Ghayath Almadhoun, a Palestinian-Syrian poet born in Damascus in 1979, is a singular voice in contemporary Arabic poetry, crafting works that navigate the intersections of exile, trauma, and resistance with unflinching clarity and surreal intensity. Born in the Yarmouk refugee camp, a historic center of Palestinian diaspora in Syria, Almadhoun fled the Syrian dictatorship in 2008, three years before the Syrian Revolution, eventually settling in Sweden and later dividing his time between Stockholm and Berlin. His statelessness—what he calls being “exiled from exile”—informs a poetic practice that defies conventional forms and national boundaries. Writing primarily in Arabic, often in collaboration with translators like Catherine Cobham and Marie Silkeberg, Almadhoun creates poetry that resonates globally, blending visceral imagery with sharp critiques of power, war, and displacement.

Almadhoun’s trajectory is marked by a relentless commitment to poetry as both documentation and defiance. His five collections in Arabic, including Adrenaline (2017) and I Have Brought You a Severed Hand (2024), published by Almutawassit in Milan, reject traditional labels, which he terms “texts and notes” to encompass fragments, silences, and the raw edges of experience. In Sweden, his translated works include Asylansökan (Ersatz, 2010), which earned the Klas de Vylders Stipendiefond for Immigrant Writers (2012), and Till Damaskus (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2014), a collaboration with Swedish poet Marie Silkeberg which was named one of the best new books by Dagens Nyheter, and adapted into a radio play for Swedish National Radio. His poetry has been translated into nearly 30 languages; projected in art installations by Jenny Holzer; performed by artists like Blixa Bargeld. He has earned recognition through awards such as the Damascus Arab Capital of Culture for Young Writers Prize (2008), the Almazraa Prize (2005), the ZEBRA Award for Best Poetry Film (2020) for Évian, and a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program scholarship (2019–2020). Almadhoun’s multimedia projects, including poetry films like The Celebration and Your Memory Is My Freedom, extend his voice into visual and sonic realms, amplifying the experiences of the displaced.

This interview explores the core themes of Almadhoun’s work: poetry as a refusal to be silenced, a “refugee camp made of metaphors” where memory, loss, and resistance converge. He speaks of the “severed hand” that recurs in his poems—not as a symbol, but as a biographical archive of personal and collective loss, from his brother Ghassan, killed in Syria, to the homelands of Palestine and Syria. Rejecting the commodification of suffering for Western audiences, Almadhoun envisions poetry as a “living dialogue” rooted in mutual vulnerability, where readers become co-creators in a “trauma bond.” His surreal inversions, like “the Mediterranean Sea had completely sunk,” protest the “grammar of power,” exposing the absurdity of narratives that center Europe as savior or victim. Poetry, for Almadhoun, is not a path to deeper truths but a refusal to lie, a “broken mirror” reflecting fragmented realities. He also confronts censorship.  The cancellation of his anthology Continental Drift: The Arabic Europe in Berlin highlights the challenges faced by Arab artists in democratic spaces.

Almadhoun’s work places him in a lineage of poets who wrestle with exile and trauma, from Mahmoud Darwish’s elegiac chronicles of Palestinian displacement to Paul Celan’s fragmented responses to the Holocaust. Like Darwish, Almadhoun writes from collective memory, yet his voice—infused with the urgency of Syria’s collapse, the coldness of European exile, and dark humor—carves a distinct space in contemporary Arabic poetry. His engagement with figures like Derrida and Gogol, alongside references to Al-Andalus and Chernobyl, constructs a “bleeding geography” that challenges Western narratives of progress and reimagines belonging in the cracks of empire. Aligned with diasporic and postcolonial writers like Adonis and Ocean Vuong, Almadhoun uses poetry to assert presence against erasure, making his work a vital contribution to a global movement of voices resisting silence. 

This conversation reveals Almadhoun’s poetry as both a witness to catastrophe and a space of survival, demanding that readers listen—not to consume, but to confront the weight of history and the resilience of art.

 

 

 

Perhaps ultimately, this is the only home I have left: the poem itself, which shelters both destruction and its echo—construction. It's a refugee camp made of metaphors. It's a place where I can exist—not as a victim or a symbol, but as a voice that refuses to vanish.

