Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Nouri Gana. Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 332 pp.

Review by Karim Mattar

1 August 2024

When I met the Lebanese writer and public intellectual Elias Khoury after a talk in Oxford in 2012, I asked him about melancholy in the Palestinian case. With my mind at the time immersed in Orhan Pamuk’s writings on hüzün, I was curious whether the author of Gate of the Sun (Bāb al-Shams, 1998) thought that the affect of unresolved attachment to a lost homeland had any aesthetic value or political force. His reply was swift and sharp. “No, Karim,” he said, “you must be angry!”

Nouri Gana’s new book Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World squares the circle of Khoury’s and my positions in that exchange. Set in the postlapsarian garden of Arab literary and cultural production in the wake of the titular defeats of 1948 (the Nakba, or Catastrophe) and 1967 (the Naksa, or Setback), Melancholy Acts tells the story of how loss—with all of its associated attachments, moods, and desires—is transformed by writers, artists, intellectuals, and other public figures from across the region into a living and collective archive of resistance to an intolerable reality. Picking up from Constantine Zurayk’s and Edward Said’s descriptions of 1948 as an existential crisis for the Arab world writ large, Gana’s book is rightly centered around Palestine, the archetypal and as-yet-unresolved loss of the Arab twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, its analyses stretch from Algeria to Tunisia to Egypt to Syria to Iraq, and the sources of anguish in its case studies include local autocracies and global imperialism in addition to Zionism as these combined forces have skewed and distorted the incomplete, indeed often catastrophic project of Arab modernity. The book, in short, is a tour de force reading of the contemporary Arab predicament.

A professor of comparative literature at University of California, Los Angeles, Gana offers nimble and knowledgeable readings of a wide range of poems, novels, films, theoretical works, and political texts from the region. Taken together, they trace the collective psychic effects of the hurt of history. What cumulatively emerges is an understanding of the contemporary Arab diwan—of Arab contemporaneity per se—as structured and even defined by melancholy, down to its core. For Gana, Arab culture marks

a psychoaffective response to the ever-deepening crisis of the postcolonial project of national liberation and social transformation, and . . . a desperate or despairing response to the unyielding hegemony of the joined-up forces of local despotism, apartheid Zionism, and global neoliberal imperialism. [p. 2]

It is precisely here, Gana shows, that the revolutionary potential of the culture lies. For in its melancholy attachments to Arab history’s others, its dispossessed, and its ghosts (Palestine, pan-Arabism, socialism, feminism, and more), Arab culture in its totality becomes one of proud and undeterred commitment (iltizām) to righting the wrongs of history, to restorative justice. If in the Arab world this seems hopeless, Gana—following György Lukács and Theodor Adorno—reminds us that “the hopelessness of proactive commitment to a lost cause pales in comparison to the hopelessness of abandoning commitment altogether” (pp. 8–9). Melancholy as commitment, or per Ghassan Kanafani, the “uprising of melancholy” (intifāḍat al-ḥuzn) (p. 25)—this is the original thesis at the heart of Gana’s book, with multiple ramifications for our understanding of revolutionary cultural practices in the Arab world and beyond.

Melancholy Acts opens with two suicides—that of the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in 2010, which instigated the Tunisian Revolution and the Arab Spring, and that of the Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi in 1982, in protest of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year. While tragic, these acts testify to “alternative modes of self-realization in the face of the ‘subjective impasses’” produced by their milieus, and so dramatically establish the melancholy frame through which Gana reads Arab culture (p. 3). Chapter 1 develops the notion of the “act” via literary, cultural, and theoretical works of commitment, and features capsule readings of Nouri Bouzid, Saadallah Wannous, Chokri Mabkhout, Youssef Chahine, Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Annemarie Jacir, and others that set the scene for the book. Chapter 2 opens and masterfully addresses the Adornian question of Arabic poetry after the Nakba via Nizār Qabbānī, Adonis, and especially Darwish. Chapter 3 explores the fate of the Arab left under Nasserism and after the Naksa via a close reading of Mahfouz’s novel The Beggar (Al-Shaḥḥadh, 1965). Chapter 4 dives into the question of Arab masculinity under the neo-patriarchal rule of Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia, as represented in modern Tunisian cinema (Moufida Tlatli, Nadia Fares, Férid Boughedir, Bouzid, and others). Chapter 5 addresses globalized discourses of suicidal violence via a close reading of Hany Abu-Assad’s film Paradise Now (2005), which productively complicates the familiar narrative of inhuman terror.  And Chapter 6 systematically takes apart the French-Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama’s dehistoricizing critique of Islamic revivalism while critically questioning the myths of origin inherent to the movement in its many regional manifestations. It is fitting that the book should end with this critique, for as he pursues it, Gana forwards an outline for an alternative and specifically feminine cultural origin that cuts across the profane triptych of patriarchy, authoritarianism, and imperialism that continues to bedevil the Arab world.

Melancholy Acts thus closes with an opening to reimagine the future of the Arab world. Suggesting a honing of Gana’s thought since his first book, Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (2011), it powerfully foregrounds what is simply unacceptable and so unmournable in Arab history as registered in its contemporary textual archive, and revolutionizes the concept of melancholy by redefining it as a form of necessary commitment rather than unhealthy attachment to loss.[1] All in all, the book comprises one of the most significant readings of Arab contemporaneity that we have.

[1] See Nouri Gana, Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (Lewisburg, Pa., 2011).