In his memoir I Saw Ramallah (رأيت رام الله), the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti recounts returning to the West Bank in the mid-1990s after the Oslo Accords, an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization that Edward Said famously described as the “Palestinian Versailles”. Inaugurating a misleadingly titled “peace process”, the terms of that agreement permitted many Palestinians in exile to return to the land that would, apparently, one day become a Palestinian state. History has proved Said right: the limited autonomy for the Palestinians provisioned by Oslo ultimately enabled an entrenchment of Israeli occupation and apartheid, and has in part led us to where we are today.

For Barghouti at the time, the return to his homeland was bittersweet; it meant confronting not the idea of Palestine, but the place itself. Arriving in his ancestral town, Deir Ghassaneh, he finds the buildings he knew from childhood still standing, and remarks, in this translation by Ahdaf Soueif: “Buildings are not the only things destroyed by time. The imagination of the poet is preordained for destruction. Suddenly my imagination collapses like a building.”

Barghouti is playing here upon the motif of “standing on the ruins”, al-wuquf ‘ala-l-atlal – a motif that is as old as the oldest versions of the qasida or ode, which is itself the oldest of Arabic poetic forms. The traditional qasida begins with a prelude, called the nasib, which features particular motifs. These include: recalling the departed caravan and the vanished beloved, and standing upon the ruins of the abandoned campsite and weeping. Subversions of the motif of standing on the ruins are almost as old as the motif itself. But whether it is being riffed upon or summoned sincerely, any mention of al-atlal in Arabic literature and the visual arts immediately invokes an ancient literary heritage stretching all the way back to the seven canonical Mu‘allaqat or “hanging odes” of the pre-Islamic Jahiliyya period. The sixth-century poet-king Imru’ al-Qais began his mu‘allaqa with the words:

قفا نبكِ من ذكرى حبيبِِ ومنزلِ
بسقط اللِّوى بين الدخولِ فَحوملِ

Halt, two friends, and we will weep for the memory of one beloved

and an abode at the edge of the dune between al-Dakhul and Hawmal.

The opening imperative verb, stop or halt, is in the dual form: Suzanne Stetkevych has translated it as “Halt, two friends”, while other scholars have suggested that the “two” being addressed are the poet’s sword and his steed. Either way, the weeping is explicitly not solitary: both within the framework of the poem, and in relation to the listener/reader, this is a public show of grief.

From the very earliest appearances of the poetic nasib, the loss of a particular beloved was always also a figure for communal grief over the ravages of time. In itinerant life, time’s passage is marked geographically. Standing on the ruins for the bedouin poet is the point of departure both verbally and physically, as the poet, and by extension his or her people, move on from the site of the abandoned encampment.

In English, “ruins” signifies the remains of an architectural structure that has been “ruined” by the natural effect of time and weather, or suddenly destroyed by man. While the Arabic atlal (singular: talal) is translated variously as ruins or traces, its root relates to the act of looking, or looking out upon. From talla we have to emerge, to rise, to loom up, come into view, to command a view of, to overlook, to look out, or peek out upon, and from there we have that which rises into view, that which remains standing. Etymologically in Arabic these material traces of the past are there to be looked at.

Freud once suggested that to look at ruins might be an analogue for the work of good psychoanalysis. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that the traces of our past experiences lie mixed together in our psyches, just as Rome contains the architectural remnants of all of its various histories, by which “everything is somehow preserved and […] in suitable circumstances […] can once more be brought to light”. But looking at the ruins strikes me as a better analogue for the work of mourning: as Freud himself argued in Mourning and Melancholia, proper mourning requires a person to acknowledge what exactly they have lost. If a loss is not brought into the full light of consciousness, grief curdles into melancholia. Stopping to perceive the traces of what is there no longer, then, precisely enacts the psychic movement of looking, acknowledging, and then, eventually, separating. Centuries before the development of the discipline of psychoanalysis and its discursive equipment, the Jahiliyya poets’ call to stand on the ruins and weep before moving on from the site of loss was a poeticised, communal version of an interior mental process.

According to Melanie Klein, who developed out of Freud’s work on mourning the concept of the infantile depressive position, a child’s development involves the ultimately shattering understanding that his or her loved objects are impermanent. This becomes a template for all subsequent experiences of grief. If the baby can tolerate the first “loss” of the mother’s breast, it develops the capacity to think. Confronted finally with the mother’s separateness, the child is cast out at sea and, painfully, becomes an individual.