 

 

 

The cover describes this work not as a poetry collection, but as 'a collection of texts and notes'—a deliberate distancing from the conventions of poetry. I couldn’t help but think of Adorno’s line: 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.' In the face of historical catastrophe and ongoing violence, is poetry itself no longer adequate—only fragments, notes, ruins? Are you resisting poetry as a form, or reshaping it to account for the brokenness of experience, memory, and speech?

I believe that not writing poetry after Auschwitz is the true act of barbarism.

I write poetry after Auschwitz. After Sabra and Shatila. After Deir Yassin. I write after the Nakba, after Gaza, and after children are swallowed by the Mediterranean like some pagan god. I write after a German cultural institution denies my nationality, and after literary festivals love the poem but fear the poet. I write from exile. Stateless, flagless, and unprotected. I write with a Palestinian passport made of smoke. I write because silence is the real barbarism.

Auschwitz has become a metaphor not only for death but also for the systematization of death. For intellectuals of my generation, this means we must disobey the banality of evil.

Barbarism is remaining silent after Auschwitz and Gaza.  Barbarism is not writing after Auschwitz and Gaza. 

I want to return briefly to form. Your book is described as ‘a collection of texts and notes’ rather than a poetry collection. What does this framing mean to you? Is it a way of distancing yourself from traditional poetry, or does it reflect the fragmented, ruptured nature of the experiences you write about?

This framing—"texts and notes"—is not a rejection of poetry; rather, it is an expansion of it. It’s an attempt to write from the margins and center them. Instead of distancing myself from poetry, I am broadening its scope to include overlooked forms such as notes, lines between lines, and the silence between poems.

This approach is also a way of writing against the norm. It rejects the idea that writing must always adhere to a specific form. I don't believe that. I believe in writing that rules itself with no rules.

Of course, it's a poetry collection; poetry is always my destination.

However, sometimes poetry itself becomes too narrow for the poet. It can no longer contain the complexity of what needs to be said, especially when death is loud and the world is silent.

Many of these poems seem directed at a Western audience—those who need suffering explained or translated to be legible. What does it mean to narrate pain to those who haven't lived it? Who benefits from that narration, and what does it offer to those who already suffer? How do you resist the danger of your poetry becoming an export product for Western empathy—consumed, applauded, and then forgotten?

Suggesting that I write poetry primarily for a Western audience as a product of suffering, tailored for foreign empathy, misunderstands my work and the essence of poetry. I don't write to translate pain into familiar terms for those who have never experienced it. I write because poetry is where memory, identity, and resistance converge. It is not a commodity, but rather a living witness and a refusal to be erased.

My poems arise from profound displacement and unspoken histories. They emerge from the tension between absence and presence, exile and home, silence and speech. Reducing them to objects for Western consumption perpetuates the erasure they resist. This is not a marketplace where suffering is packaged and exported. It is a space where voices assert their complexity, contradictions, and rawness.

In interviews and essays, I have discussed the danger of being pigeonholed as the "Palestinian poet," whose work is expected to confirm a narrative that comforts or educates Western audiences about conflict and suffering. Such expectations flatten the poet’s voice, confine it to victimhood, and deny poetry's inherent humanity. I resist this instrumentalization—using poetry as a tool for empathy that risks becoming performative, fleeting, and hollow.

For me, poetry is an act of survival and defiance. It is not meant to soothe the conscience of distant observers but rather to confront, unsettle, and demand presence, whether that presence is welcomed or rejected. Poetry complicates the binaries of victim and perpetrator, us and them. It holds space for the contradictions of exile and a self shaped by loss and hope.

Furthermore, poetry is not disposable. Instead, it is a living dialogue between poet and reader, grounded in mutual vulnerability and an indelible truth. Writing poetry is insisting on the endurance of memory and refusing to be silenced. It does not offer Western audiences tidy narratives to digest and applaud.

In this way, my poetry resists becoming an export product. It is not crafted to satisfy the demands or curated sensibilities of distant markets. Rooted in complexity, ambiguity, and urgency, it defies simplification and appropriation. These poems speak from lived experience and collective memory, not from the expectation of audience comfort or approval.

