It’s a wonderful thing when poets write prose. Their perceptions are so acute, clarity of expression so exquisite, and images so fresh that reading their prose awakens the mind and refreshes the spirit. When poets write, they restore the act of reading as active engagement and appreciation, like listening to a stirring song, offering a respite from reading as necessity, as chore, or as mild form of torture. For this reason alone, reading Mourid Barghouti’s I Was Born There, I Was Born Here is a stimulating experience, whether or not you’re emotionally attached to Palestine and the Palestinians. If you happen to be so attached, Barghouti offers rousing reading plus a haunting, heart-piercing love song. Because Barghouti is a poet and not a journalist, policymaker, academic, or any of the other very important people that determine how we perceive Palestine, we experience it anew. We experience the permanent disorientation of being Palestinian, either constantly on the move or forcibly fixed in place, always at the behest of others. We see things that are never shown, like the petty joys and idiosyncrasies of ordinary people striving for normalcy. We smell the oranges, jasmine, and coffee that have a special place in the poet’s taste-memory. We hear the sublime voices of Fairouz and Luciano Pavarotti, sacred parts of his writing routine. Reading I Was Born There is like living in Barghouti’s mind for a while, a rich, funny, profoundly insightful place to be.
Written in the same contemplative voice of his earlier I Saw Ramallah (1997), Barghouti’s I Was Born There, I Was Born Here(2009) continues his journeys into Palestine after a 30-year exile. Unlike his first visit in 1996, however, this time the poet’s shuttling back and forth between Cairo, Amman, Ramallah, and his birth village Deir Ghassanah are shadowed by grave events: the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, Ariel Sharon’s 2002 reinvasion of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Iraq war in 2003, the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power, and the subsequent machinations of the losing Fatah to unseat Hamas, backed by Israel, the United States, and client Arab regimes. The book also takes in events of personal significance for the poet, like accompanying his son Tamim (himself an accomplished poet) on Tamim’s first visit to Dar Ghassanah and Jerusalem in 1998; Tamim’s deportation from Egypt in 2003 by Mubarak’s government for opposing the Iraq war; and the poet’s brief, unhappy tenure managing a World-Bank funded cultural project for the PNA in 1999.
Barghouti’s pensées are structured in 10 intricately arranged chapters and a four-page coda, chapters that move back and forth in time in a non-sequential ordering that mimics the workings of the mind. The sensibility that made I Saw Ramallah so original and compelling fills the pages of I Was Born There. There’s Barghouti’s poetic concision, the capacity to distill volumes into a few arresting lines. “The occupation soldier stands on a piece of earth and confiscates it, calling it “here”; all that’s left for me, the owner of the earth exiled from it in faraway lands, is to call it “there.” There’s his distinct approach to philosophical rumination. I don’t mean the declamatory, vacuous musings that often pass for philosophizing, but the sort of disarmingly simple, sharp, quiet observations of an introspective soul. As he and Tamim stroll through the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, Mourid wonders what it must be like for Tamim to finally experience the city after only knowing it through stories, statistics, and photos. He thinks, “But imagination cannot be cancelled out by reality. The reality that surprises us soon generates in the mind another image. I wonder, is there a reality outside of human imagination? The answer perplexes me.”
But the real pleasure of Barghouti’s memoir are the images that grace nearly every page, images that can only be crafted by someone of uncommon sentience. The powerful opening chapter is chock-full of these. Titled “The Driver Mahmoud,” it tells the story of Barghouti’s trip from Ramallah to Amman via Jericho, on the eve of Sharon’s reinvasion of Ramallah and other Palestinian towns in spring 2002. The Israeli army is on high alert and has blocked major roads. Barghouti takes a taxi from Ramallah to Jericho with six other passengers, helmed by an indomitable young driver named Mahmoud who’s determined to get his passengers safely to Jericho, from where they will take a bus to cross the bridge into Amman. To avoid Israeli checkpoints, soldiers, and tanks, he veers off the main road and takes unpaved back roads in the middle of fields.
Older than his years and unconsciously heroic, Mahmoud takes out a thermos of fresh coffee and small plastic cups and distributes them to his passengers. Barghouti notes, “With the pouring of the first cup, a cunning race ensues between the scent of cardamom and the scent of coffee. The cardamom gets there first, of course.” He looks out the window and sees massive uprooted olive trees as far as the eye can see, “lying out in the open like humiliated corpses…For every olive tree uprooted by an Israeli bulldozer, a Palestinian peasant family tree falls off the wall. ” As the car winds its way through the wilderness and the misty grey valley, it comes to a complete halt in a ditch. Now only a deus ex machina can save them, thinks the poet. Within minutes, a huge yellow crane appears between the trees, gleaming under the drizzle, operated by two young villagers gesturing to Mahmoud to prepare for the rescue operation. Mahmoud reassures his passengers, “Fasten your seat belts, don’t be afraid. We’re going to ride the carousel!” The metal fingers of the crane clasp the taxi, “like fingers plucking a pomegranate seed,” lift it and put it back down on the embankment. All disembark and hug one another, and “we find ourselves clapping, as if celebrating a grand victory.”
