Out on a Limb: On Ghayath Almadhoun’s “I Have Brought You a Severed Hand”

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Ghayath Almadhoun’s I Have Brought You a Severed Hand—his second collection of poetry to be adeptly translated into English by Catherine Cobham—stages from the outset a stark question about dismemberment and form. To whom does the titular hand, amputated from its body, belong? What is the relation between the one who gives and the one who receives, or the one who speaks and the one who listens? Is the hand being proffered in the spirit of a gift—or is it evidence, rather, of something damning and unnamed?

I’m getting ahead of myself, perhaps, but something about this title gets ahead of itself and asserts itself in every present. The perfect form of “I have brought”—Cobham’s uncontracted, deliciously prim formulation for the Arabic laqad aḥḍartu, which emphasizes the action’s completion—comes across nearly as an accusation. We might imagine the digits of the hand aloft, while pointing to the agent responsible for its severance. Or maybe the fingers are curled up, the hand wilting upon itself, its very disjointure from the arm a mute document of pain. 

Intuitively, we might have our mental image of the titular hand shaped by Khaled Soliman al Nassiry’s illustration on the cover: a raised palm with index and middle finger outstretched as if in a posture of allegiance or faith, while the ring and pinkie finger are bent so they look like grotesque pipes. Blood, luridly crimson to the point of artifice, laces each joint. In place of the thumb sits the outline of a miniature person in red whose left hand is missing, severed at the elbow. The digit, like the hand, is cut off from the whole to which (we presume) it is attached; mutilation multiplies in a nauseating mise en abyme.

Almadhoun turns these dizzying substitutions—disproportions of outsized limb to diminished body—into games of scale. “Are we even reading poems?” one might reasonably ask. Subtitled Texts and Notes, the book consists of fragments written between 2017 and 2023. Transitory and unlineated, they are deliberately broken off, on the brink of being swallowed up by encircling white space. These are clipped vignettes, distilled incantations, wry scribblings—no less caustic and barbed for being dashed off in the margins of one’s day.

Many of them—if we are to trust the headings—are “footnotes.” Almadhoun’s footnotes, however, are beached on each page, divided from the textual ocean in which they might originally have been submerged. And whereas the Arabic edition flushes these footnotes to the page’s bottom border—seemingly to preserve their peripheral status—the English version promotes the marginalia to an autonomous primacy. Like the severed hand that speechlessly stands in for the whole person. Headings, footnotes, body: it seems impossible to describe the function of arranged text without recourse to an enfleshed lexicon.

I picture a typographical equivalent of Jordan Peele’s Us, an allegory of rebellion in which the main players are the ancillary glosses and parenthetical annotations, now emerging into consciousness of themselves as a class consigned to the incidental. Only think what battles of wit need be parried, for page-space to be ceded to the bibliographic proletariat. In place of the textual we might substitute “nation,” “geography,” “race”; Almadhoun’s politics in I Have Brought You a Severed Hand is one that, having bided its time, wrenches its way out from the sepulchral maw and crowds in from the shadows.

History and capital-T Theory are his currency; he claims—and in his importunate demand maybe struggles to redeem—what’s “ours” from the ruined edifice of Western philosophy. “We love you, Europe,” a poem early in the collection intones. “We love your art and hate your colonialist history, love your theatre and hate your concentration camps, love your music and hate the sound of your bombs, love your philosophy and hate Martin Heidegger, love your literature and hate orientalism, love your poetry and hate Ezra Pound, love the freedom of expression within your own boundaries and hate the Islamophobia…” 

The litany speaks for itself, almost rolls off the tongue in its rhythmic and repetitive turns like a spoken-word piece. We all know Heidegger was a Nazi; we’ve heard time and again that Pound embraced fascism. The more recent disclosure of Habermas’s Zionism appears but another cog in this corrupt machine. Almadhoun’s ease shrouds the serious, shattering anxiety of inheritance that undergirds the poetry; the existential crisis of an intellectual who, like many of us, owes a formative debt to the Western canon while living in the aftermath of the depredations wrought in its name. From that vantage he cannot but wonder—where does one tradition end and another begin? Can you “take Nazism and give us Immanuel Kant”? Is it possible to write, and even to think, without the miasmic taint of genocide?

In that mercurial glibness, that hidden self-reckoning, that erudite penchant for incessant cross-referencing, I sense a genealogy of giants trailing behind him, among which we might number Frantz Fanon, Ousmane Sembène, the third-worldist solidarities dreamed of by journals like Lotus and Souffles in the heyday of decolonization. All held out hope for a reinvented humanity, even if scarred and severely charred by the conflagrations of war. All were laceratingly alert to the grisly truths of plunder and exploitation, from the “Eiffel Tower that’s made of iron stolen from Algeria” to the “load of refugees who were going to clean up European retirees’ shit.” All were determined to expose the First World as a fiction teetering on the edge of collapse: held up by hypocrisy and brute force, magnified by the distorting trompe l’oeil of culture, and literally stitched together by the colonies’ resources and labor.