You describe poetry as a space of survival and resistance, not a commodity for an audience, yet also as a living dialogue rooted in mutual vulnerability. How do you envision the reader’s role in this dialogue? What kind of presence or witness do you imagine on the other side of the poem, and can such a dialogue exist with readers who may not fully grasp your lived experience?

Of course, I enjoy writing, but that is not my ultimate goal. I write because I need to make sense of the world through literature. Poetry is my way of surviving this madness.

Readers are everything to me—ultimately, I don't write for myself. I don't expect them to fully grasp my lived experience—how could they? However, it is precisely this unfamiliarity, this strangeness between the reader and the world of my poems, that creates the connection. It's not about sameness; it's about the possibility of encountering each other through literature.

When readers bring their own unique understanding to my work, they become part of the writing process. They recreate the narrative in their own voice. This shared act of reimagining enables a trauma bond to form between me and others who still believe in poetry.

The title—I Have Brought You a Severed Hand—is violent, symbolic, and oddly intimate. What does the hand signify to you? Is it a witness, an accusation, a relic?

There is a man without a hand, or a man with a severed hand, or simply a severed hand that appears in many of my poems. The image repeats itself so often that I began to wonder why. It puzzled me—its persistence, its quiet insistence—so I asked two friends, both psychotherapists, to read the manuscript. I thought perhaps they could understand something I couldn't. Maybe they could interpret the hand.

One of them told me he believed it was my younger brother, Ghassan, who was killed by the fallen Syrian dictator. In his reading, I had lost my hand as a metaphor for losing my brother.

The other agreed, but extended the idea further. He said it might not only be Ghassan—it could be Palestine, or Syria, or both. He reminded me that I had lost those countries too. And then he pointed to one poem where I wrote, “I brought you a severed hand,” and noted the title: “I Brought You Syria.”

The severed hand recurs in your work, almost as if it speaks its own language. Do you think poetry sometimes reveals truths before the poet fully understands them? How do you interpret the persistence of such visceral images—bodies, wounds, ghosts—in your work? 

I come from a place where wounds are not just metaphors. These images—bodies, wounds, and ghosts—are not just decorations. They are biography and testimony simultaneously.

I believe poetry often knows more than the poet does. It can reveal truths that the poet may not grasp for years, if ever. Art works like that. It moves ahead of time, preceding its creator like a shadow cast before the body, but still very connected to it.

To me, poetry is like a broken mirror; the reflection is random yet each piece reflects something true. Sometimes the reflection is truer than the original image because it is more specific. Poetry enables us to see through the eyes of memory because memory, unlike reality, is not limited by physics. Memory is a defense mechanism we use against history.

 

 

 

Exile teaches you to dismantle everything: hope, belonging, and time. But from that dismantling, something else begins to take shape—a kind of poetry not rooted in a single place, but growing like a weed between the cracks of empire.

 

 

 

At the beginning of the book, there’s a significant reference to Western terminology, figures, and historical points of intersection between East and West—Don Quixote, deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida, Gogol's Overcoat, Sweden, Chernobyl, Algeria, Al-Andalus, and more. While your poems seem to begin by deconstructing hope, they also seem to be reconstructing a kind of geography—a new landscape that exists at the intersection of these histories and places. How do you see this interplay between destruction and construction in your work? Is this dual gesture a way to challenge the West’s narrative of progress, while also reimagining a new kind of belonging or identity in exile?

Yes, I believe destruction and construction are not opposites in my work. Rather, they are twins born from the same place. When I write, I start with ruins, not foundations. The map I draw is not of a country, but of its collapse. Don Quixote, Derrida, and Gogol’s Overcoat are fragments in the wreckage—scattered relics of colliding, often violent, civilizations. I don't use these fragments to decorate poems. Rather, I use them to interrogate the language of power and the architecture of storytelling.

Deconstruction is not an academic exercise for me; it is my mother tongue. I come from a place where everything was deconstructed: my country, my citizenship, and my memory. Even my name has passed through checkpoints. Exile teaches you to dismantle everything: hope, belonging, and time. But from that dismantling, something else begins to take shape—a kind of poetry not rooted in a single place, but growing like a weed between the cracks of empire.

