own losses and traumas mean that the only crafts she makes with the children in her care are funeral wreaths for the soon-to-be killed. She considers the legacy of <\/span>Khiam Prison<\/span><\/a>, the horrific detention center turned museum only to be destroyed by the Israeli Air Force in 2006 \u2014 the acts of reclaiming and remembering are that threatening. She holds up Emir Maurice Chehab as a kind of commemorative hero for having the foresight to protect the artifacts of the National Museum in 1975 by enclosing them in slabs of concrete. The unveiling of the artifacts, accompanied by the museum\u2019s decision to retain echoes of the war through the sniper hole now punctuating the Mosaic of the Good Shepherd, speak to a tenacious, far-reaching version of commemoration.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Only a few moments of slippage disrupt the commemorative philosophy Ziad\u00e9 develops carefully throughout the project. Standing in the Museum of Memories in Shatila Camp, she listens to a tour from museum owner Doctor Mohamed el Khatib. As the doctor presents artifacts, Ziad\u00e9\u2019s response raises questions about her own project:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It looks like the back room of an antique store . . . you were expecting something more captivating. You are slightly disappointed. You thought you would find weapons of all kinds, Fatah or PLF posters, clandestine newspapers, photos of the fedayeen or of battles and massacres, flags, logos, keffiyehs, combat uniforms . . . but the doctor\u2019s explanations deeply move you. These objects were brought by the camp residents or by their parents when they fled Palestine and were entrusted to him to preserve their memory. Objects with no historic, ethnic, aesthetic, or economic value, but which are all that remains for them of their country . . . The doctor makes you a coffee and comments on each piece. Almost none hold any interest apart from simply being there, in this camp. Only a few exude an aura of great tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is a strange reflection that undercuts some of the cataloging Ziad\u00e9 accomplishes elsewhere. <\/span>My Great Arab Melancholy <\/span><\/i>does indeed \u201cexude an aura of great tragedy,\u201d but it\u2019s also attuned to a range of griefs more nuanced than this reaction suggests. If the cardinal sins of melancholy are erasure and forgetting \u2014 impulses that have removed Martyr\u2019s Square from Beirut\u2019s map and destroyed key landmarks of the Nasser presidency in Cairo \u2014 a determination to make visible is the melancholic\u2019s guiding principle. In Nada\u2019s classroom, the woman who teaches her students to make funeral wreaths also displays images of the dead and injured in Gaza. Ziad\u00e9 transitions wordlessly to several full pages of these images. They are from 2014. They are from yesterday. Melancholy refuses to unsee the injustice. It asks us not just to burn it down but to hold on.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katie Logan reviews Lamia Ziad\u00e9’s latest illustrated volume that prompts a reckoning with the concept of melancholy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":346,"featured_media":31923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center 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