Starry, Starry Night: Fatima Hassouna's Loud Death
A loud death means doing the memory work against forgetfulness, not in some distant future, but right here, right now.
“This world was never meant for one/As beautiful as you”
- ‘Vincent’ - Don Mclean
Madness, they say, is what Vincent van Gogh suffered from. Someone out there probably has the answer, but I’m personally tempted to agree with the interpretation given in the song Vincent: “how you suffered for your sanity/And how you tried to set them free/They would not listen, they did not know how/Perhaps they'll listen now.”
This song remains one of my favorite ones. It moves me in a way that only truly haunting songs do.
But this was before I had heard of Fatima Hassouna's assassination.
Only after did I see her painting of Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night, and thought of the song again
- and that broke me.
[Please read the note on the use of the imagery of madness in this piece before continuing.1]
The 25 year old photojournalist was killed by the Israelis in Gaza in the early morning hours of 16 April 2025 alongside 10 relatives, including her pregnant sister and her five other siblings.2
This came a day after the documentary of which she is the protagonist, Sepideh Farsi's Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, was selected for the Festival de Cannes.3 It is very conceivable that this is why she was killed. It is also conceivable that it was unrelated, because the Israelis have already killed at least 200 journalists since the genocide started and Fatima, as far as they were concerned, was just one more.
Back to Vincent. The song ends with a somber note:
Now I think I know/What you tried to say to me/And how you suffered for your sanity/And how you tried to set them free/They would not listen, they're not listening still/Perhaps they never will.
Perhaps they never will. They may still do so, and I think that, ultimately, listening to nan Gogh is something we choose to do, an act that may benefits us rather than nan Gogh himself. It's too late for him, it's been too late for a long time. Listening to “one as beautiful as you” is a call for self-reflection - the beauty is already in/with Van Gogh, and that will never change. It's a haunting beauty though, for he died by suicide aged only 37.
It's hard not to be struck by a sense of unease in Vincent for the Vincent he is talking to cannot respond back. We can though, and those people in the audience paying attention to every sung word - maybe they did so on that night. One comment in the YouTube video of the concert calls the song “hauntingly beautiful,” and I think it's because it does not pretend to be about anything other than what it is. Vincent is a song about a man, a 19th century painter widely believed to be among the greatest of all time, and one who was terribly misunderstood in his own time.4
The love letter that is Vincent is nothing more than that, a love letter. It's because it wastes no time pretending to be anything other than that we get to reflect on its meaning. The letter is addressed to a man who will never be able to read it, so those of us who can are invited - or perhaps invite ourselves - to be Vincent van Gogh, at least for a few minutes. What would the world have had to be for the letter to be one of undefiant joy instead - in other words, for van Gogh to be happy, accepted, understood?
I genuinely don't know. It's too far back in the past and in a context I'm not as familiar with. What I do know is that Mahmoud Darwish spoke of madness as well, and unlike the poetic madness that comes about from a profound loneliness as we see in Vincent, the madness that Darwish speaks of plagued those who shut themselves off from the world - in order to kill it.
The Madness They Suffer From
In 1982, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was in Beirut when the city was besieged by the Israelis. As part of his book "Memory for Forgetfulness" (ذاكرة النسيان) Darwish mentioned an acquaintance of his who could not believe that a siege was underway "unless it was written in Hebrew," and "since Israeli newspapers had not yet reached him, he wouldn't acknowledge that Beirut was under siege."
The they in Mahmoud Darwish's cry for sobriety have brought themselves to a state of amoral madness, of moral monstrosity in the Baldwinian sense, that which comes from refusing to be responsible for our world. The Israelis who were - and most still are - unable to actually see Darwish and understand what he was saying have since wreaked even more death and destruction than the hell he witnessed. Indeed, the ongoing genocide in Gaza is on a different scale than the 1982 siege of Beirut that he experienced, when “لقد جنّت السماء” - “the sky [had] gone crazy.”
Parallel to his use of the imagery of madness in his poem was the tension between memory and forgetfulness.5 Even as he was witnessing the Israeli hell on Earth he could feel it slipping away into oblivion. Why wouldn't he? Over three decades had already passed since the Nakba that deprived him of a homeland, and everything that had happened since proved to him that Israel was not done destroying Palestine. They were even destroying the Lebanese capital - all of that to destroy the Palestine they built their embodined forgetfulness over.
Spartacus in Palestine
There is a scene in Elia Suleiman's 2009 film The Time That Remains that has stuck with me for the past few days. Students at a Nazareth school, including a young Elia himself, are shown Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film Spartacus. The year is 1970, three years into the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem that continues to this day.
Darwish had every reason to believe that memory was not inevitable, that History with a capital H does not judge - and even if it did, that it wouldn't be enough.
