Poetry Reading with Ghayath Al Madhoun
Conversation 0The Palestinian writer reads two of his poems in the original Arabic. Scroll down this page for an English translation.
Poems by Ghayath Al Madhoun
If We Were in a Virtual World
Even though the window is virtual, the dead are real.
—Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry
1. The War Is Over
The war is over. But the bombs are still falling inside my head.
If we were in a virtual world
I would have cleaned the window overlooking your house with an electronic
newspaper
And the plastic rose that I put on my brother’s grave would have grown.
The war is over, and the friends who went to the market to buy
a fresh death were killed on the way.
If we were in a virtual world
I would have recycled my friends
For I need second-hand friends.
The war is over, and the dead have returned to their families safe and sound, the martyrs have returned to their mothers in one piece, mothers have returned to their houses, houses, streets, mosques, eyes, legs have returned to their owners, fingers have returned to hands, rings to fingers, schools to children, washing lines to balconies, lovers to rooftops, my brother has returned to my mother, and I have returned to Damascus.
If we were in a virtual world
I would have forgotten to remember the war
And remembered to forget it, as the dead forget the general’s features
And the martyrs remember the way home.
The war is over, and all those I knew are dead, or war criminals, or dead war criminals.
If we were in a virtual world
I would have turned off the war like you turn off the television
But we were born into a bitch of a world
And when people are born into a bitch of a world
Time changes into a typewriter
And the dead become poems.
Comedy footnote:
The genius of Dante lies in his description of Limbo, think about it a little, you’ll realize immediately that we’re living in the first circle of hell.
(Cut)
* * *
2. War
I tried to translate the war from a Semitic language to an Indo-European language for you, and you were hit by shrapnel. I tried to come to your aid and we were besieged by news bulletins. The Security Council tried to send us smart weapons, and security men of average intelligence confiscated them, we insulted the Red Cross and the Vatican objected, we ate the flesh of dogs whose owners had been killed and the environmentalists objected, we were saved
from drowning and the European Right objected.
How can I describe to you how much this world resembles the
beating of skinny hands on the thick walls of gas chambers in
detention camps, without giving you PTSD? How can I explain
the difference between house slaves and field slaves, without making you confuse Syria with surrealism? How can I say in the same poem my friends were tortured to death and you are more beautiful than New York, without Lorca laughing in his grave, or poetry being separated from reality?
Tragedy footnote:
The problem with this world is not that a quarter of its inhabitants go to psychiatric clinics, the problem is that the rest don’t go.
(Cut)
* * *
3. Chess
When the wind passed by, it couldn’t find the tree and the axe was looking at me, while I was lost in translation, calm as a ceasefire, stuck in a blue planet in a remote suburb of the Milky Way. I saw a gazelle devouring a wolf, blood dripping from her teeth, I saw barren women suckling fetuses that were born dead, I saw electronic flies emerging from Twitter and hovering over my friends’ corpses, I saw a country travelling in a fishing boat, and a man eating his dead brother’s flesh, not metaphorically as in the Quran, but eating
the flesh of his brother killed in a bombing raid, so as not to
starve to death. The wind passed and didn’t find the tree, or
the city, or the country. The dogs didn’t howl, the caravan didn’t move on. My wife the widow looks at me, and the war is clean like a game of chess. Barrels of oil rise in price and barrel bombs of TNT fall on cities, planes lick school textbooks and suck children’s fingers, while I am silent like a European citizen who enjoys the privileges of the first world and asks with the innocence of a domesticated wolf, which
is harsher: the Swedish winter or the Arab spring?
Absurd footnote:
The New York Times says milk is white, Paul Celan says milk is black, my mother says there is no milk!
(Cut)
* * *
4. A Metaphor from a Virtual World
Dante was right. This comedy that we are living is divine, or to be fair, let’s say that it’s at least 97% divine, otherwise how do you explain the fact that everything around us resembles a metaphor from a virtual world!
Flowers have sex via bees!
Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian!
We are happy because the USA hasn’t dropped the atomic bomb on
Tokyo!
A dictator’s supporters demonstrate to demand the banning of demonstrations!
I love you!
God sells lands full of milk and honey!
Finland is the happiest country in the world according to the World Happiness Report!
The cross you wear round your neck is no more than a Roman
instrument of torture!
