PERSPECTIVE
The poet's eye
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`The narrative is remarkable for its rich poetic texture, offering human aspects of the Palestinian problem expressed in a language which is fresh and vivid in visual imagery.'
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WELL-KNOWN Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti's I saw Ramallah is an intense elegiac memoir on the Palestinian predicament. Literature on the Palestinian diaspora has usually been wrought with fierce and involuted tensions which emerge from the politics and polemics of exile. Barghouti's book moves beyond the politics of war and peace in West Asia and is bound by a fraught diaspora poetics unfolding an evocative tale of displacement, deprivation and the inevitable return of the restless native. The narrative is remarkable for its rich poetic texture, offering human aspects of the Palestinian problem expressed in a language which is fresh and vivid in visual imagery. Barghouti's poetic sensibility perhaps allows for an amazing balance and restraint of his views on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He neither severely condemns nor berates the unresolved dealings between the two countries and without sentimentalising, draws attention to the horror of the irrevocable cost of human price paid when one loses his homeland and its shared history. This is where Barghouti's book scores well and transcends over the perhaps-targeted and assumed partisan readership and resonates well with wider readership.
The history of Palestine tells a fierce story of dispossession and disinheritance. In 1948, millions of Arab inhabitants dispersed across the world and remained in exile after the political movement of the Zionist Jews conquered the West Bank and Gaza and established an Israeli State in 1967. Palestinian attempts to regain their territories failed miserably and the crisis continues till today. The 1993 U.S.-backed peace process failed to arrive at any reconciliation but the treaty however allowed the return of some Palestinians, who belonged to the 1967 territories such as Ramallah and Jerusalem, to their homes.
The narrative opens with Barghouti's return to Ramallah in the summer of 1996, crossing Jordan into the West Bank over a wooden bridge that stretches over a trickling river. He sees Ramallah after an extended exile of 30 years, not being certain whether he is a guest, a visitor, a native or a citizen. The poet's eye tersely rests on an Israeli soldier on the bridge, wearing a Yarmulke, and carrying a gun. Intimidated by a strange sense of foreignness in his own native land, Barghouti notes: "His gun took from us the land of the poem and left us with poem of the land. In his hands he holds the earth and in our hands we hold a mirage".
Memory and reflection
Barghouti's structural layout operates on two narrative planes, both interlinked through memory and reflection. The first tells of his personal history which is about the tragic dispersal of his family — his forced separation from his wife Radwa Ashour, a noted Egyptian writer and an academic and their son Tamim (while Barghouti stayed in Budapest as a PLO representative, his wife and son stayed on in Cairo), and the sudden mysterious death of his brother Mounif in France. The second deals with the collective experience of exile and its painful conditions. Filtering through the experiences of his own personal life, Barghouti details the Palestinian displacement and bemoans the loss of his "idea of Palestine". The politics in the book stem from within these lived experiences. Dispersed across the Arab countries, Europe, Australia and the Americas, the Arab refugees still live a homeless life heavily restricted. Barghouti's personal plight touches a chord with millions of dispersed refugees across the world when he poignantly tells: "At one-thirty in the morning, Mounif informed me from Qatar of the death of my father in Amman. I was in Budapest. At two-fifteen, afternoon, seven years later, my brother `Alaa informed me from Qatar of the death of Mounif in Paris. I was in Cairo."
The personal as political
Barghouti's pointed references to the sudden disappearances of noted Palestinian cultural figures such as the novelist Ghassan Kanafani and the cartoonist Naji al - `Al is significant. It creates a realisation of how artists and their power to penetrate the conscience of a country are sadly subject to abrupt elimination. In making the personal political, Barghouti's rendering of the Palestinian problem is to do more with sorrow than with anger. It underlines human failings rather than a political correction.
I saw Ramallah is an important literary event as it marks the collaboration of three literary talents: Mourid Barghouti, Aldaf Souief, the Egyptian novelist and critic who translated the memoir from Arabic to English and a foreword by the late Edward Said. It is no surprise that the book went on to win the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for literature in 1997. The American edition in English was published in 2003 and more recently, Bloomsbury published the book in the U.K., in March 2004.
A moving narrative of return and loss, this compact memoir is a lamentation of divisions structured by walls, guards and guns; it is also a celebration of human resilience amidst strife and terror. In re-discovering a new Ramallah, distant and foreign to the dispossessed poet, Barghouti faces a fact true to his existence: "it is enough for a person to go through the first experience of uprooting, to be uprooted forever". An appealing account that sums up with novelty the experience of displacement the world over today.
RENUKA RAJARATNAM
I saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti, Bloomsbury, 2004.
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