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 21st 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 contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
