Ghayath Almadhoun Interviewed at Asymptote

The Palestinian-born, Stockholm-based poet Ghayath Almadhoun’s first book to be published in English is Adrenalin (Action Books, translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham). Sohini Basak interviews Almadhoun for Asymptote, and writes in her introduction that the poems, "[w]ritten in the wake of the Syrian war, the refugee crisis, and a personal loss of his homeland [...] are formally experimentally and emotionally explosive." From their conversation:

SB: The weight of pain, if I can approximate it to that phrase, is present in each line of the poems collected in Adrenalin. There is a way pain is translated into language in public discourse: in the news, in public versions of private narratives, someone’s pain is made to be greater than someone else’s. You write:

. . . when my Syrian friends were dying under torture, my European friends were gently withdrawing from my wound which scratched their white lives and didn’t conform in any way to accepted Western criteria of what constitutes pain.

Could you tell us more about what you were thinking when you wrote these lines?

GA: I am made of a mass of feelings and contradictions; to be a poet is to be a Richter scale that measures vibrations resulting from human feelings and memories. Now, pain is blossoming in the backyard of my poetry—the war in my country became my breakfast, and the peace in Stockholm is my dinner, and I’m the paradox.

These are tough days for us as humans, very, very tough. To be a Syrian these days . . . Is it strange if I tell you that I feel we have become the new Jews? Forget my background as a Palestinian, I really mean it—the Syrians have become the new Jews. Of course, my comparison is not to the Holocaust, but to the diaspora of the Syrians as perpetual refugees, and to the silence of the world towards the death of the Syrians for over eight years now. I don’t have the words to describe for you the pain—we became the abnormal. It became difficult for me to mingle with other writers, since what if they asked me the typical question—“How are you?”—which would immediately remind me that I’m not well at all. Then comes the difficult part: what should the answer be to such an existential question like “How are you?” Any answer could orient us to an ugly truth which, in turn, would alienate us from each other. Our pain has gone far beyond the conventional form of pain here in Europe where I live. The people here are sensitive, you can’t remind them of how bad the situation is every time you meet them. Over time, they will prefer not to meet you.

I wish I believed in morals like Kant, to be a little optimistic, but I’m not. I’m closer to the Arabic poet Al-Maʿarri from the eleventh Century—realistically pessimistic...

Read on at Asymptote.