Do Palestinians typically see Israeli’s as white?

yeah. it's a white settler colonial state. the settlers are white. their interests are full of white supremacist ideals. they treat poc like shit. the settlers mostly come from europe and america. israel loves eugenics. it's whole thing is like. white.

If the borders refuse me, I refuse them

(You can read a Swedish translation of this text here.) I mentioned this project to a friend. She immediately said: You should talk to Ghayath Almadhoun. Ghayath Almadhoun is a poet whose poetry has touched me. He is also a poet working with several languages, living and writing in many places. Finding a time when we could meet was a challenge, due to his frequent travelling. I’m happy we managed. His account of travelling for work brings together the personal and the political, the funny and the sad, the historical and the present, in extraordinary ways.

Ghayath Almadhoun: I travel for many reasons that I hardly understand. Some of them started already in childhood. I was born in Damascus, with a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, in the Yarmouk refugee camp for Palestinians. It was just tents when they founded it in 1948, but now it has become buildings, part of the city. The first questions in my life were: What are we? Why do they say that we are not Syrian but Palestinian? Why, then, am I not in Palestine? 

It was very difficult for my father to explain to a six-year-old why land in Asia provided a solution for the antisemitism and racism against the Jews in Europe. But later, things became even more complicated. I discovered that I am not Palestinian-Syrian. I am a Palestinian from Syria. The Palestinian-Syrians are the Palestinians who arrived to Syria in 1948, when Israel occupied eighty per cent of Palestine. As the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe all accepted this, the Arabic governments understood that the land that was occupied had become Israel. As a solution, they gave the refugees all the papers they needed. So those who arrived from Palestine to Syria in 1948 have the same civil rights as the Syrian people. But our family came after the occupation of Gaza, in 1967. When Israel occupied the Gaza strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights from Syria, Sinai from Egypt and some parts of Jordan, the international community said: “This is occupation, and Israel should leave.” The Arabic nations then decided to not give any papers to these Palestinians in order to not provide any solutions for Israel. I found myself growing up without civil rights. I was not allowed to work. I was not allowed to take driving lessons. I was not allowed to leave the country, and if I did leave for any reason, I would not be allowed back. As we were not allowed to own a house, the house is in the name of my mother, who is Syrian. But if she died, the government would take the house and sell it. This, that I couldn’t inherit, was the thing that hurt me the most.

When I understood that I was already born outside, in exile, as they say, I became fascinated by the idea that there are no borders. If the borders refuse me, I refuse them. When I began to study, I also understood that my father was a poet. I began to think about poetry. I felt connected to many Surahs in the Quran, such as The Poet’s Surah, Surah 26. At the end of the Surah, it says:

“And the poets – the deviators follow them; Do you not see that in every valley they roam And that they say what they do not do?” Travelling is the reality of Arab poets, and poetry is very much connected to travelling in the Arabic tradition. Take the most famous Arabic poet El Mutanabbi. In the 800th century, he travelled, but most of all, his poetry travelled. If El Mutanabbi said a poem in Bagdad, the people in Damascus got it in a matter of hours by pigeon. From there, it went everywhere. His poem would arrive in Andalusia within a week. He himself came two months later.

So, I began to write poetry. My friends all went to Beirut, to Jordan or anywhere. They got invitations to go and read there. But I couldn’t travel, because I didn’t have a passport, papers or even an ID. So, the pressure began to build inside. This continued until I turned thirty, in 2008. Then I left the country. I made a sort of fake passport and went to Sweden. After I got a real Swedish passport, it’s: “Catch me if you can!” The travelling is also connected to my writing. For example, I could visit a place, read about it, discuss it and then I write a poem. I did it for example when Assad used chemical weapons on the suburbs of Damascus. Many people got killed in the first attack with the nerve gas sarin. There were 1,400 deaths, out of which 900 were women and children. I saw these bodies shaking. The pupils of the eyes go small. I started to think about chemicals. And I found that the first chemical attack happened in the city of Ypres in Belgium, on 22 April,1915. I went there for the 100th anniversary of that event. I visited 170 cemeteries. They counted 600,000 graves, and I visited all of them in two weeks. At one gate, they have written the names of all the dead soldiers no matter where they came from – France, England, Canada. They play music in honour of one of them every day and speak about what they know about that specific soldier. They had done this for eighty years without stopping for one single day. Even during the Second World War, they played every day. The problem is that they need 600,000 days to finish the names. I listened to such concerts for fourteen days. Then I wrote a poem that moves between the past and the present, Ypres, Syria and Palestine. Another time, I went to Antwerp to do research about blood diamonds. But during that month, thousands of people started to drown in the Mediterranean. So, my poem started with blood diamonds and ended with Syrians drowning in the sea. By the way, this is not political poetry, this is my life.

