In his collection of essays, Reflections on Exile (2000), the late political activist and professor of comparative literature Edward Said generalized about the Arab condition after the Nakba of 1948 (the name given to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their native land to clear way for the Israeli nation-state). “…No Arab could say that in 1948 he was in any serious way detached or apart from the events in Palestine,” he proclaimed; “he might reasonably say that he was shielded from Palestine; but he could not say—because his language and his religion, cultural tradition implicated him in every turn—that he was any less a loser, an Arab, as a result of what happened in Palestine” (46). In place of a language, religion, or cultural tradition, Said—who had spent a career debunking such essentialisms—identifies an attachment to loss, and to the loss of Palestine in particular, as the grounds for a post-Nakba Arab identity.
Now, over twenty-five years later, Said’s remark resounds in scholar Nouri Gana’s most recent monograph, Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World (Fordham University Press, 2023). Reappraising Said’s “loser” by way of a psychoanalytic hermeneutics, Melancholy Acts defends the centrality of melancholic loss to Arab subjectivity, culture, and critique. In close readings that gather around the question of Palestine, but engage a geographically various range of Arab films, short stories, plays, and poems, as well as mediated historical events, Gana defends melancholy as the only ethical and political orientation to the persistence of loss into the present.
***
Always melancholicize! Gana’s opening gambit revises Jameson’s injunction to Always historicize! As with the melancholic’s pathological refusal to assimilate or absorb the lost object, to melancholicize names a critical orientation to historical loss marked by its non-normalization. In the Arab world, which has been structured by the “decimated” emancipatory project of decolonization at least since the Nakba of 1948—and especially the Naksa of 1967—the action of melancholicizing resists what Gana calls the “disappearance of disappearance.” The violence of this redoubling loss is concretized in Melancholy Acts by neocolonial Israeli land theft and by the historical amnesia it enlists. Gana reminds us that former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion once said of Palestinians faced with the loss of their land, “The old will die and the young will soon forget” (84). Against the grain of this propulsive, death-driven thinking, the art objects Gana examines are charged with the resistive, melancholic impulse “to retain, preserve, and approximate” a “colonial past of transgression, dispossession, and injustice.” As Gana demonstrates through shrewd close readings of post-Nakba Arab culture, the refusal to assimilate loss, however pathological, limns both the desire for and possibility of historical redress.
Like its forebearer The Political Unconscious, Melancholy Acts approaches history as the absent cause behind our aesthetic objects. Yet, Gana specifically takes interest in texts whose delimitation by melancholic malaise—sadness (in Arabic, huzun), grievance, impotence, or rage—lays bare a shared experience of history as the loss of individual and collective sovereignty. Seen in this way, Melancholy Acts follows a suite of critical monographs that have endeavored to historicize “ugly feelings” (as Sianne Ngai puts it) as early as Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race (2000). Also in this pantheon is Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005); Ann Cvetcovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling (2012); and David Eng and Shinhee Han’s Racial Melancholia (2019). All of these monographs focus on American and Anglo-American cultural histories. By contrast, Gana develops a traveling theory of melancholy, arguing for the fraught dialectic of “human agency” and “historical determinism” as the basis for “the melancholic formation of postcolonial subjectivity in the Arab world.” “History may hold open the promise of emancipation,” he writes, “…but the extent to which human agency is held at bay by the overriding course of historical dynamics remains as ambivalent and enigmatic as Marx’s equivocation in The Eighteenth Brumaire: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please’” (46.) In the fiction of committed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, a key figure in Melancholy Acts, the violent determinations of colonial history are tempered by what Gana describes as a “melancholic attachment to sovereignty…[that] almost always exceeds the pitiful failure to shield it from a crude reality” (22). Assassinated in 1972 by the Israeli Mossad, Kanafani’s courageous example of literary and political resistance is suggestive of the surprising optimism of the melancholic whose irreconcilable grievances propel him to make—and make sense of—his own history. “…Political and military defeats have spawned a psychoaffective disposition toward melancholy and become the recurring site of creative and critical inquiry” (48), Gana writes.
In a key chapter on Arabic poetry, Gana queries the melancholy of poetic form in the wake of what Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi has called the “ongoing Nakba” (al-Nakba al-mustamirra) of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “Melancholy Forms” reads proleptically in light of the most recent—and unhalting—decimation of Gaza. Of particular interest to Gana is the Arabic elegiac tradition (marthiya). Invoking Adorno’s 1949 proclamation that “poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Gana reverts to the Palestinian catastrophe of the year prior. Similar verdicts, uttered by the poets themselves, circumscribe post-Nakba poetry. After an explosion by pro-Iranian guerrillas killed his wife, Balquis al-Rawi, in 1982, the Syrian poet Nizar Gabbani famously proclaimed that “poetry after [Balquis] is impossible.” But this assertion belies an indissoluble, melancholic attachment to poetry in Arab culture: alleged impossibility is undercut by indispensability. In other words, Arabic poetry has survived the onslaught of catastrophe—whether in Palestine or Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Yemen—even if it survives in order to elegize itself. As Gana goes on to show, post-Nakba poems tend to negate themselves as poems of a specific kind. In the elegy he attempts after Balquis’s death, Qabbani laments the absent addressee and the loss of poetic form. “Balquis… / This is not an elegy,” he intones in his post-elegiac elegy. Gana reads the poem as a “melancholic act of dissidence from normative practices of elegiac mourning— really a refusal to mourn altogether” (100-101).