Barghouti’s image-making, poetic concision, and philosophical rumination in the new memoir recover the same themes he broached in I Saw Ramallah, themes that are by turns political, aesthetic, and formal. For it would be a mistake to read Mourid Barghouti as a Palestinian poet, rather than a poet who is Palestinian. To be sure, his identity is one wellspring of his art, but his art is not contained by his identity. His sensibility as a writer is just as acute as his love of homeland. Formally, Barghouti uses to great effect the technique of association of ideas. An observation or sensation triggers a memory, which calls forth another memory, which may be followed by a meditation on some object, a preview of some future event, or a return to the present. Each of the book’s chapters is intricately structured in this way, narratives nested within other narratives that flow back and forth across time and space. In the remarkable, eponymous fourth chapter of I Was Born There, while visiting Deir Ghassanah with Tamim, father and son come upon the village school. Mourid is prompted into a reverie on the contrast between his hardscrabble childhood and his son’s relatively privileged upbringing. We’re then transported to an extremely moving flashback into the poet’s childhood, his first time in school, and why his birth certificate lists his first name as Nawaf. The memory morphs into a loving, heartbreaking portrait of his orphaned mother, robbed of an education and forced into a marriage, twin tragedies that she spends her whole life ensuring that her children and grandchildren won’t experience.
Chapter 6, “The Ambulance” is another standout example of the technique of nested memories. At the height of the Israeli reinvasion of Ramallah in 2002, when Israel besieged the city and blocked entry, Barghouti undertakes a risky venture to cross into Ramallah from Jericho in an ambulance. The experience prompts a memory of the first time he rode an ambulance years earlier in Amman, while accompanying the body of his beloved brother Mounif on its return from Paris. A small detail about the devastating death of Mounif recalls for the poet his presence at the hospital bedside of Palestinian historian Emile Touma when he died in Budapest in 1985. Then, Barghouti is momentarily jolted back to the present when the ambulance worker asks him a question, which prompts another memory and portrait of fellow Palestinian poet Hussein Barghouti, who had recently died of cancer as Mourid was being smuggled into Ramallah in an ambulance.
Given the events of the past few years, what was only hinted at in I Saw Ramallah is spelled out in I Was Born There. That’s to say politics, the corruption of the PNA, and its groveling before the Israelis. A stand-in for this state of affairs is the detested figure of Nameq al-Tijani (Glorifier of the Crown), Barghouti’s sarcastic moniker for the lowly, careerist PNA underling who will sell his soul for a handful of shekels. Whenever he sees this type on a bus or at a café, the poet tenses up and removes himself from the premises, so revolted is he with what the Nameqs of Palestine represent. The poet reacts the same way to his one-year stint in 1999 directing a PNA cultural project riddled with corruption. An episode bitterly remembered and elliptically recounted, Barghouti first confronted the corruption at his new workplace, then resigned in protest and went off to Amman for 35 days. After the mediation of trusted friends, he returned to Ramallah to reluctantly finish out his term, though mentally he retreated into the security of his inner world. Of the experience he states tersely, “I decided to respect my voluntary isolation and resume it forever.”
Disillusionment with the PNA isn’t the only political theme in I Was Born There. More original are Barghouti’s reflections on the Palestinian condition. Much more sharply than he articulated in I Saw Ramallah, in the new memoir Barghouti nests Palestinian displacement within the broader regional condition of dictatorship. “Occupation, like dictatorship, doesn’t just ruin political and party life but also individuals’ lives, even those who are non-political.” No Palestinian family is without tangible experiences of ill-treatment and obstruction at the hands of Arab governments. So what is the difference between Israeli occupation and Arab dictatorship? Watching helplessly as Egyptian policemen yank Tamim out of his home in 2003, rifles pointed at his back, Barghouti says, “Violent power is the same, whether Arab or Israeli. Brutality is brutality and violation is violation, regardless of the perpetrator.”
Barghouti is a gentle soul and a discerning mind, but that doesn’t mean he won’t occasionally lapse into unoriginality and coarseness. I grew tired of his gratuitous jabs at Arab feminists, his predictable disdain for the overt religiosity of some Palestinians, especially women in his family, and repeated announcements of his disgust at the PNA. An unusually hateful remark about Palestinian women who veil their face (p. 241) made me sad, not simply because it’s the secular mirror-image of religious bigotry and intolerance, but it commits the same blithe reductionism that the poet so vehemently detests.
For it’s his uncompromising refusal to simplify that makes Barghouti a writer to reckon with. In I Saw Ramallah, he spelled out his disdain for cheap rhetoric masquerading as art: “I wondered again about that rubbish they call the ‘poetry of the stones’ and the poems of solidarity with the ‘children of the stones.’ It is the simplification that takes the accessible and the easy from the human condition and so blurs that condition instead of defining it, misrepresents it at the moment of pretending to celebrate it. It is the eternal difference between profundity and shallowness. Between art and political rhetoric.” (Ahdaf Soueif’s translation).
The battle against platitudes, derivative language, and sheer numbness is fought out on nearly every page of I Was Born There. The poet-philosopher isn’t merely “resisting” but engaging in the most difficult, the most rewarding task there is. “I don’t weep over any past, I don’t weep over this present, I don’t weep over the future. I live with the five senses, trying to understand our story, trying to see.”
Neither the lamenter of his people’s sufferings nor the chronicler of their greatness, Barghouti is something else. “We will tell the story as it ought to be told. We will tell our personal histories one by one. We’ll tell our little stories as we lived them, as our souls, eyes, and imaginations remember them. We won’t leave history to be the history of great events and kings and soldiers and the tomes on dusty shelves. We’ll recount our individual stories, the stories of our bodies and senses that to the ignorant eye appear to be shallow, incoherent, and meaningless. The meaning is etched in us, one by one, women, men, children, trees, houses, windows, and cemeteries where no national anthem is played, and forgotten by a historian blind of pen. We’ll recover history as the history of our fears, our anxieties, our patience, the desires of our pillows and our improvised braveries, the history of preparing a dinner meal.”