Tragicomedy footnote:
Since everybody is going to die in the end, the death rate in Syria and Sweden is the same.
(Cut)
Évian
Last year, to mention just one example, a boat carrying refugees died of a heart attack. When the first rescue ship arrived, the Mediterranean Sea had drowned. They found the water gasping for breath, the waves soaked through and the European Union trying to hang on to a piece of wreckage from the boat in order to survive.
They didn’t find the children.
Preliminary results of the investigation clearly indicated that satellite images showed the sunken boat didn’t know how to swim. On the eight o’clock news that evening, as the waters of the Mediterranean Sea flowed gently from the television on to the parquet floors of sitting rooms, upsetting happy families in safe countries and causing a minor disturbance to the sexual performance of the silent majority in Central and Northern Europe, suddenly, like mushrooms popping up in the woods, a middle class European woman asked why they’d come by sea and not by air after getting
visas. Overwhelmed by this white innocence, the television committed suicide.
Commenting on the tragic incident by phone, the integration officer from the Department of Immigration said what shall we do now? The new load of refugees who were going to clean up European pensioners’ shit have all died.
On the eight o’clock news that evening, a white female broadcaster who’d never had children, citing a Middle East specialist who’d never visited the Middle East, said that the children might have disappeared for postmodern reasons when they were playing hide and seek.
Jesus, son of Mary, was the sole survivor. They found him walking on the water.
Footnote 1:
They’ll take our jobs and our houses, they’ll seduce our women, they’ll seize the resources we’ve allocated to the poor, they’ll be infiltrated by criminals and spies, they’ll pour in and destabilize society and lead to its breakup. They look bad, they carry diseases, their standards are different, their culture is different, their morals are strange, they’ll never be able to integrate.
Footnote 2:
All the racist words in footnote 1 don’t 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.
Footnote 3:
In 1938, 32 countries met at the Évian Conference to discuss the crisis of Jewish refugees coming from Germany and Austria. The United States refused to increase its annual quota of refugees even before the start of the meeting. Britain made clear that the United Kingdom was not a country of immigration. All countries present refused to take them in. On 13 July, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter wrote triumphantly: “Nobody wants them.” (I have the feeling that the writer of the article was Adolf Hitler in person.) Four months after the conference, the Nazis carried out the Kristallnacht pogrom, then gradually began to solve the Jewish problem in their own special way, that led, as we know, to the Final Solution.
How I Became…
Her grief fell from the balcony and broke into pieces, so she needed a new grief. When I went with her to the market the prices were unreal, so I advised her to buy a used grief. We found one in excellent condition although it was a bit big. As the vendor told us, it belonged to a young poet who had killed himself the previous summer. She liked this grief so we decided to take it. We argued with the vendor over the price and he said he’d give us an angst dating from the sixties as a free gift if we bought the grief. We agreed, and I was happy with this unexpected angst. She sensed this and said “It’s yours.” I took it and put it in my bag and we went off. In the evening I remembered it and took it out of the bag and examined it closely. It was high quality and in excellent condition despite half a century of use. The vendor must have been unaware of its value otherwise he wouldn’t have given it to us in exchange for buying a young poet’s low-quality grief. The thing that pleased me most about it was that it was existentialist angst, meticulously crafted and containing details of extraordinary subtlety and beauty. It must have belonged to an intellectual with encyclopedic knowledge or a former prisoner. I began to use it and insomnia became
my constant companion. I became an enthusiastic supporter
of peace negotiations and stopped visiting relatives. There were increasing numbers of memoirs in my bookshelves and I no longer voiced my opinion, except on rare occasions. Human beings became more precious to me than nations and I began to feel a general ennui, but what I noticed most was that I had become a poet.
Women
Women who trod grapes from the beginning of time
Women locked in chastity belts in Europe
Witches burnt alive in the Middle Ages
Women of the nineteenth century using male pen names to
get their novels published
Tea pickers in Sri Lanka
Women of Berlin who rebuilt their city after the war
Women who farm cotton in Egypt
Algerian women who smeared shit on their bodies so they
wouldn’t be raped by French soldiers
Cigar virgins in Cuba
Black Diamonds in Liberia
Samba dancers in Brazil
Women who’ve lost their faces to acid in Afghanistan
My mother
I’m sorry.
Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham
Arabic Music Days
Music, Visual Arts, Poetry and Film