Ghayath Almadhoun: Between Cancel Culture and the Deutsche Schuld
In 2018, I was invited to do a reading in Hamburg organized by the team of the German literary magazine Tau. One of the authors in the program was the Syrian-born Ghayath Almadhoun, a Palestinian poet living in Sweden. Originally from Damascus, he’s the proof that the inability or impossibility to lay deep roots is an essential formative experience of artists, especially writers. It’s true in my case and in his as well.
As a child in the 1990s, I was a refugee from war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which took me to Croatia, Germany and then back home again, to ground zero. Except it was by no means a ground zero anymore because, it looked like the aftermath of a game of chess. This was my first visit to Hamburg and I had no expectations because the city was mostly off my radar for whatever reason. Germany, for me, was the line between Berlin, Cologne and Munich.
It was to be an occasion to remember for multiple reasons: my first visit to the bold and beautiful building of the Elbphilharmonie, first reading in Hamburg and the first encounter with Almadhoun. It left a major impression on me: the sound of his voice, the poem he was reading and a language I didn’t understand. But sometimes, that’s not an obstacle to communicate emotions which are at the root at every poem.
Afterwards, we got to hear the German translation of his poem Black Milk, dedicated to the tragic demise of his brother. If the German version didn’t sound so deflated compared to Arabic, it would be a tearjerker. His most recent work is a matter of major controversy. Coincidentally, also in Germany. This time in Berlin, though. Judging by what’s going on in the Bundestag after the AfD-supported immigration law, this is just one of the many cherries in the orchard of political troubles this country is currently brimming with.
I already wrote about another controversy, when the Israeli film director Yuval Abraham condemned the crimes committed in Palestine while receiving his award at the Berlinale for the movie No Other Land. Claudia Roth applauded the winner but made sure to emphasize her admiration wasn’t aimed at Basel Matra, the Palestinian co-author of the film. Still, it reverberated through the media to such an extent that there were calls for her resignation and withdrawal of funding for Berlinale.
You just can’t catch a break. Angela Merkel made an uncompromising support of Israel so instrumental to German identity that she called it their “raison d’etre”. This was the continuation of what is known as German Guilt, an awareness of Nazi atrocities enshrined in every fiber of their society, especially education, bordering on perpetual atonement which is partly responsible for the rising of AfD, torchbearers of the extreme right wing.
Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader who’s also a prospective new chancellor, stuck a hot hatpin into the German political beehive when he decided to accept AfD’s support for the immigration bill, which hence put the needle over the edge regarding the new bill which would be much closer to AfD’s own ideas. The mainstream public reacted with a massive protest aimed to protect the red line between them and right-wing populism that’s represented by Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Marine le Pen in France respectively. Again, this goes back to the aforementioned historic concept of German Guilt that’s been hanging like noose over the heads of their leaders ever since World War II. Though the Nuremberg trials sent many crucial players in the Holocaust to the same place where they sent their victims, in one way or the other, the trial is still going on as if on a loop.
Because of this, every single time the notorious party succeeds to influence the mainstream as it happened recently, the bells of doom start tolling until your eardrums burst. All sense of nuance and context disappears and it leads into a combination of ignorance or straight up censorship where artists pay the price. I can think of two appalling examples that illustrate this disturbing practice the best. In 2023, Adania Shibli won the LiBeratur award at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was a recognition of her work by LitProm, a German literary organization.
However, the invitation was withdrawn due to the conflict in the Middle East, and quite explicitly so. At least they didn’t dress it up into a lie. The reaction was immediate, with the global literary community supporting her. It included Nobel Prize winners too like Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk. The latter was a victim as well, since she was awarded together with the notorious Austrian author Peter Handke, which put her own Nobel deep into the media shadow.