As you said, the dual process of tearing down and rebuilding is essential. It is my way of surviving the violence of erasure. The West often writes its history as a linear progression—from darkness to enlightenment, superstition to science, and East to West. However, I want to puncture that narrative. I want to write a bleeding geography. A geography where Al-Andalus is not a romantic ruin, but rather, a living ghost. Where Sweden is not just safety, but also coldness. Where Chernobyl is not just a disaster, but a metaphor for the radioactive aftermath of modernity itself.

If I reconstruct anything, it won't be home in the conventional sense. It's a poetic topography made of severed hands and boundless grief. It's a place where contradictions can breathe. Gogol's overcoat doesn't just warm the poet; it also covers the corpse in the ruins of language.

Perhaps ultimately, this is the only home I have left: the poem itself, which shelters both destruction and its echo—construction. It's a refugee camp made of metaphors. It's a place where I can exist—not as a victim or a symbol, but as a voice that refuses to vanish.

Your poetry blurs the line between metaphor and reality in unsettling ways. At times, war is described with surreal language, but the horror is unmistakably real. You write: "Paul Celan says milk is black, my mother says there is no milk"; "Since everybody is going to die in the end, the death rate in Syria and Sweden is the same"; and you compare the Swedish winter to the Arab Spring. These lines seem to both collapse and stretch meaning. I believe poetry is always tethered to reality, even when it moves through symbols and metaphors. But sometimes, the real events—the most brutal and shocking ones—resist metaphor entirely. In those moments, poetry either breaks down or becomes painfully literal. How do you navigate that tension? Do you ever feel that metaphor fails you when confronting certain truths, or is it precisely through metaphor that you're able to reach them?

Some say my poetry is political, but reality itself is political. This is my life. What metaphor could make sense of a child being pulled to pieces from the rubble? What metaphor can explain a refugee camp becoming a permanent home? Or a state that deems some deaths more legitimate than others? Sometimes, reality is more fantastical than any metaphor. Can you imagine?

Yet, poetry persists, even in mass graves and prisons. When my mother says there is no milk, she isn't using a metaphor; she's describing starvation under siege. It's memory trying to translate itself across languages that refuse to understand each other.

I don't think metaphors make horror any more bearable. I use them as a tourniquet is used—as a desperate, improvised measure to stop the bleeding. Sometimes, though, the wound is too big, and my metaphors fail. Sometimes, reality resists language completely. I just sit there and watch the poem crumble under the weight of what it's trying to convey.

Do you see poetry as a source of truth—or perhaps a different kind of truth or reality? In a world of political rhetoric and media distortion, do you see poetry as a way to access a deeper truth, or does it instead expose the fractured, elusive nature of truth itself?

I don't believe poetry leads us to deeper truths. Rather, I think it is a source of a more elusive kind of truth. Truth is problematic, and poetry makes things more problematic because it neither simplifies nor explains. Instead, poetry relies on intelligence. It assumes that readers are looking for tension, not comfort. Most poetry readers have high IQs and can handle nonlogic, emotional perception, and contradictions. Poetry doesn't claim to hold the truth; it simply refuses to lie.

You once wrote: “My writing became a diary to help me survive, a therapy to heal, and a way to translate my new reality into poetry. I am no longer Middle Eastern, and I will never be 100 percent Western. I am exiled from exile. In Palestine, they call me the Syrian Swedish poet. In Syria, they call me the Palestinian Swedish poet. In Sweden, they call me the Palestinian Syrian poet.” So I have to ask—who are you? How do you carry these shifting identities, these layered exiles? Do you ever feel like the act of writing creates a self where no stable one exists?

Writing didn't provide me with a homeland. Instead, it revealed the pain of not having one. I am a Palestinian poet without a passport—an exile within an exile. I don't write to find myself; I write because I'm constantly losing myself. Poetry doesn't stabilize me; it keeps me company in the chaos. It's not a solution. It’s a witness.

