To speak of the air is to touch desire: Bil hawa, havada, and the affective register of a promise held in the air

Abstract

At a burnt but still-functioning ATM in northern Lebanon, Omar tried to withdraw his salary and, once he could not, called it bil hawa [in the air]. In northern Cyprus, Meryem Hanım said the public-sector post she sought for her daughter remained havada [in the air]. Following our interlocutors’ lead, we read bil hawa and havada as affective registers through which the state is felt, addressed and lived as its material promises are held in the air, desired but unfulfilled. Drawing on Aretxaga’s and Navaro-Yashin’s accounts of political life and the phantasmatic, the paper traces this relation across northern Cyprus, a polity whose international recognition remains contested, and northern Lebanon, a  region within the Lebanese state shaped by historically uneven forms of state presence and public provision. Placing the two side by side, we explore how state promises bind beyond sovereign form, state failure, or waiting alone. Bil hawa and havada reveal a shared register of inhabiting the state after conflict, where futures remain unsettled and an ever-present elsewhere sharpens desire. The relation lives in the idiom: in Arabic, hawā [desire] and hawāʾ [air] share a root, and to speak of the air is already to touch     desire.