Healthy mourning is grounded in the ability to separate: I do not own the objects of my love, nor are they perfect, nor are they part of me; I cannot control them. Crucially, mourning requires a person – whether as a child or as an adult – to recognise that they are not omnipotent, that they are capable of being bad and of having destructive thoughts. In other words, mourning involves not only coming to terms with your lost or departed loved object (or beloved), but also with your own vulnerability and finitude. In Klein’s model, what you get in exchange for mourning your own omnipotence is not just a confrontation with the bitterness of life, as Freud had it, but a richer experience of living and, above all, the ability to love.

I think the impulse to make art often begins with looking at ruins or traces – what Adrienne Rich called “diving into the wreck” in her poem of that title, whose speaker is an underwater archaeologist wearing a mask and flippers – even when this is not obvious to the reader or viewer. I do not mean to say that all art is reparative, nor do I believe that writing poetry is necessarily therapeutic (although I don’t doubt that for some people it might be), nor that it frequently involves a healthful “processing” of loss. Literary writing might as easily be an expression of melancholic avoidance (like me, writing this lecture) or obsessive repetition, or an ideological instrument or projection of fantasy. Still, loss strikes me as a common starting point, and from this point of stopping-to-look at mortality and the passing of time, a writer can launch off into other zones and climes.

In the qasida, the nasib literally gives way to the rahil, the poet’s crossing of the desert, followed by the fakhr, the boast of the warrior and his tribe, and sometimes the panegyric, or madih. An ancient correlate to this pattern in the visual arts might take us to the story recounted by Pliny the Elder of the so-called “Corinthian maid” who, in 600 BC, supposedly outlined her lover’s shadow on the wall in chalk before he left for battle. Her father, a potter, developed from this primitive silhouette the art of modelling clay in relief. His daughter’s original drawing might mark an early instance in the Western tradition of a trace of the departed as a spring for mimetic art: atlal of another kind. The trace that both presences an absence and reminds us that it is gone at the same time.

Traces and ruins persisted in Arabic poetry into the twentieth century, but with less frequency and more figuratively. After all, centuries had passed since the age of the itinerant bard packing up his tent, and with the spread of modernist ideas into Arabic literary writing, the strict formal properties of the qasida began to disintegrate. Still, the motif recurred, referentially, sometimes reverently.

Many Palestinian poets have made use of the trope to address the 1948 Nakba – the massacre and dispossession of Palestinians by Zionist forces, which enabled the founding of the Israeli state – the material traces of which are still to be found in the ruins of Palestinian houses, often on the edges of cities or hidden beneath forests of pine trees planted by the Jewish National Fund.

From Rashid Hussein’s Jaffa in “Love and the Ghetto” (“الحب والجيتو”), to Fawzi Bakri’s Jerusalem in “On the Ruins of a City” (“ﻋﻠﻰ ﺃﻁﻼل ﺍلمدينة”), to Mahmoud Darwish’s “Standing Before the Ruins of al-Birweh” (“طلَّليةُ البروة”), in which he invokes Imru’ al-Qais’s well-known dual imperative to “halt” at the wreckage of his demolished village and explicitly alludes to tropes of “the mu‘allaqat of the Jahiliyya”, these writers do not mourn tents or temporary dwellings from which they have naturally departed, but rather the homes and towns from which they have been forcibly displaced, and which have since been destroyed or appropriated.

Fadwa Tuqan opens her elegy for Jaffa, “I Will Not Cry” (“لن أبكي”), like this:

على أبواب يافا يا أحبائي
وفي فوضى حطام الدور بين الردمِ والشوكِ
وقفتُ وقلتُ للعينين:
قفا نبكِ
على أطلالِ من رحلوا وفاتوها
تنادي من بناها الدارْ
وتنعي من بناها الدارْ…

At the gates of Jaffa my loves

and in the chaos of the destroyed houses, amidst the rubble and thorns

I stopped and said to my two eyes:

Stop, let us weep

Over the ruins of those who have departed and passed away

Calling out for those who built the house

and mourning for those who built the house.

