Palestine Outside Gaza: TWO EXPERIENCES

Irrespective of how the current situation plays out, the Palestinian spirit is too deeply entrenched to be defeated

- Sudhanva Deshpande

THAT feeling has no name. When you are racing to finish work on a book because you don’t know what the fate of the author is going to be. Will they be around to see the book? And if they are, will you be able to get it across to them? Or will they have to be satisfied with only a WhatsApp photo of the book? Above all, how on earth are they coping?

In early October 2023, we at LeftWord Books were working on Haidar Eid’s book Decolonising the Palestinian Mind. My colleague Vijay Prashad was near finishing the first round of edits, after which the text would have gone back to the author. We’d have taken in his corrections and suggestions, done another round of editing, and sent it back. We were aiming to have the book out in January 2024.

Then, October 7. As the scale of the Israeli attack started becoming horrifyingly clear, our first thoughts were for our author—Haidar Eid is Palestinian, taught at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University, where he lived with his wife and two daughters, aged six and seven. We had no idea what had happened to him. A couple of weeks later, Vijay received a short voice note from Haidar. At least he was alive.

Over the next few days, we received more voice notes, which we pieced together as a prologue to the book. “This book is being published as Gaza, where I live, is being annihilated,” it began. We dated the prologue October 26, the date of the last voice note.

Five days later, on October 31, we received a text from Haidar titled ‘Even Ghosts Weep in Gaza’. It was a short, lyrical, sad text, heartrending and poetic. Here’s an excerpt:

Ghosts do not cry. My ghost is an exception.

My ghost sings to the pretty woman sitting on a rock in the middle of what was once a home.