What kind of poetry can we write in the world we live in today? This poem suggests: a jagged poetry that features horror but also humor, that knows tragedy but also comedy, that we don’t know how to trust. An all-too-human poetry, unpredictable, which we must keep going back to, to see what it will tell us today.
Ghayath Almadhoun’s “If We Lived in a Virtual World” doesn’t offer us a choice between war or the absence of war, a virtual world and a real one. The epigraph from Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry warns us: “Even though the window is virtual, the dead are real.” But the poem goes on to collapse these categories even further; whether we are in a virtual world or a real one, during a war, or during peace, is not the real question here:
1. The war is over
The war is over. But the bombs are still falling inside my head.
If we lived in a virtual world
I would have cleaned the window overlooking your house with an electronic newspaper
And the plastic rose that I put on my brother’s grave would have blossomed.
In the second section, titled ‘War’, another question is asked:
How can I say in the same poem my friends were tortured to death and you are more beautiful than New York, without Lorca laughing in his grave, or poetry being separated from reality?
The poem’s form—in four numbered sections with footnotes—nods to our compulsion to categorize, while showing the impossibility of neat categories. The footnotes conclude each section: “comedy footnote”, “tragedy footnote”, “absurdist footnote”. How lovely to imagine that we can organize the world into virtual and non-virtual, into a main section and a footnote. How lovely to decide who is worthy of a main text, who is worthy of a footnote, and who we shall leave out altogether. Each section ends with “(Cut)”, the gesture of a director, selecting their own version of the world.
The poem’s irony encourages us to laugh at absurdities and despair at realities, but never settle on one feeling. In the final section, the speaker suggests via Dante that perhaps “everything around us resembles a metaphor from a virtual world.” Subsequently, the poem fills with a list of potential evidence in the form of urgent exclamations:
The dictator’s supporters demonstrate to demand the banning of demonstrations!
I love you!
God sells lands full of milk and honey!
There are no easy reassurances in this poem, but there are plenty of real questions. After all, whose theater is this? And who is that now, calling out the final “(Cut)”?