Tuqan composed this poem in the shadow of the 1967 war: Israel’s expansion of its occupation to include East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza perversely meant that many Palestinians, including refugees from cities like Haifa and Jaffa, were suddenly able to visit the land from which they had been expelled 19 years earlier. Tuqan’s poem narrates this painful opportunity to look upon the ruined houses of Jaffa, a city subjected to violent ethnic cleansing in 1948.

All of these writers deviate from the structure of the traditional nasib – placing the ruins in the middle of a poem, or at the end, or as a recurrent image. The ruins cannot be a point of “departure” in that older sense: the poet cannot, or will not, move on. Consolation – the end of mourning – is not possible when a Nakba is ongoing. (In the first year alone after the 1967 occupation, 7,000 homes were confiscated or demolished, rendering 50,000 people homeless; and the demolition of Palestinian homes has never stopped being an Israeli policy of both punishment and deterrence in a project that seeks to appropriate the land and expel the people.)

Incomplete or failed mourning, according to Melanie Klein, has pathological consequences. These might include: depression, mania, the incapacity to form deep abiding relationships, and a desire to halt time so that the loss cannot be transformed into a past event. What, then, about a loss that is ongoing, that cannot by definition be transformed into a past event?

Abdaljawad Omar has written that Palestinians are fighting for the “right to mourn”, and that they live suspended in “a collective state of perpetual deferral” of this process: “The constancy of loss fractures the temporality essential for mourning, rendering it a luxury unattainable amidst relentless and recurrent bereavement.”

Traditional Western psychoanalytic literature rarely accounts for the ways in which mourning is social – just as giving birth is bodily but also social, bound up in societal norms and practices. In the West, the extinction of culturally engrained collective mourning practices might be blamed on secularisation, and even, in part, on Freud’s own foundational essay Mourning and Melancholia, which so decisively defined mourning as an individual experience confined to the privacy of the mind.

Condolence practices are more structured in Southern and Eastern societies that remain both religiously inflected and more communal: in Islam the house of condolences is open for three days, while widows take four months and 10 days to mourn; Islamic and Eastern Christian traditions mark the 40th day after a death, while in Hinduism, visitors attend the grieving for 12; in China and Greece, mourning involves wailing and lamentation among friends and neighbours, and while three days, 11 days, 100 days may seem like nothing to the mourner, who may experience a disjuncture between these communal rituals and the wilder psychic life of their grief, the rigidity of the structure can be helpful as a framework – a string of motifs, if you will.

While a resistance to consolation might be a collective political act, a refusal to “let go” of Palestine (the old may die, but the young will not forget), everyday mourning practices remain crucial nodes of Palestinian sociality and cohesion. Specifically, the emotive and galvanising power of commemorating the martyr – celebrating the life and sacrifice of a person slain by Israel – renders such funerals a site of communal defiance and revolt.

This is a central reason why Israel has for decades sought deliberately to obstruct Palestinian mourning. Israeli state forces repeatedly and violently interrupt funeral processions, for example, and since the 1960s they have maintained a practice of withholding the bodies of Palestinians they have killed – either keeping them refrigerated as a form of torture for the family and a bargaining tool, or in secret burial sites in closed military zones called the “cemeteries of numbers”.

Without the body of the lost loved one, without the proof of death or the possibility of ordinary funerary rites, complete mourning becomes difficult. Israeli police and settlers have historically desecrated Palestinian burial sites and graves, often building parks and other public spaces over them, and in Gaza today, these violations are pushed to an extreme: by the fourth month of the genocide, the army had already destroyed 16 cemeteries, while the sheer volume of casualties has meant expedited burials without the usual procedures of washing the bodies, which are usually laid to rest in mass graves. These are calculated forms of violence, inflicted on both the psyche of the mourners and on the social body as a whole.

By destroying all the elements of a normal social life, the genocidal onslaught has blurred the boundary between life and death that is ordinarily ritualised through mourning practices. Hospitals and legal and municipal infrastructures have been mostly obliterated, as have all ordinary family structures and dynamics, and, of course, any sense of safety. The division between private and public life is also gone, which means there is no way, for example, that you might go home and grieve a loss in private, among the familiar objects and furnishings that give you comfort.