But why exactly should mourning be refused? For Gana, mourning’s promise to dispose of oppressed histories—to absorb the loss as loss—is tantamount to oiling the wheels of the terrible, forward-moving machine Walter Benjamin called “progress.” Pushing beyond its Freudian characterization as pathology, Melancholy Acts frames its namesake as a form of psychopolitical resistance to “losses whose loss is far too incomplete to even warrant mourning” (33). As becomes clear, this critical stance is itself resistive. Gana identifies a trend among Arab intellectuals to pathologize bad affects, beginning with the late Syrian philosopher Georges Tarabishi’s diagnosis of Arabs with a “collective neurosis” (usāb jamā‘ī) following the Naksa of 1967 (6). For Karima Lazali, a psychoanalyst currently practicing in Algiers, the melancholy (mélancolisation) of a postcolonial Algerian citizenry signals the pathological refusal to “turn the page on the colonial past” (283).
Gana reminds us that Lazali’s postcolonial melancholic has a colonial antecedent. During the Algerian War for Independence, the French ethnopsychiatrist and founder of the racist Algiers School, Antoine Porot, charged his patients with a never-before-seen strain of melancholy he called “homicidal.” “The melancholic Algerian does not commit suicide. He kills,” Fanon concurred. If the European melancholic is suicidal or auto-destructive, Fanon went on to say, his Algerian counterpart is hetero-destructive (222). Of course, Porot failed to account for the colonial conditions that informed this surprising impulse to enact violence upon others, an error Fanon would heroically redress. But for the anticolonial psychiatrist and philosopher, foregrounding the social and political formation of the unconscious was far from an end in itself. “In the colonial context… everything, including psychic pathologies, ought to be mobilized for the purpose of decolonization,” Gana writes of the Fanonian orientation to psychopathology—one that clearly underwrites his own. Said otherwise, the aggressive dimensions of Algerian melancholy subtend the potential for a revolutionary praxis to emerge. Here, Gana recites David Marriott: “The universalization of aggressivity during the insurgency is the self’s very liberating possibility; it is analytically what transforms melancholia, say, into resistance” (19).
Melancholy Acts begins with a commensurable figure of aggressivity: Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor who set himself aflame in 2010 on the streets of Sidi Bouzid, after his fruit cart was confiscated by a municipal police woman who slapped him and spat on his face. As we well know, the spectacular violence of his self-immolation catalyzed the Arab Spring, a regional movement in protest of the ongoing neoliberalization and authoritarianism that have wrecked “the promissory project of a decolonized, united, and emancipated Arab nation” (11). If Bouazizi’s suicide is to be understood as the conscious assumption of an unconscious death drive, it is equally an indictment of Arab despotism and settler-colonial Zionism, Gana argues (3). For Bouazizi and the spate of suicides that followed, auto-destruction indexes the melancholic attachment to unrealized forms of political sovereignty. “The choice of death is the only real choice that could be made at the right time before it is imposed upon you at a wrong time or before you are pushed towards it for any reason beyond your own power to choose such as disease, defeat, fear or poverty” (22-23), reflects Shaddād, the protagonist of Kanafani’s play, Al-Bāb (The Door).
These revelatory lines recall Freud’s articulation of the death drive in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), an essay that seriously undercuts Freud’s earlier claims to the organism’s self-preservational instincts. “The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion,” Freud ventures. The collective wishes to die only in its own fashion, because the organism can’t die in its own fashion, Gana might elsewhere have written, of the post-Bouazizi phenomenon of mass suicide. In Melancholy Acts, individual will is both fatally circumscribed by historical upheaval and animated by the specter of collectivity of which it is a fraction. Gana returns to Kanafani: “Man, in the final analysis, is a cause” (49).
In its provision of a traveling psychoanalytic theory of melancholy, Melancholy Acts stops short of Arab and Arabic theories of depressive pathologies and their cures. Its six chapters probe the critical and creative boons of the melancholic attachment to lost objects that, à la Freud, take the form of abstractions and ideals, not just actual persons. One chapter links the lost socialist utopia of post-1952 Egypt to a melancholic Arab left; another theorizes, through the films of Tunisian auteur Nouri Bouzid, melancholic manhood’s patriarchal reflexes; a fifth examines the politics of representing suicide protest, “a melancholy act par excellence” (41), through Hany Abu-Assad’s film Paradise Now; and a final engages Lacanian psychoanalysis to reconceive the mythic origins of Islam. But Gana’s translation and augmentation of a psychoanalytic theory for the postcolonial is achievement enough. In an astute reading of Kanafani’s short story, “Letter to Gaza,” he demonstrates the virtues of his critical paradigm, tracking the “chiastic reversal” of melancholy from the “colonial imposition” of loss to a consummate “decolonial disposition” (16).
Kanafani’s story is narrated by a Palestinian man who aspires to leave Gaza for the undulating foliage of a distant paradise, one Gana—a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles—knows all too well: California. But the narrator changes his mind upon learning that his niece, Nadia, has lost her leg, having thrown herself upon her siblings as bombs and flamethrowers pummeled the strip. In a letter addressed to his childhood friend, Mustafa, who has already emigrated to Sacramento, the speaker makes evident his refusal to abandon Gaza’s familiar scenes of wreckage and rubble. The speaker instead implores his friend to return. (“I won’t come to you. But you, return to us!”) In Gana’s reading, the narrator’s exhortation represents an attempt to melancholicize Mustafa—to awaken him to Nadia’s loss as an inroad into a shared political struggle (24-25). The narrator urges the conscious registration of the metonymic loss that Mustafa has unwittingly repressed: “Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth. Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you.”
