Night Is Day by Ghassan Salhab: To Linger in Seasons of Pain

The poet can’t keep up, he lags behind. In his defense I can only say that someone’s got to straggle in the rear. If only to pick up what’s been trampled and lost in the triumphal procession of objective laws.

— Wislawa Szymborska, Unrequired Reading, translated by Clare Cavanagh

1.

There is only one eye in Salhab Salhab’s Night Is Day (2024, Contretemps 345’). Strapped to his chest, a lone camera captures the first sparks of Lebanon’s 2019 uprising, its economic collapse, the pandemic, the Beirut port explosion of 2020, up until the first month of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. ^[1]My heartfelt thanks go to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Writing Residency, whose generous gift of time and space allowed me to finally write this essay. The shots are long, almost endless. Edited together, they make a nearly six-hour video that constitutes a timeline of all the events we have witnessed unfolding over the past five years.

At the outset of the uprising against the corruption of the regime, the director-protester walks amidst feminist groups. Their chants and banners are conveyed solely through his gaze, which meticulously lingers in the most minute of details: sweat beading on a young woman’s forehead, a clenched fist confronting anti-riot police, the tightening shadow of a soldier’s brow. The marching women carry the same broad banner they have borne for years as they mourn those lost to femicide. The banner reads: ُTHE PATRIARCHAL REGIME KILLS.

Despite the cynicism I have cultivated over the years as a means to survive in Beirut, I long for that banner, for what it distills, for its blunt poetry. But the present summons me back. Years into these scenes, and as I watch the video, I know that the patriarchal regime these women denounce will only grow more monstrous. If only I could warn them, those who are walking toward the future with such insistence and stubborn joy, not to rush. Because I am already in that future, and it is lacking, scarred by their absence: This one migrated, the other was deported, the other slipped into despair, another fell into silence. 

Just ten minutes in, and the pain the video evokes is already weighing on me. So why endure it?

2.

I stay put. Knowing how helplessness will only deepen. In Salhab’s retracing of the fates of these marchers, I feel something that touches my own intimate world. Among the protesters, I glimpse familiar faces: a friend who was once close but is now distant; he who has vanished; she who has gone cold; those who were high on dreams, now broken. I see him, he who stood on a ledge laughing, then fell. I count these familiar faces, seized not by nostalgia, nor by bitterness, but by a knot in my gut warning of the cruelty yet to come. Still, I continue watching, as though I had entrusted Salhab with carving a cinematic language just for me, one that might reveal what was unspoken in the last five years. 

And as I count the faces in the crowd, I catch her.

She was walking down Bechara El-Khoury street, hiding behind her thick glasses, strands of red hair, and a scarf around her neck. How the euphoria that intoxicated everyone that day could not quiet the anxiety inside her. How uneasy she felt about all that sudden joy, her weariness of it all, even of the streets that were welcoming her, for the first time. How she avoided friends, specters of the past, recent and old. She glances suddenly at the camera—not more than a second—before walking on. That same day she will tell her analyst about her consuming anxiety, how ghosts marched beside her by day and kept her company at night.

3.

Season: Violence

Location: Helou Military Station

A line of protestors demand the release of their detained comrades. I hunt for the red-haired woman. She is nowhere. But you were there, smoking, waiting for the boys to be released. You don’t know their names, and still, you feel an old love for them. How a man in his fifties approached you, terrified: the CIA are onto him, Soviet planes above, the military poisoning his food. He spilled it in one breath. You meet his eyes, light his cigarette, and believe every word he says. Because his paranoia rhymes with yours as you whisper every morning, NO TRUST. DOWN WITH THE GANG. Except that you have access to chemicals and therapy. He doesn’t. 

Pain is the compass of strangers. A week later, you will see the same fifty-year-old man—yes, the very same—with protesters on the Ring Bridge while tear gas lights up the horizon. Again, he comes to you (or was it always you who went to him?), this time with his little girl on his shoulders. He asks you to sing for the girl, who’s turning four. You chant with the crowd: Haaaaappy birrrrrthday tooooo youuuuu. You chant hoping that the demons chasing you would look away, even for a second. This is how the paranoid meet in the city square as they search for reassurance.

