Elegies
Dear friends,
After writing this personal obituary of Khaled Khalifa—which The Markaz Review were kind enough to publish for his arba’een—events in Palestine, or rather the civilized world’s response to events in Palestine, upstaged practically everything in my life. The horror forced me back into a state of engagement I hadn’t really experienced since the Arab Spring. This essay, drawing on my 2011 visit to Gaza and published yesterday in The Rumpus, is one consequence:
Your birthplace was a locus where the pain of being in the world was concentrated and magnified. Whether or not I believed in a liberal commonwealth that would eventually save you, here was humanity’s terminus. There is a part of being human that is so unjust and unconscionable, so far removed from anything morally conceivable, you have to recognize that all of being human is impossible. Impossible to accept or wash your hands of. Impossible to put right. And instead of resistance and solidarity you can only grieve.
Another consequence is a fair amount of anger and distress. Those have as their principal object the institutions and abstractions that make up our impossibly frustrating world. But their objects also include many of the discourses and practices that claim to be doing good by standing up for those institutions and abstractions. The only thing I have to say is that, precisely because of all that’s been happening, I know who I am even better than I did back in 2011.
The most important event upstaged by Palestine was the death by thrombosis of my friend Mohab Nasr (1962-2023), whom I hadn’t been in touch with for over a year. My train arrived an hour or so too late for the funeral, but it meant something to be in Alexandria for Mohab.
Mohab was a very great poet—perhaps one of the greatest ever to write in modern Arabic—and he had absolutely no clue how to promote himself or accumulate literary real estate. In this sense, his career was tragic. But it was also a rare triumph. He was also a philosopher, a moralist of the highest order, and a true teacher; he worked as a schoolteacher for many years.
At an early age, Mohab became the husband of the Student Movement activist Arwa Saleh, something he told me about with incredible generosity of spirit while I wrote The Crocodiles.
I leave you with something Mohab said to me when I interviewed him in 2012, which seems to sum up both tragedy and triumph:
When the writer creates an image to be attached to, they stand directly behind that image and lionize it as a “conviction”—a mask: when you remove it the writer goes away with it, vapourizes. The real writer places their image at a distance, knowing that any image is a moment out of something fluid, a portion of existence in flux; and when they place it between the covers of a book, they are also placing it between two brackets of doubt.