Spectral afterlives: Ghayath Almadhoun and Paul Celan’s Palestinian migrations

Ghayath Almadoun’s 2017 “Al-Ḥalīb Al-Aswad (Black Milk)” borrows its title from a master trope of Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge (Death Fugue),” arguably the single most canonical poem about the world of the concentration camps. In conjuring Celan’s ghost, Almadhoun raises a set of questions about how genocide and its spectral afterlives continue to haunt the Arab present and how a certain strand of Holocaust remembrance has been exploited as a tool for unseeing global catastrophes. Through a reading of Almadhoun’s poetry, I seek to query the chronopolitics implied in the “after Auschwitz” episteme—itself forged through a certain reception of “Todesfuge”—and the weaponization of its memory politics. How might the extravagant temporal figurations of a poem written “before” the Gazan genocide put into question the historical scissions that serve as an alibi for genocidal violence?