In the video, the seasons of our lives overlap and compress. Over these six long hours, the pain I have known across five years takes on new forms, shifting with each season, moving from the pain of empathy, to that of identification. On the screen, for example, a protest demanding the truth about a young protester’s cold-blooded murder. How you did not sleep that night, but stayed awake until dawn, weeping for that stranger who was suddenly familiar, almost family. How you urgently rushed to your analyst in black and how she too was all in black, as though the two of you had a funeral date. How you raced out of her clinic, while Shabjdeed rang in your head, as though he was whispering just for you: I don’t fear death / When it creeps I won’t hide / Stare it down cold, look it dead in the eyes. 

How you found your way to the murdered man’s town, sitting in your small car, red hair covering reddened eyes, watching angry mourners flocking. A car pulls up and a blonde woman stumbles out, held up by two men at her shoulders so she wouldn’t collapse from the weight of her grief. Everyone moves ahead. Everyone—except her. The widow stops and turns. She locks her eyes on the stranger (on your eyes). How in that moment, death looked you dead in the eyes. 

I kept watching, knowing now that Salhab would stretch the space, giving me room to dig deep into my memory, into deeper cruelty. I felt bound to the chair, yet gave in once more to the strange rhythm of time: times of pain on repeat, but thicker as they return, sharper, heavier. And in these fresh seasons of pain, gunfire drowns the chants, while feminist circles widen before masked men who now face rabid power with stones and their bare bodies.

4.

Salhab summons us not only to face the past, but to face our severed present. For now, I sit in the cinema, in the future of this footage, and I see a version of myself: I have already lost much, though not everything yet. The video is still in the spring of 2020, and I know the greater, crueler loss is yet to come. My pulse quickens, my breath tightens. If only I could warn the protesters walking with the Beirut port at their backs that THE PATRIARCHAL REGIME KILLS indeed, and that it will try to kill them on August 4, 2020. 

Salhab withholds the sound of the blast of three thousand tons of ammonium nitrate at the port. On screen, only a red cloud rising over rooftops, then long silence. It’s as if Salhab wants to shield us from the regime and its political and artistic machinery that turn ruin into spectacle. Instead, he carves space to signal the disaster, not as memory solidified as a monument to be gazed at, but as a crater that can only be legible to those standing at its rim, counting the dead.

Silence is suspended: An activist’s hoarse voice recites the names of the 236 victims, one full name after another with such precision. I choke with gratitude that he who survived the explosion by sheer luck is beside me, clutching my sweating hand. The protester reaches the unidentified bodies, those claimed by no one, and reads in a monotony that cuts through me: “Unidentified male… Unidentified male… Unidentified male… Unidentified female… Unidentified female… Unidentified female…” Salhab needed only to portray the port explosion as a crater and a number of unidentified bodies for me to realize that you have yet to touch bottom.

The video offers shifting meditations on silence and speech. It assembles a lexicon of pain: the cries of wounded protesters, live rounds fired by riot police, the grind of tank treads. As the chronology advances, down into the stillness of a pandemic that smothered the movement, the director lingers instead in rain, birds, thunder, flowers blowing in the wind, all the natural rhythms to which no one pays attention, and are yet composed of the very pulses by which our time moved through the pandemic. His video is full of sound and yet it is silent.

He leaves us wondering how a video stripped of dialogue and captions can still aim so precisely at the violence seeded in each returning season and reveal the fate of dreams that were bound to fail. And how these silent images can offer us a full treatment of silence, not as the suspension of speech, but as its continuation, even its distillation, when seasons of pain ultimately became unspeakable.

5.

Salhab folds language into the consecutive seasons of pain. He keeps circling a poetics of lack, testing how much words can bear. The video’s Arabic and English chapter titles carry that lack: phrases that sag under sorrow, aware of their own inadequacy, and at times speaking in opposing narrative voices, as though language itself is incapable of evoking all the pain with which the director is enmeshed, so much so that they became one.