Every day for two years, we have seen the material ruins of Gaza: apartment buildings, houses, schools, hospitals, water lines, gardens. Aerial photographs show destruction so total it resembles ash, like the leavings of a fire, which, if you touched them with a finger, might crumble softly. The majority of housing is damaged or uninhabitable, and most people are living in tents, vulnerable not only to Israeli firepower but to the elements, storms, the freezing cold, poor sanitation.

At earlier stages of this horror there was much talk in the West of witnessing through the screen, of bearing witness, even of the etymological link in Arabic between witness, shahid (شاهد) and martyr, shaheed (شهيد). The much-witnessed, live-streamed genocide continued, and the images became, if anything, even more apocalyptic.

Witnessing, or looking and weeping, did not stop the atrocities, and the proliferation of images may even have conditioned people to normalise them, as they look at another mangled corpse covered in dust on a phone screen and then inevitably continue with their day. There have been other genocides in the history of our species; what has made this different seems to be the flagrancy with which it has been conducted, recorded and abetted.

How plainly we see the future, continuous with our past: casual, industrial-scale warfare perpetrated with a lucid sadism, powers that care neither for the Earth nor for other human beings, a world increasingly in ruins, dominated by a technocratic elite that considers entire populations disposable, and has the power to dispose of them.

While atlal (أطلال) in Arabic is close to a word for looking, invoking spectatorship, the word for rubble, anqadh (أنقاض) is related to the word for collapsing: it contains a trace of the word that turned it into debris. The root verb naqadh can mean to destroy, to demolish, to knock down, to cleave, to burst open, to violate, to break, to breach. It can also mean to nullify, to annul, to invalidate, to cancel, to quash, to veto. It is closely related to the word for contradiction, for paradox, for logical incompatibility.

There is a world of difference between weeping upon the remnants of an abandoned encampment and staring in horror at the ruins of a refugee camp, or plastic tents bombed by an F-16, or a school on fire. The ruins of Gaza are also the ruins of the human body. Organs outside flesh. Exploded corpses disinterred from the rubble in states of decomposition and dismemberment that make them almost impossible to identify. Only 700 of an estimated 10,000 bodies so far have been retrieved from the damage. These are not atlal, they are anqadh. They bear the marks of a deliberate violence that does not intend to end until all Palestinian life is rubble. They are not there to be looked at, wept over and abandoned.

According to the Kleinians, the worst pathological consequence of the failure to complete mourning is repetition: the model of the loss is endlessly acted out in psychic life. Certainly this has already been theorised with respect to Israel’s instrumentalising of Holocaust memory for the purposes of domination and warfare. “One way of understanding Israel that I think should not be controversial,” wrote Gabriel Winant, “is to say that it is a machine for the conversion of grief into power.”

The memorialising of the Nazi Holocaust in museums and other forms of pedagogy in the West seems designed to facilitate, in Naomi Klein’s words, not “re-membering” but rather re-traumatisation. “Looking back,” she writes in Doppelganger, “I am struck by what wasn’t a part of these strangely mechanical retellings. There was space for the surface-level emotions: horror at the atrocities, rage at the Nazis, a desire for revenge. But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame or guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms.” This is not mourning: this is a wound kept purposefully open to preclude reflection and justify genocidal violence through the logic and rhetoric of an ontological victimhood.

So what about the Palestinians? A friend of mine said recently that they think Palestinians repeat themselves more often than anyone else, that it has been one long repetition of the story since 1948 – we tell the same thing, again and again, we use the same symbols, again and again. It occurs to me to wonder whether, in this case, what might be seen as pathological in a clinical context – repetition and other unhealthy expressions of unprocessed grief – are actually normal responses to a pathological situation that has destroyed much of Palestinian social life, and therefore psychic life. Repetition can also be a kind of insistence. You burn down my house, I will build it again. You kill my parents, I will take up arms. After a so-called ceasefire in January 2025, 300,000 people walked home to the north of Gaza. The Israelis and Americans thought they would never return, because so many of their homes had been reduced to rubble, but they insisted on returning. Repetition is a tool against forgetting. Repetition is a kind of return, even if it is only of the repressed.