So, all in all: I travel in order to write. I’m making up for what I missed when I was without papers. I’m a travelling poet like in the Quran. And I’m born in no country, so I don’t believe in borders. But the main reason why I’m travelling like I have been doing now, 345 days a year and not even staying in Sweden for a full week, is another. When I came to Sweden, I accepted Stockholm as my city because Damascus was in the background. Every time I felt tired of being a foreigner, I remembered that Damascus was there, that one day I could go back and feel relief. In 2011, the Syrian revolution began. I really supported it, and it made my hopes of going to Damascus grow. But people I knew got killed, family members, almost all my friends. Cities I knew were destroyed. And the dictatorship won. The country was destroyed. My hopes of ever going back were lower than ever. Damascus disappeared from my background. Everything was shaken. Also, Stockholm didn’t belong to me anymore. What broke me was my brother. I lost him on 2 April 2016, killed by Assad. I was on tour: I was supposed to spend fifteen days in Holland. The second gig was with Anne Vegter, the poet of the nation. We finished our discussion. I went outside and I put the mobile on. Then my other brother called and told me. I disappeared from the universe for two hours. I woke up with people around me. We went to our friend’s house and I asked him to book me a ticket to Stockholm. The coming twenty-four hours were the most difficult in my life. While the plane was over Denmark, I understood there was something wrong. I wanted to tell the pilot to stop and let me off. Why was I going to Stockholm and not Damascus? Stockholm is even further away from Damascus. What is the difference if I cry in Amsterdam or if I cry in Stockholm? So I started travelling this way. As I see it, the best way to survive trauma is to be on the road. When you arrive, the problems will come. I noticed this in someone I know who was in Syria for four years during the bombings. He lost all his friends. People died in his arms. ISIS arrested him before he left the country. His trip here took eight months. All that time, he was doing ok. But when he got here, it took forty days and then the post trauma hit him. That made me even more scared. So, I began to ask myself: What will happen if I begin to travel and never let myself arrive? The panic attacks will wait for me to be settled. But what if I don’t settle? After the death of my brother I wrote a poem. The writing took place in maybe sixty places, twenty countries. If I would sign it with the names of the cities, that would be as long as the poem. What held me in this is that somebody else paid most of my tickets and travels. In this sense, I survived through poetry twice. On one hand, it’s about writing for survival; writing what hurts me on a paper. But then there are the festivals and the residences and the scholarships bringing me from here to there. Many of these festivals were shocked that I only needed one ticket. Germany pays my ticket from France. Belgium pays my ticket from Germany. Everyone pays only to bring me.

It happens that there are holes in the schedule, maybe even seven days empty. I fill these holes in order to not stay. I ask the festival to make my ticket longer and I pay the hotel myself before I go to the next festival. Or, if the ticket can’t be changed, I book a flight to the Arabic book fairs. In Arabic countries, the book fairs are two to three weeks long. And they schedule them in a systematic way, so they cover the whole year. Any time you want to go to a book fair in an Arabic country, you can. There are around 540 million Arabic-speaking people in the world, in 22 countries with 22 totally different cultures. So, when you go there to sign your book, there will be completely different receptions. You’re a star in Kuwait, they hate you in Libya, and you’re a bestseller in Iraq…

I don’t even remember all the places I have been to, I mix them up. The security personnel in the airport know me and say hello to me. Sometimes I see them in the morning. I go home to throw out the summer clothes and throw in the winter clothes because I’m going to the other side of the planet. Then I see them again in the afternoon. People understand after a while that if they are trying to stop me, they will lose me. If the train is fast and heavy, you should go with it, not stand in front of it. But the routine with friends is you go to their house, bring wine and cook and they come to you next time. When you are travelling again and again and don't have dinner with them, they are not your friends anymore, in a way. You lose your roots.

It is so good when you arrive in places like sunny California, cornfields and wine. And meeting people, discussing with them, having good food, having intellectual exchanges about philosophy, life, racism, patriarchy, everything I’m interested in. But physically it’s tiring. I have a theory I call The Pillow Theory. There are problems in life such as patriarchy, occupation, capitalism and the differences in the shape of pillows in the hotels. I’m fighting for the right of every person to have a size that fits them. Because of pillows and tiredness and lost friends, I’ve started to think I need a strategy to travel less. Also, my girlfriend is involved in this. Our idea is to let my mind think that I’m travelling though I’m not, by taking long residencies outside Sweden. So now I have a five-month residency in Amsterdam and after that a whole year at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme, a scholarship. It works, in a way. When I went to Amsterdam, I started longing for Sweden as my country. Because I understood I would be away for long, I became homesick for the first time. And when I feel the thirst for travel I can make it subtler, because technically, I am already travelling. Through this, I started travelling less. Now, I travel only twice a month.

When I travel, I bring my laptop. They asked me in India what I would bring if the house were on fire. I said my laptop, because there is another house inside it. What is a home for a Palestinian born in a refugee camp if not language? It’s something I inherited from my father. He told me about paradise, the land of milk and honey. When I got my Swedish passport, I went to Palestine. There was nothing. No milk and no honey. It’s only in the dream of the Palestinians. The first time I went there, I was held six and a half hours at the airport. With all the happiness and sadness that I had about being there, finally the Israeli let me in. To this day, I never spoke with my father about that, because they threw him out twice, once from Ashkelon to Gaza in 1948, then from Gaza to Egypt in 1967, and he left his mother there. Until 2012 when she died, he didn’t meet her.

Home is connected to the mother tongue. I miss hearing my name. I used to say to God all the time that I miss Syria and Damascus here in Sweden. But when I asked God to connect me with Syria, he must have misunderstood me. Instead of taking me to Syria, he sent the Syrians to me.