The other example is Almadhoun’s cancelled reading in Berlin, this tragic metropolis of atonement. It was supposed to be a presentation of the book Arab Germany, an anthology of contemporary Arab poets. He himself put it the best in an article for The Nation: What makes my cancellation one of the most serious is that, unlike Shibli’s book and the work of other artists, the anthology I curated had nothing to do with Palestine. It included poems by 31 Arab poets living in Europe and is part of a series of anthologies by the Haus für Poesie, the previous ones being Black Europe and Persian Europe. The anthology has no politics, no mention of the occupation, and no hate or antisemitism. There is nothing that links the book to Palestine or criticizes Israel, and I haven’t made any public statements. The seriousness of my cancellation lies in the fact that I was cancelled because I am Palestinian, and only because of that, which is what Germany did in the 1930s, punishing people because of their identity.
After the blatant ghosting of Adania Shibli, Arab publishers also withdrew from the Frankfurt fair in protest of the unfair and biased treatment the author experienced in Germany. We’ll see if Almadhoun’s experience will get the same reaction, but it most definitely should. Artists are turned into hostages of politics. Literature is a universal language because so many of us can relate to it. Whatever your opinion of the Palestinian attacks on October 7 might be, allow their authors to be individuals with integrity instead of treating them as mouthpieces of an ideology.
Maybe the fact they belong to the “wrong” people allows you to disrespect them? This isn’t the Reconquista in 15th century Spain, when Christians expelled Muslim forces and purified their culture from every last trace of Islam, or at least tried to. Are we witnessing a new Holy War in Europe? Will people like Almadhoun and Shibli be the scapegoats? In the 1930s, it was Jews. Not very hard to guess who’s likely to be the next on the chopping board.
Palestinian authorities don’t help their cause either because they’re extremely hostile to the LGBTQ population and their freedom of speech: in 2017, Abbad Yahya’s novel Crime in Ramallah was banned for threats to morality and public decency. The distributor was detained and he fled to Doha, while copies of his novel were burning in Gaza. For writers, the pendulum of freedom and respect obviously needs to swing both ways: in Palestine and Germany.
In this sense, writing turns into an act of exile in itself, a space for rest from the cruelty of a world that doesn’t particularly care for their work. It’s only about setting an example and reaffirming the power of their iron fist. Between the covers of each book, there’s a world hiding is treasures in plain sight. This is undoubtedly equally true for the one Almadhoun was about to share with the audience in Berlin. It was cancelled due to circumstances that have nothing to do with poetry.
The author said the event was arranged and confirmed until the very last moment, which is nothing short of a slap in the face. There’s no doubt he is in this situation because the still guilt-ridden German public discourse can’t bring itself to recognize and acknowledge things that soothe the pain our world is currently going through. Poetry alone has this miraculous ability and we should not stand in its way.
Coming from a part of Europe that turned divisions and inter-ethnic tensions into their brand in the 1990s, I know how it feels to be put into a box where you cease to be an individual, but another part of an amorphous concept that’s usually interpreted through one and the same angle for the last 30 years. We’re still required to talk or write about reconciliation. What the fuck have we been doing for the last 30 years if we haven’t found peace with each other again?
Or is it maybe intellectual laziness? Is it too much of a trouble to dare to put us in any other frame than eternal victims of someone or something? Don’t you dare to make me carry a cross that’s not of my own making just because it makes you feel better about yourself. This is what people like Ghayath Almadhoun and Adania Shibli are up against. They’re full-fledged voices that have the ability to speak to our conscience without begging us for pity.
There has to be a safe place for each of us to speak without being shunned for the will, not the bravery, to do so. If Palestinian authors need to be brave in order to speak in Europe, we have a problem. Because we like to emphasize that one of the many virtues of our European family is protecting the diversity of its many voices. Anything less than that would be a betrayal of values that make this continent worth fighting for. In his essay in The Nation, he succinctly described what that is.
Finally, we must remember that the freedom we enjoy in Western countries is not a given and should not be taken for granted. Rather, it has been hard-won through struggle, as is the case for most people around the world. It is therefore imperative that we continue to fight to preserve it. I want to end by reminding you that people often say: “We didn’t know what was going on in the 1930s.” Well, I have told you all this, because I want you to leave your zone of interest and bear witness to the times in which we live today. You know what’s happening. Now you must do something.
