I Can't Attend

I can’t attend, for the distance between my reality and my memory confirms that Einstein was right and the energy produced by my longing equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.

I can’t attend but I can be absent, yes, I can be absent with great skill. I’ve become an expert in recent times and I’ve acquired a diary where I make a note of the times I have to be absent and I have memories that haven’t happened yet.

(excerpt — English translation by Catherine Cobham)

About this poem

“I Can’t Attend” is the title poem of Ghayath al-Madhoun’s 2014 Arabic collection La Astati’ al-Hudur. Written after he left Syria for Sweden, the prose poem stages an exile’s absurd accounting: lying “in the summer sun as if I am a white man” in the North, the speaker invents ever more fanciful excuses for his absence from Damascus — his friends “ascending to God at a rapidly increasing rate,” a woman in the North who made him forget the taste of his mother’s milk, the fishes who will find no one to feed them. The litany tightens until the final excuse collapses the joke: “I’m dead, yes, I died several years ago.”

Catherine Cobham’s English translation appeared in Adrenaline (Action Books, 2017), al-Madhoun’s first English-language collection.

Sources

• Ghayath al Madhoun – the agony of an exiled poet — In That Howling Infinite (full text in Cobham’s translation, with the Arabic original)
• ديوان “لا أستطيع الحضور” ٢٠١٤ — ghayathalmadhoun.com (the poet’s own bibliography)