The devastating images that have flooded our screens sometimes galvanise and sometimes stupefy. Meanwhile, writers in Gaza who have somehow managed to produce work during the genocide provide us with insights beyond the paralysing visuals. Doha Kahlout’s “Escaping the Group Photographs” (“هروبٌ من صورِِ جماعية”), composed on her phone while living in a shared tent in Deir el-Balah, tracks the gropings of consciousness in the attempt to put the experience of war into language:

أسمِّي الأسماءَ العاجزةَ، والمعانيَ المقيدة، ألمُّ حصيلةَ قيدٍ وفكرةٍ، ونهرٍ يصبُّ جريان كلماته فيَّ، غمّسونِي بعقلِ الأولين، و بجناحين مبتورين قالوا: حَلِّقي، جثمتُ، وأُثقِلتُ، رفضتُ الإجابات، ورفضتني الصورةُ الجماعية.

I name the powerless names, the restricted definitions, and a pain resulting from restriction and from thought, with a river that pours a current of words into me, plunges me into the mind of the ancients. With a pair of clipped wings they say: fly. I crouch, weighed down, I reject the answers. The group photograph rejects me.

Deprived of connection, the poetic voice here is alienated: when she tries to speak, drawing on the collective language of her literary heritage, she stumbles. She is forsaken by their old motifs, their names, their images: these no longer serve their purpose, providing neither answers nor social cohesion, nor a sense of poetic lineage or community.

“Fenced in” by “bewilderment” (“سيّجتني الدَّهشة”) – an image that summons the besieged geography of Gaza – the poet’s mind is cut off from her literary community, present and historical. Expressing the fractured consciousness of a person trying to survive genocide, Kahlout’s text enacts, at the same time, the mental gestures of trying to overcome the fracturing, to put the shattered pieces together and make sense of experience.

“Consolation” – safety, wholeness – “waves” at her from the other side of the fence.

أعيتني الطمأنينة، ورأيتها خلف سياج الدهشة تلوّح لي، أعرِفُها وأعرِّفُ بها، ولا تصلُني.

She recognises tranquillity from afar, but is unable to touch it.

Another kind of ruin has dominated Western literary traditions. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European literature in particular, ruins are also the site of intense emotion: in this case, primarily of awe and immensity, and also the kind of wondrous terror that the philosopher and politician Edmund Burke theorised as an encounter with the sublime.

Writers like Shelley, Byron, Goethe and Schiller fixated on fragmentation and incompleteness, both architecturally and in literary form. They were concerned with how the mind, when faced with a ruin or fragment, experiences an urge to complete what was there no longer. Walter Benjamin would later describe ruins as “allegories of thinking itself”. Yet while the origins of these ideas about ruins, too, are ancient – harking back to the “ubi sunt” motif of medieval Latin and Old English poetry – the prevalence of the ruin motif during the Romantic period is tightly connected to the European global imperial expansion of the time, and the consequent outpouring of travel literature, philosophy and visual art in which ruins offered an occasion to contemplate the passing of entire civilisations. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” says the broken pedestal in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias”. If all empires are foredoomed to disappear, then to “look” upon these ruins and “despair” is not only to mourn the past, but to confront the finitude of the future, and the truth that, eventually, Western empires will fall also.

Despite its eventual decay into Romantic cliche, this form of ruin survived into Western literary modernism, perhaps most famously in the work of T. S. Eliot, whose long poem “The Waste Land” uses the fragment as both form and invocation, a “heap of broken images” from ancient history and classical literature, to grieve what civilisation has lost under the ravages of modernity.

Eliot exerted a foundational influence on a group of avant-gardist Arab poets in the mid-twentieth century: “The Waste Land” first appeared in Arabic translation by the poets Adonis and Yusuf el-Khal in the Beirut-based Shi‘r magazine in 1955. Contrary to their contemporaries who endorsed and enthusiastically debated the doctrine of literary commitment or iltizam, the Arab modernist poets of the 1950s and 60s associated with Shi‘r spoke less directly of politics, and their metaphoric pool was often mythological or placeless.

One of these poets was an Iraqi named Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. Al-Sayyab had spent the early part of his poetic career as a member of the Iraqi Communist Party, penning explicitly committed verse with a Marxist lens. His disillusion with and departure from the Party in the mid-1950s coincided with the development of a deeper mythical sensibility in his writing. His incantatory magnum opus, “أنشودة المطر” (“Rain Song”) has often been compared to “The Waste Land”, which opens with the cruel month of April “stirring / Dull roots with spring rain”. The rain represents the simultaneous effluence of fertility and weeping, revolution and tragedy. Gutters sob and the miserable drown in a sea “over which evening spreads its hands” – a very Eliotian phrase – while the sea holds the warmth of winter and the trembling of autumn, with death, birth, light and darkness mingling together.