Pain crosses the frame and claims the videomaker. Salhab portrays the last days of his ailing mother as she recedes from life and passes away. We see no footage of her. Only one scene featuring the hand of an old woman, and two black and white photographs of her with what seems to be her husband and another with Salhab as a child. Words on the screen narrate her death and funeral. There is no representation of this loss, except for words that narrate one of Salhab’s last conversations with her and her burial rites. 

The mother’s death unsettles the count of collective losses, while collective losses return to unsettle hers; each empties the other of significance. But both losses are ultimately one, because although there is no room for the director’s personal grief against the enormity of collective ruin, he cannot reckon with collective ruin without first mourning his own (nor can you, for that matter). In this new iteration, pain is intimate, even gentle.

How can a video about successive seasons of pain possibly end?

6.

In the last six minutes of the video, Israel begins exterminating Gaza. For the first time in the video, an audio clip appears in which the speaker, in a soft, gentle voice, recounts the anxiety that seeped into a conversation with a Palestinian friend in Bethlehem, and recalls how silence and emptiness took over the conversation. The video ends.

Date: October 17, 2023 (Can you believe it’s exactly four years since the beginning of the uprising?) 

Place: Al-Maamadani hospital in Gaza where 500 sick and injured Palestinian patients are murdered by Israel. 

How you downed a sedative. Sleep dropped like a stone. You dreamed of voices chanting a Palestinian intifada song: in green we shrouded him / in red we shrouded him / in white we shrouded him / in black we shrouded him. The chorus swells until you join them in song. How you opened your eyes to find marchers chanting the song in real time under your balcony. 

I do realize that Salhab includes no footage of that night. He couldn’t have. Because he was in Beirut and not in Gaza. And yet, his video does conjure the events of that night and the revelation that followed: that the murder of Palestinians has already entered your subconscious. Thus, through the evocation of silence and slowness as a cinematic practice, Salhab offers us the space for our affective memory to come into the light.

Writing now, I can’t clearly recall the details of how Gaza’s season of pain appears in the video. Perhaps it felt superfluous. Perhaps the years of resurrected pain have finally numbed me. Or perhaps genocide, unlike the events of 2019 and the port explosion and its aftershocks, has not yet receded, and its pain spreads, unrelenting.

7.

In Night Is Day, the seasons of pain cascade into collapse. Salhab offers a vast miniature of the successive seasons of pain: how your hope flared and then dissipated; how you feared for strangers you came to love; how joyful you felt cussing at the political class, oblivious to the tons of ammonium nitrate they had kept in store for you; and how the pandemic transformed you from a fearless protestor spitting in the face of the regime to one taking shelter in its authority as you were made to fear those very strangers that once taught you how to breathe through tear gas. 

But pain is about numbers too. How it all began with tens of thousands filling the streets; to the thousands who appear in Salhab’s videos; to the dozens who attend the video; and to the few who sat through the six-hour screening, those, like me, taking stock of what they lost. 

Through what his lens gathers, Salhab invites us to trace not only the hopes, but also the losses we never paused to count, because the ones that followed were always harsher. He lingers there with a slowness that resists the mechanical reproduction of pain and the historically imposed violence, particularly within the Lebanese context. In the film, slowness becomes an excavation of the minor and marginal details that have slipped out of the dominant narrative of successive losses.

And so, Ghassan Salhab’s video becomes a realm of memory—not an official archive or an authoritarian ledger, but the time we never had, one we thought we could never seize while the whirlpool of disasters pulled us under. Six hours of video are offered without affect or rhetoric, so we can summon pain, linger in it as it parades before our eyes, and watch our world bow to its seasons with violence and some tenderness.

We will accept Ghassan Salhab’s Night is Day as a gift, then. It may be a heavy one, but it offers us a space to pause, a moment to reflect, so we may finally trace the passing seasons of pain across cities, communities, relationships, bodies, and their memory so we might begin to mend.