Kym Cunningham

Dis(re)membering (re)Memory

The fifth and most recent of Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun’s volumes—originally published in Arabic and translated by Catherine Cobham for Action Books in 2025—begins with a concise yet incisive epigraph: “Not all free countries will be occupied, / but all occupied countries will be freed” (3). This statement provides the reader a framework for how to view this new collection of 18 prose poems, offering the reader recurring motifs: the occupation of space, the (pre)occupation of memory, the concept (courtesy of none other than the great Toni Morrison) that sites hold memory. But more than these, perhaps, the epigraph offers a lesson in cartography. That is, the epigraph helps the reader position themselves, to understand the space they occupy. As a map, the epigraph is neither promise nor threat—though it can be read as either. So from the beginning, Almadhoun’s speaker asks the readership: do you see this statement, this collection, my geographies—as promise or threat?

            In this question, the speaker lays bare the violence of colonialism (both settler and not) that occupies the heart of this collection. Sectioned into seven years (2017-2023), the volume plays with the idea of dismemberment in both the body of memory and the body politic. These poems ask what one is to do when the body is dislocated from memory, when the alienation of colonialism severs the body from itself. Within the collection, the speaker refers to this titular, violent severing as “amputated memory” and “secondhand happiness” (103), passed down from one generation to the next.

            My father says: I am older than Israel, but Palestine is lost in translation,

so I stare at Syria where he lives, and Palestine which lives in him, and

try to see the cup half full, of blood. The only reason that Palestine is still

in the Middle East is because it can’t be transported to the museums of

Europe. (104)

Here, Palestine is a memory “lost in translation” which lives in the father’s body, a body older than Isreal. There is a tension between what is lost and what can be accessed—and by whom—a tension which reverberates within the placed body as memory. And so here, memory is experienced in the multiple, like a hall of mirrors, infinite and disjunctive in its inaccessibility.

            It is this disjoining that locates the heart(lessness) of colonialism, a mirroring that represents historical circularity. That is, the speaker mechanizes repetition—of content, of form—throughout the poems to indicate how historical events mirror one another. In a section of “Évian” entitled “Footnote 2:”, the speaker says:

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…(35)

This use of footnotes contextualizes the speaker’s poems while also segmenting them. That is, it severs parts of the poems from each other while showing the mirroring effects of history: how Syrian refugees are referred to in the same language as Jewish Holocaust refugees. This dismemberment then collapses time and space even as it disjoints the two.

            This is a collection of upheaval, comprised of poems that themselves are frequently segmented and include unattributed footnotes—what might be described as unmoored. These footnotes are read as additional segments of the poems, although their footnote status cannot be forgotten, often swallowed as they are by the white page. These are refugee footnotes, an instability not internal but externally imposed. And indeed, this formatting returns the reader to the question of time and space, specifically the time imposed upon the poems themselves. Although Palestinian, Almadhoun was born in Syria and emigrated to Sweden in 2008, before the Syrian protests turned to civil war. It is unclear exactly what the genesis of the poems is, as well as whether it correlates to specific events in the lives of the writer, speaker, or national histories. Indeed, the speaker does not offer a map or historical guide by which the reader can contextualize these segments. The reader is then left to wonder whether 2017 refers to launch of  the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) against the ISIS capital, the now-former president Assad’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, or something else entirely different. In another form of mirroring, the speaker obfuscates this too from the reader, making the reader question under what circumstances they are granted access.

            But even though the collection begins with the memory of Damascus, it starts not there but in Berlin. That is, the speaker is never in but always separate from Damascus. And so perhaps attempting to frame the text within Syrian history is inaccurate and represents a (white) misguided attempt at contextualization. Instead, perhaps this collection centers around the European refugee crisis during the aforementioned 7 years, wherein many countries all but shut their borders. Such cruelty, the speaker suggests, is not endemic to the conflict zones but to the white “Waste Land” of placid Stockholm. “Everyone around me is afraid of Islam and I’m / afraid of Islamophobia, stuck between the dictatorship of my country and / the dictatorship of your winter” (112). Dictatorships, political unrest, these conversations are not unique to places white Western readers consider “other” but evident in the works of T.S. Eliot and Derrida, among others. And yet, though this volume is a translation, the text was originally written and published in Arabic, suggesting the intended readership was not white Westerners. And yet, there still may be the expectation of translation, given at least one of Almadhoun’s previous books had also been translated by Cobham. Perhaps another mirroring occurs in how the author—and in turn, the speaker—interact with the reader. Does the dismembering—of author from text, of speaker from readers—continue through this very work?

            It seems what Almadhoun has set up via this collection is the question underlying beginning epigraph: Is the reader willing to map what they read here as a promise or a threat? Will they allow themselves to recognize the dismemberment inherent in colonialism, and work towards something different? If art holds a mirror to history, we are looking at ourselves. And there is little question that what Almadhoun has created here is art, in all of its wondrous, curious glory. Perhaps this collection will help us see ourselves differently, piece by piece.