أكاد أسمع النخيل يشرُب المطْر
وأسمع القرى تئّن، والمهاجريْن
يصارعون بالمجاذيف وبالقلوْع،
عواصف الخليج، والرعود، منشدين:
مطْر...
مطر...
مطر...

And I almost hear the palm trees drink the rain,

and I hear the villages groaning, and the refugees

struggling with oars and sails,

storms of the Gulf and the thunder, singing:

rain…

rain…

rain…

Composed just prior to the Iraqi revolution of 1958, while al-Sayyab was in exile in Kuwait, “Rain Song” articulates both a thirst for and a desolate terror of revolutionary change, through this activation of opposites, like memory and desire. The poem was itself formally revolutionary, owing to its departure from the multi-footed metrical system of traditional verse, and it came to be seen as a pioneering text in the Arabic free-verse movement.

In another of al-Sayyab’s later poems, “إرم ذات العماد” (“Iram of the Pillars”), a grandfather narrates “through the smoke from his cigarette” a vision of the legendary city of Iram, which he once came upon while fishing for oysters. He describes reaching the city’s vast white wall, and knocking at its formidable door, and the echo that resounds, delivering a shiver of death and the smell of strange other worlds. Recounting his hallucinatory encounter with this mythical place, he weeps over the dreams of his youth, and closes with the line “وعمري انقضى” (“and my life has passed”). Iram of the Pillars, mentioned passingly in Surat al-Fajr of the Quran, is a mysterious extinct city of unknown location whose people were punished for their sins and buried beneath the desert.

In popular culture, as in the story cycle A Thousand and One Nights, Iram functions as an objective correlative for the awe of a lost paradise – something like a lost city of Atlantis. In al-Sayyab’s poem, Iram also signifies the world of ancient, pre-Islamic poetry.

But al-Sayyab’s invocations of vanished structures are quite different from the Jahili poet’s contemplation of the atlal of the deserted encampment, where the traces of a tent leave marks in the sand. While he may purposefully invoke his pre-Islamic poetic heritage as well as figures from Mesopotamian mythology, the fragmentary and hallucinatory qualities of poems like “Iram of the Pillars”, with its interpolation of voices and method of mythic intertextuality, hold stronger traces of the more Western modernist traditions of Eliot, Frazer, Neruda and Lorca.

I don’t believe that literary forms or motifs have stable political meanings that are automatically passed on through chains of influence. But while al-Sayyab may not have shared Eliot’s political views, nevertheless a resonance of aesthetic and emotional experience is palpable. In al-Sayyab’s later poetry in particular, there is clearly something of Eliot’s weeping over the ruins of culture, and of his same pessimistic vision of modernity, of a need to shore “fragments against [the] ruins”. So what is the nature of this particular ruin-sadness, which might even approach a kind of civilisational grief?

A few years ago, in Athens, I was in a conversation at someone’s house with an archeologist who was elaborating on the differences between a ruin and a monument. A monument, he told us, is a ruin that has been arrested in its process of ruination. Unlike a real ruin, a monument has been preserved, and is usually well-lit, like the Parthenon. Meanwhile, real ruins continue to decay into nothingness. An Egyptian sitting beside me remarked, laughing, that, well, only some of the pyramids of Giza were preserved and illuminated, and that most of the pyramids were decaying beside them in the dark. Where was the line there between the monument and the ruin? she asked. Somewhere in the sand, replied the archeologist.

I think we could go further and suggest that the difference between a monument and a ruin lies in its relationship with the state. A monument is preserved by the state as a testament to its history, and in service of its continuity. A ruin presages the state’s decay.

I wonder, then: is turning a ruin into a monument a different kind of refusal to mourn? Unlike the Palestinian refusal of consolation while the struggle is ongoing – could this refusal instead signify that mania for permanence that, in Melanie Klein’s understanding, can result from failed mourning; a refusal or inability to accept the limits of the self, or to recognise the self’s destructive power?