We are asked to embody memory instead, to be that moral arbitrer before the horrors of our present are relegated to our past. This requires us, somehow, to take in the impossible cruelty of this fact: Fatima's starry starry night was often one of drones and jets. The swirling stars in the original van Gogh painting were silent, at least to us.6 That's why we often animate them and put them to music.
Fatima painted Starry Night in broad daylight on 18 April 2023, months before the genocide even started, and almost exactly two years before the Israelis killed her. In other words, her swirling stars we know were extremely loud. One of those stars killed her and so many of her loved ones.
She was 23 years old when she painted Starry Night, her entire life spent in a world where Gaza was under an Israeli blockade, partially and then fully. She was 15 the last time the Israelis bombed Gaza as intensely as they would do again not long after Fatima painted those swirling skies. Were they also silent when she imagined them? Did she know that the madness that Darwish spoke of would one day come for her too? Not the misunderstood madness of van Gogh, but rather the cowardly madness of those who are not listening still, and perhaps never will.
Her very last Instagram post, on 15 April 2025, the day before her assassination, was of the sunset in Gaza. “It’s the first sunset in a long time.” She was supposed to get married a few days later, the date was already set in 2023, undoubtedly delayed by the genocide.
When she announced her engagement, not long after painting Starry Night, she told us:
أستطيعُ أن أشعرَ بها جيّداً، اللحظةُ التي يلتقي فيها اثنان، فتصبحُ الدُنيا لا شيء، أستطيعُ أن أقرأ كلّ ما تقولهُ عيونهم، لأنها لا تقولُ شيئاً، ولأنّ وجودَ الآخر هو من يفعلُ ذلك، فتعيشُ اللحظةُ حينها.
My translation:
I can feel it again, the moment two people meet. The world disappears. I can read everything your eyes say because they say nothing. It is your presence that speaks, and allows us to live in the moment.
It is a powerful thing: the woman who reproduced the silent Starry Night in a Gaza whose nights were often anything but had enough presence of mind to listen to wordlessness in her love's eyes, something the most privileged among us struggle to do. I am happy to know that she experienced love. Those who murdered her cannot possibly do so, not while listening to the wordlessness she describes, the one that came out of Gaza despite Israel.
I try and pity those who do not experience this while grieving her. I fail, and I'm left with rage. Their insatiable, cowardly need to kill those who bare witness to their crimes will one day fail them. I only wish it had failed before taking Fatima from a world that desperately needs a soul as beautiful as hers.
Fatima knew that death was never far away. Being a photojournalist in Gaza came with high risks because the enemy is Israel, and Israel kills photographers and journalists. Israel kills artists and poets too, and Fatima was all four of those.
This is why she made a request of us all:
إذا متُّ، أريد موتًا صاخبًا. لا أريد أن أكون مجرد خبر عاجل، أو مجرد رقم في مجموعة، أريد موتًا يسمعه العالم، وأثرًا يبقى عبر الزمن، وصورة خالدة لا يمحى أثرها بمرور الزمان أو المكان
If I die, I want a loud death. I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.
We know what to do then, right?
A loud death means doing the memory work against forgetfulness, not in some distant future, but right here, right now. All memories eventually fade, but we can choose not to let them pass into that ‘peace’ of the graves that Israel so desperately seeks. Such a ‘peace’ could only haunt us, and we too would suffer from the madness that created the moral monsters that killed Fatima Hassouna.
Remember Fatima. Fight for the living. Free Palestine.
Madness and its various imageries are commonly used in an ableist way. As someone with autism and ADHD, I'm no stranger to that type of use. Unfortunately, I don't yet know how to express what I'm trying to express here without using that vocabulary, particularly as it was used in a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, and that Van Gogh was himself ‘accused’ of being mad. I believe madness can be healing just as it can be deadly.
Darwish himself wrote: “لستُ نادماً على شيء ، فما زلت قادراً على الجنون ، وعلى الكتابة ، وعلى الحنين” - My translation: “I don't regret anything for I am still capable of madness, of writing, and of yearning”
Both of her parents survived the strike, although I don't know if her father knows because he was described as being unconscious and in critical condition. Her mother is conscious and according to Fatima's cousin Salma al-Suwairki “is now in shock and is only thinking and talking about Fatima.”
This was as of 18 April 2025. I haven't seen an update anywhere. If you know more, let me know and I'll update the info here.
Hassouna was happy when Farsi told her the news, but she said she would only try and come if she was able to go back to Gaza soon after. There was little chance she would be allowed to leave, and no chance the Israelis would ever let her go back to Gaza as their goal is to force as many Palestinians as possible into exile.
The Van Gogh museum tells us he was not necessarily misunderstood because “his fellow artists appreciated” his paintings, but that's missing the forest for the trees. Van Gogh wanted the wider world to appreciate them too.
The English title was in fact that, “memory for forgetfulness” (the Arabic, ذاكرة النسيان, can be also translated as “memory of forgetfulness”)
They may have been loud to Van Gogh himself. I even suspect they were.