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From Melancholy to ‘Fagadaan’: Naming the Pain of Gaza
By Haidar Eid 
It’s not romantic melancholy or existential questioning that you may see on the streets of Gaza. Rather, it’s a unique condition: Fagadaan, Loss.
In his memoir, Istanbul, Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk devotes an entire chapter to the concept of melancholy and its relationship to the city he loved and grew up in. He addresses the centrality of melancholy in Istanbul’s culture, in poetry, music, and fine arts.
The people of the ancient city, according to Pamuk, consider melancholy a badge of Turkish honor.
Pamuk skillfully attempts to understand the intensity of this sadness by explaining the city’s history after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Significantly, this great melancholy -transformed from a spiritual concept into a rational state – is linked to daily life in Istanbul.
The writer then discusses his own understanding of “communal sadness” in his city, not from a romantic Western perspective associated with individual isolation, loneliness, and nostalgia, but rather from what he calls the collective “dark mood” of millions of people—the sadness of an entire city!
In his opinion, it is a melancholy that connects the city’s people to one another. So it’s a melancholy that is different from 19th-century romanticism. Instead, it is a sadness that the city’s residents see themselves in and collectively accept. Thus, the city itself becomes a tangible embodiment of melancholy in terms of memory and place.
Here, I turn to Gaza and the collective melancholy that you can easily see in its streets, homes, schools, universities, destroyed cinemas, blue sea, sealed borders, and in the eyes of its women, men, and children! In this context, I am not writing about the melancholy of the city/ concentration camp/Bantustan.
Rather, like Istanbul, Gazan sadness is that in which we see ourselves as a single entity, not as individuals, each possessing existential melancholy in the Sartrean sense, but as an entity comprising the sadness of a city/strip. And like Istanbul, the city becomes a physical embodiment of this sadness, but one not tied to a vanished empire or a bygone glory!
It’s the sadness we see in the eyes of children who went to play soccer after school and saw the remains of their friends scattered on the field!
In the empty boats of fishermen returning before sunrise, as they were not allowed to fish beyond three miles!
In the eyes of a cancer patient who needed an injection of chemotherapy that was not available.
In the screams of an elderly man who lost 28 members of his family, leaving only him to become the grandfather, father, mother, brother, and sister to his grandson, the sole survivor of the massacre!
In the eyes of a father who was unable to provide a loaf of bread and a plate of thyme for his four daughters and his disabled wife!
In the screams of a woman who carried her two children and ran hurriedly out of the house under a night sky illuminated by phosphorus bombs!
In the wailing of a family whose home was destroyed on a harsh winter night!
In the screams of a child who couldn’t bear the cold in a tent provided by some relief committees!
In the wasted dignity of a man at the gates of an international kitchen waiting for two loaves of bread to feed his seven hungry children waiting for him in the house/room in Jabalia camp!
In the face of a doctor who knows his patient will die within 24 hours if he doesn’t receive the necessary treatment, which won’t arrive soon!
In the cries of an infant dying of starvation after the milk in her mother’s breasts dried up, and the necessary formula milk was unavailable!
In the grief of the 12-year-old girl whose parents and two brothers were killed and whose legs were amputated!
In the words of the little girl who prayed to God that her parents and siblings would not be killed before she died!
In the cry of a boy for his mother, who inhaled phosphorus for a prolonged period, causing her lungs to swell and die!
In the eyes of a sheikh who went to pray Fajr in a mosque that was no longer a mosque!
In the melody of a talented oud player who finds no one to listen to his music!
In the voice of a singer who no longer remembers his last gig!
In the eyes of children, drawing a Merkava tank, an F-16 fighter jet, and a phosphorus bomb!
So, it’s not romantic melancholy or existential questioning that you may see on the streets of Gaza. Rather, it’s a unique condition that the people of Gaza have found a name for, one never used before in Arabic, not to describe the countryside of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, the Algeria of Albert Camus, or the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre. It’s a condition that Gazans call “Fagadaan (loss)”.
This word is understood by the people of the Strip as a mixture of forgetfulness, oblivion, denial, disorientation, lack of focus, and wandering eyes, accompanied by a tremendous ability to transform great anxiety into an inspiring energy for a state of stubbornness and sumud that pleases neither Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, nor even the President of the United States and Arab leaders!
– Haidar Eid is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at the Al-Aqsa University, in the Gaza Strip. He is a research associate at the Center for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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