The ruins and traces of ancient histories have so often been monumentalised to glorify and prop up not only Western empires, but younger nation-states across the world. The selective archeological digs of the Zionist state, Saddam Hussein’s appropriation of ancient Mesopotamian structures, Sisi’s renovation of ancient Egyptian sites to legitimise his rule. For the Romantics, the mind’s urge to complete what is no longer there when looking at the ruins was a communal emotion that produced a collective identity – part of that particular form of historical consciousness known as nostalgia, which has been so central to the development of nationalisms. Perhaps the Romantic poets were, in fact, in their acts of aesthetic contemplation, turning their ruins into monuments.

Western empire, in the form that it was known in the nineteenth century, did, of course, end. The tragedy that Shelley melancholically foresaw came to pass, and by 1960, most of the colonised world had fought for and won their freedom from European imperial powers; the UN was compelled to recognise the self-determination of the peoples of Asia and Africa as an inalienable right. “Colonial” was finally becoming a dirty word.

Much of the material structure of empire was dismantled, although some residue formed part of the newly independent states, whether in the form of legal and bureaucratic apparatus, or actual buildings. Rubble from destroyed colonial architectures was often repurposed – these haunted sites of crime and oppression, so loaded with symbolic power and racist ideologies, were of course made of bricks and cement and tiles that could be pulled apart and re-used – but sometimes villas were reappropriated wholesale by colonised elites, while evacuated military and police installations, and even prisons used by colonial armies, were reused by the governments that replaced them.

The US built many army bases around the world, but the exercise of American imperialism did not require the same kind of colonial architecture as the old European empires. US military interference was most often conducted covertly or by proxy, through the funding of militant opposition groups, assassinations and the indirect facilitation of coups d’etat. Meanwhile, the bulk of Cold War “containment” policies consisted in a strategy of soft power, including economic and cultural influence.

One instrument of American soft power was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which funded literary magazines and cultural initiatives across the world. In 1959, one of its Middle East specialists named Ivan Kats sent a memo to his boss, John Hunt (an undercover CIA agent), arguing that they needed to compete with Egyptian and Soviet influences in the region in favour of US interests. “The best approaches to the Middle East at the moment are through the arts and the social sciences … We can reach them, and disinterestedly, through music, painting, and literature.” In the literary arts, this strategy specifically involved promoting a certain model of writing that eschewed direct political engagement, elevating ambiguity and ambivalence as high-water marks of literary value.

Badr Shakir al-Sayyab died of a degenerative paralytic disease in December 1964, a few months after his poem “Iram of the Pillars” was published in the October 1964 issue of the Lebanese literary journal Hiwar, which was edited by the Palestinian poet Tawfiq Sayigh. During his final years, al-Sayyab had contributed regularly to this magazine with new poetry and “country reports” on cultural activity in Iraq. Along with translation work for the Franklin Book Program, this provided most of his income during the last months of his life. In April 1966, a year and a half after al-Sayyab’s death, The New York Times published a series of exposés revealing that the CCF, which had funded Hiwar and Franklin Books, was definitively a CIA front organisation.

In Lebanon, the CCF had initially wanted to fund Shi‘r magazine, but chose Hiwar on the basis that the Shi‘r poets’ engagement with Western modernism presented too radical a departure from the local poetic tradition, and therefore would not be sufficiently influential in an Arab cultural context. Badr Shakir al-Sayyab emerges as an interesting figure straddling both these modes – and indeed, like many others, published in both magazines – being at once modern and anti-Communist, with a modernism that was still enmeshed in his Arabic poetic lineage, leading all the way back to Imru’ al-Qais.

The revelation about the CCF was a scandal in the Arab world. Hiwar (which means “dialogue”) had already drawn suspicions across the literary scenes of Beirut, Cairo and Baghdad since at least the early 1960s, but after the Times exposé, these suspicions were confirmed. Multiple editorials slammed Hiwar as a bed of spies, and it was banned from entering Egypt. Other editorials made fun of the allegations. The poet Unsi al-Hajj wrote sarcastically:

“We have finally found someone who understands our importance, we Arab writers, and from the largest intelligence agency in the world. I imagined the late Badr Shakir al-Sayyab – who was at the forefront of those who published in Hiwar – behind his appearance of weakness, being the James Bond of Iraq.”

