SyriaUntold Talks to Ghayath Almadhoun About 'Mutasha'il'

Syrian-born, Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun—who went into Swedish exile in 2008 and now lives in Berlin—speaks to Madeline Edwards for SyriaUntold about quarantine's relationship to imprisonment, his current projects, and what he calls "pessoptimism": 

There is a Palestinian writer, Emile Habibi, from Haifa. In 1974, He wrote a novel that he called: Al-Mutasha’il. He created this word, and from that moment we added it to the dictionary. In Arabic, we have mutasha’im [pessimist] and mutafa’il [optimist]. He took half from one and half from the other, and created mutasha’il. He is half pessimistic and half optimistic. 

"Much of Almadhoun’s poetry weaves between similar contemplations of life and death, home and exile," says Edwards. "His most recent poetry film, 'Évian,' mourns a boat which, filled with refugees, has 'died of a heart attack,' as the Mediterranean Sea itself 'drowned.' In another poem, 'The City,' Damascus is a mystic cemetery affirming the past lives of her many residents." More from their conversation: 

Has this past year also impacted your view of death, or how you write about it? 

The Syrian war changed my relationship to death more than the pandemic. I saw the pandemic as threatening for us as humans. This doesn’t scare me. If you told me there was a huge asteroid heading towards Earth to crash, and that we will disappear like what happened 65 million years ago with the dinosaurs, I would not feel afraid, or anything. That’s because all of us will disappear together. So for me it’s okay. But the death of war, where the target is only one group; it’s totally different for me. 

You think about death all the time, in a certain way. And then you find yourself in a war. Yes, I was in Sweden, but my family was under the bombing. And I began to lose people one by one. Uncles, brothers, friends. Every day. It’s insane, if I show you my Facebook. I have hundreds of people who are dead now. Killed by the Assad regime. And today will be the birthday of this person, tomorrow the birthday of that person. And I don’t want to remove them, because we have messages between us on Messenger, we have memories.

Find the full interview at SyriaUntold.