But Almadhoun, formed in the crucible of diaspora and residing now between Stockholm and Berlin, is more an Aimé Césaire refreshed for an age of post-9/11 neoliberalism and identity politics. Syrian-Palestinian by descent, born into the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus and launched into a life of itinerancy, his cleaved poetic subject is one who declares a fear of capitalism while “everyone around me is afraid of terrorism”; who takes the world to task for not calling things “by their names” and labels Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan “all American wars”; who is “a Swede when they take the tax off me, an immigrant when I demand equality.” His poems are afflicted by “postmodern stress disorder.”

Sensitive to every coil and kink in the fragile project of whiteness, Almadhoun co-opts reified metrics of identity, racialization, citizenship into his own literary joke. He plays court jester to the European Union’s promises and enshrinements (a quality which also renders Almadhoun’s work peculiarly ripe for translation): “Since everybody is going to die in the end, the death rate in Syria and Sweden is the same.” He fiddles liberally with ossified clichés, operates on the moral spinelessness of the idiomatic: to a casino girl who says “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” the persona counters, “What about what happens in Syria?” His rhetorical prestidigitation relies on smart inversions, juxtapositions that force the oppressor’s hand. Witnessing “them displaying ‘savage’ men they brought in chains from the colonies, I knew who the real savage was.” The mirrors, like the proverbial tables, are turned—in what Césaire himself, bringing Nazism into view as a metropolitan manifestation of what had been practised in the colonies for centuries, might have called a choc en retour (or “reverse shock,” in Michael Rothberg’s translation).

There pulses the delinquent thrill—the whiplash—of Almadhoun’s figurative dexterity. A representative simile reads: “Barrels of oil rise in price and barrel bombs of TNT fall on cities […] 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?” He layers it on so thickly, dislodges an otherwise neutral social designation so utterly from its habitual frame of use, that having an EU passport now becomes legible only as a synonym for a posture of political passivity and bleating assent—one that treats world-historical events as intellectual exercises, for whom a regional anti-authoritarian insurrection is but a mere change of weather, an ephemeral seasonal phase registered only insofar as it might touch the self. 

In that same off-kilter key, Almadhoun likens psychiatric hospitals to mass graves in the Middle East; a civil war is hand-delivered to the poem’s addressee “so you won’t feel homesick.” Is home still home if it reeks of carnage and displacement? Inanimate objects and architectural structures suffer from a condition of excess, of being too much themselves, as if caught in a retributive feedback loop: water chokes, roads lose their way home, houses emigrate and abandon their inhabitants, the Mediterranean sinks in its own deluge, and Islamophobia is itself something to be afraid of.

Almadhoun’s errant gamble comes to a head with the monumental trauma that is the Holocaust, whose exceptional position in the general discursive consciousness has sedimented a stratum of unspeakability and obligated atonement—especially in Germany, where memory culture has reached such a fever pitch that ensuring Israel’s security has been encrusted as the state’s reason for existence (or Staatsraison, if German compounds are your cup of tea). For Almadhoun to invoke the Holocaust as a rhetorical topos in relation to Palestine constitutes no trivial gesture; the unreconciled burdens and unexorcised spirits of history hinge on it.

Berlin, then, is not only a “postmodern mass grave” but a “concentration camp for millennial artists.” Invoking Adorno’s famous dictum, Almadhoun rhapsodizes—at risk of sounding twee, reckless, belittling—that “to fall in love with another woman after you is barbaric.” At times he pulls back, aware of language’s snares, a latter-day Hamlet: “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?” Troubadour and poète maudit alike, he tests the limits of comparison almost without compunction. His is a poetics more allied with polemical turbulence and dislocation than fidelity to literal historical fact. The metaphorical correspondences he limns—between realms of the erotic, the traumatic, the world-historical—approach hasty hyperbole Yet, as fragments, they divulge their own fractures, strain at the seams, as if to profess their own inadequacy. 

Palestine emerges out of this clamorous void as the aporia that must be voiced, sutured to a vision of totality and co-implication: “the final solution that caused me to be born a refugee […] because you had the audacity to hand over my country Palestine as a payment, a compensation, and a solution for the Holocaust that was perpetrated by those of your white inhabitants who believe in the purity of the Aryan race.” How else can the enigma of Almadhoun’s own biography, shuffled through interstitial matrices of globality, be accounted for? The ongoing Nakba, in Elias Khoury’s prescient formulation, demands to be recognized in light of the Holocaust’s weaponization—the impunity that the Western world continues to lend to Israel even as the rogue state flagrantly flouts every rule in the geopolitical playbook. 

Though predating Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign against Gaza after the October 7 attacks, the texts gathered in I Have Brought You a Severed Hand already know, and foresee, something of the ruin to come. “The metaphors in this poem are adapted from real events that have never happened before,” goes the subtitle to one piece. In another Almadhoun revealingly writes, “although my passport is fake, my poems are real.” Literature, for him, is thicker than the falsehoods of nationality, the vacuous mendacity of borders; it is as solid as Palestine, “as obvious as occupation,” and as real—if only ever as irrevocably partial—as the severed hand that he offers, to us.