Academics and artists tend to have different attitudes to this history. Academics often look for patterns of causality and are more likely to think like conspiracy theorists, diagnosing a direct link between the money and the cultural output. Artists, on the other hand, are usually less conscious of the ways they might unwittingly channel ideologies; they find it hard to believe that a writer’s independent agency could be curtailed by a source of money they were not even aware of at the time of composition.

Each of these attitudes risks focusing too much on the individual, or on the individual text or artwork. American intelligence-funded art production rather created an ecology of artistic creation and dissemination in which the meaning of the funding only kicked in belatedly or discreetly. The structure of funding might, for instance, foster subtle forms of censorship by encouraging the selection – and composition – of certain kinds of work, while quietly ignoring others on the grounds of artistic merit; grounds that have always afforded the judge a large margin of plausible deniability.

Decades later, as US soft power is being rapidly dismantled, the disproportionate influence of American ideology suddenly appears obvious. Where the Biden administration expressed a final croaky gasp of a hypocritical establishment, still verbally committed to values like democracy and goodwill – a mask that was revealed to be very slippery indeed during Biden’s unrelenting funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – the Trump administration demonstrates little ideological consistency beyond the maskless slogan “America First”. It was always America first; they just used to be more quiet about it.

The CCF may be long gone, but much of the international and domestic infrastructure generated in the postwar period that has survived until now is rapidly disappearing. In this we can also include university funding, which attracts a huge proportion of international students and scholars, and has made the US the unrivalled centre of higher education and knowledge production.

What does it mean to grieve the loss of these structures? How can we look at the ruins of a monopolising and imperial system of support and power, one that long stifled the emergence of alternative world orders, whether cultural, economic or political?

Last year’s documentary film The Encampments provided a record of the day-by-day development of the 2024 protest movement at Columbia University. In the spring of that year, students demanded that their university disclose their investments and divest from the arms trade and Israeli surveillance companies. The film follows the student protesters’ negotiations with the university administration and the escalation of violent counter-protest, as well as how the encampment ignited a student movement across the country, and then across the world. Striking to observe is how skilfully and sensitively the footage is balanced between the Columbia encampments themselves and the Israeli destruction of Gaza.

There is no footage of burned bodies or dismembered children, those images we “witness” online. Rather, to see the rubble of Gaza on the big screen, in a room with other people, instead of on your phone or on your laptop, alone, is powerfully moving. To see it given as much space as the campus, as huge as New York City. To see the journalist Bisan Owda speaking charismatically to camera, sitting on a high chair, describing the response of Palestinians in Gaza to news of the protests. The film achieved visually what the students were insisting upon: that these geographies cannot be separated. That this is how they ought to be viewed, spliced together.

Many distinctions between the so-called First and Third Worlds are becoming blurred, anyway, with securities one would expect in the developed liberal West evaporating under an increasing authoritarianism that justifies, for example, the abductions of non-citizens by plainclothed ICE officers, and the fatal and unapologetic shooting of unarmed US citizens in broad daylight, alongside the blatant lying that one associates with totalitarian regimes. Meanwhile, the social contract between students and their universities has been broken. One of the principal subjects of The Encampments is Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the US who, by the time of the film’s release, had been abducted by ICE agents, with the seeming complicity of Columbia University, for his pro-Palestinian advocacy and placed in detention in Louisiana for deportation.

Israel’s accelerated genocide of the Palestinians made the contradictions in the US’s imperial architecture unbearable and untenable, and threatened it with collapse, setting into motion a process of destruction that we are still trying to look at, and that is sometimes hard to see.

As we look upon burned flesh in Gaza, we are also seeing the rubble of this older version of Western empire. How best to splice the frame, to keep them both in mind, to keep looking? How to refuse nostalgia, that basis of violent nationalism; how to grieve, and yet not submit to the romance of the ruin, nor the urge to make permanent what is vanishing?

How to mourn what ought to be mourned – and, on the other hand, to hold on to what must be carried through? How to maintain an understanding of the rubble here and the rubble there? It is not simply that the mask has fallen: the whole building is on fire.

And I almost hear the palm trees drink the rain,

and I hear the villages groaning, and the refugees

struggling with oars and sails,

storms of the Gulf and the thunder, singing:

rain…

rain…

rain…

A version of this text was presented as the Mahmoud Darwish Lecture at Brown University in February 2026.