The people in my poems are ghosts who are still alive. They aren't metaphors. The severed hand isn't symbolic either. The blood isn't symbolic, either. The ruins aren't symbolic either. Violence is not a poetic device; it is my archive. My poems are documentation.

When I say that I am "exiled from exile," I mean it literally, not poetically. Exile is no longer an exceptional state for me—it is my natural habitat. Even my memories have been displaced. My nostalgia is second-hand. My language is the diaspora. I don't belong anywhere. But I exist. And that’s enough for poetry. I live in Berlin, but inside me are the ruins of Damascus, the checkpoints of Gaza, and the silencing and cancelling of Palestinians in Berlin.

Writing documents absence. It documents what was erased. It gives shape to contradiction.

Maybe the real question isn't "Who am I?"

 

 

 

In a world that turns away from what it doesn’t want to see, I hope my poems will dare to look—and invite readers to look alongside them.

 

 

You’ve described yourself as “exiled from exile,” with memories displaced and poetry as a “refugee camp made of metaphors.” In the face of such rupture, where, if anywhere, do you find a sense of belonging? Does poetry itself become a kind of home for you?

I belong to my friends and the people I love. I also belong to cities, not countries.

When I say that I’m exiled from exile, I mean it literally. When I left Syria for Sweden, I traded the exile I inherited from my father for one I chose.

Poetry becomes a kind of shelter made of metaphors, a sort of refugee camp inside language. It's unrealistic, but it's the only kind of shelter I have. As Adorno once said, "For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live."

You wrote in your book: "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 completely sunk. They found the water choked, 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." 

In this passage and following passages in the same chapter, you invert the language of disaster: the boat dies of a heart attack, the sea sinks, and the EU is clinging to the wreckage in order to survive—while the children are not found. This surreal inversion seems to mock the way Europe centers itself even in others’ tragedies, and perhaps also gestures toward the moral masochism of European intellectual culture. Are you deliberately using this kind of poetic reversal to highlight the absurdity of Europe's self-image—as both savior and victim—when it comes to refugee crises? What do you think is the role of poetry in exposing or unsettling these narratives?

I’m not mocking Europe, I’m analyzing it. It's my way of protesting the grammar of power.

Through poetry, I can create a new archive where metaphor is truer than the news. Surrealism is not an escape; it's a confrontation. The world we’re living in is surreal. People drown while border patrol drones hover above them. Parliaments debate the legal definition of life. Politicians mourn tragedies they helped engineer. If that isn’t surreal, then what is?

So, yes, I invert the language of disaster. Because the reality has already been inverted. In this version of history, the wreckage is salvaged, but the children are lost.

Your phrase “I protest the grammar of power” resonates deeply, especially in titles like ‘Anthropology,’ ‘Recycling Death,’ or ‘Postmodern Stress Disorder,’ which seem to engage with Western discourses in a subversive way. Are you using these titles to challenge or reframe the authority of such frameworks? How do you see poetry’s role in confronting or reshaping the language of power?

I don't think they specifically challenge Western discourses; rather, they challenge any power discourses that distort our understanding of violence, history, and identity.

I use these titles as a form of protest against myself, my own despair. In a world gone mad, I strive to stay sane. When horror becomes the norm, I write to reaffirm my principles. Although I don't believe poetry can dismantle power,  it rarely aligns with those who execute injustice. I believe that poetry's existence is a form of resistance against erasure, oversimplification, and forgetting.

You’ve described poetry as a refusal to lie, a “broken mirror” that reflects fragmented truths amid the chaos of war, exile, and silencing. As you carry this commitment into an uncertain future, what do you hope your poetry might reveal or preserve—not just for yourself, but for those who read it in a world that often turns away from such truths?

I write to connect with the world, question familiar ideas, and challenge so-called truths. I write to maintain balance, understand myself, and make sense of the crumbling world around me.

I’ve always said that poetry can't change the world, but it can change individuals. Sometimes, those individuals find themselves in a position to change the world.

Above all, I want my readers to enjoy my poems and experience pleasure. That must come first. Then, perhaps, something else will happen: déjà vu, hesitation, or rethinking what once seemed self-evident.

In a world that turns away from what it doesn’t want to see, I hope my poems will dare to look—and invite readers to look alongside them.