I have brought you a small grief so it can grow in your hands
—Ghayath Almadhoun, ‘I have brought you Syria’
My forehead wrinkles, eyes wide on ends, my mouth hangs a-g-a-p-e: “… … …”. I have no poker face when it comes to the sublime; when I experience a work of art—be it a painting or a piece of poetry—which moves me beyond words, unable to look away. Friends comment, “are you alright”, “what is the matter”, confusing my exalted reaction with pain or horror, disgust, even agitative confrontation. Being enveloped by a piece of world-breaking art evokes such sensations, but is that not the beauty of the sublime? Having the smooth surface of things shockingly shattered so new states of awe can bloom? The poems in Ghayath Almadhoun’s cycle I have brought you a severed hand move me in this manner. Reading I am left unable to metaphorically turn away from the experience of pain and trauma Almadhoun uses to perforate a picturesque place I dwell, the colonial heart of the Western world.
These cutting poems are not acts of elegiac mourning, they do not seek my empathy. Drawing upon Almadhoun’s experience of ‘two exiles’, as the dust jacket’s blurb states, the collection brings me face to face with the violence of migration, the intergenerational traumas experienced by those bodies rendered stateless, in-asylum, and Other to the social structures of the Western world due to neo-colonial wars. Written in a prose-like form, each short poem has a tender quality, one that positions me as an accountable witness beside Almadhoun in his fight to transform oblivion into hope; here, dreams blossom in the face of nightmares.
In my practice, I look to baffle dichotomous thinking, turning my face towards the ontology of things to reveal psychosocial and political systems of governance—the biopolitical structures—which connect us all yet which affect us differently depending on our ethnicity, epidermis and/or the place of birth printed on our passports. In Almadhoun’s poems I find a similar preoccupation. Connecting acts of genocide (historical and contemporary), the futility of assimilation, xenophobic violences and realities of migration, the collection forces me to witness the continued face of European colonisation; how racist rhetorics exist in the present, newly malformed, to create divisions between peoples. An excerpt from ‘Évian’ (p.34-35):
Footnote 1
They’ll take our jobs and our houses, they’ll seduce our women […] they’ll pour in and destabilise society and lead to its breakup. […] their culture is different, their morals are strange, they’ll never be able to integrate.
Footnote 2
None of the racist words in footnote 1 refer to the current refugee crisis, as they call it, meaning Syrian refugees these days. They were in fact widely used by the Western media to describe Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who attempted to flee from the Nazis in the period before the Second World War.
As well as being concerned with sociopolitical systems, and their effects on certain bodies, Almadhoun’s poetry uses form deviantly—poems like ‘Évian’ invert ‘standard’ conventions, positioning ‘supplementary’ information (footnotes) as catalytic shards ingrained in the body of his texts. This refusal accentuates the criticality of each poem, troubling normative standards of writing, Western standards of writing, as well as questioning the double face of European values such as freedom (see ‘Ode to sorrow’, p.13-17), dangled before souls from outside the colonial centre who will always be vilified in their journeying towards them.
Death and pain and the edges of oblivion, written matter of fact through love and hope, I have brought you a severed hand refuses a position of hopelessness. Rather, the collection cleaves a space in reading where I have no choice but to sit and stare at the chasm that lies between my “safe” world and those living a life undone by Westernised warmongers. Pairing the historical and human experience, these poems shatter the proper face of the Western world; they are sublime short essays, demanding that I, that we, dwell in the petals of grief Almadhoun crafts from nightmares.
ENDNOTE: I have brought you a severed hand by Ghayath Almadhoun (translated by Catherine Cobham) is out now with Divided Publishing