Seven days after the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti was banned from Egypt; a period of exile started that would last for thirty years. In the summer of 1996, he returned to Palestine for the first time. About the travel back home, he published an impressive memoir, I saw Ramallah (1997), in which he explains what exile does to a person and how displacement leads to alienation from the self and others. It is in the poetic writing that politics comes to the fore. It is in the close reading of this writing that we find  insight to criticise the disastrous war in Gaza today.

Mourid Barghouti

Mourid Barghouti (1944-2021) was born in Palestine (Westbank) and graduated from Cairo University in 1967. In that year he was forced to leave Egypt and found exile in Budapest. In 1996, after the peace process that was started in 1993 by Yasser Arafat’s PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation founded in 1964 in Jerusalem) and the state of Israel, Barghouti as a Westbanker was allowed to make a return journey to the Palestinian territories. The return came with mixed feelings of joy and sadness, as the memoir acutely shows. Emotions and observations, memories and reflection are interwoven and paint a picture of the fundamental existential alienation experienced. The memoir is composed in nine chapters that tell of the journey to Ramallah and to Deir Ghassanah, about the thirty years that have passed in which Barghouti found his poetic voice, and about the son who was born in Egypt, yet is Palestinian and should also have the right to return. All the memories are political and poetic at the same time.

Poetry as politics

A memoir is a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge. With his memoir, Barghouti provides insight into the Palestinian crisis, the almost 80 years of building up tension between Palestine and Israel, the development and decline of the PLO, the resistance of Hamas, the unreliability of politicians. The memoir offers a historical background to the ongoing war in Gaza, which is completely out of control considering the occupation since 1967. But the memoir also is poetic in its evocation of memories and people; it is sometimes moving, but never bitter writing. In the poetic style, the memoir explores what the experience of returning has brought, how the experience of returning is always linked to time and place. 

It is precisely the literariness of the memoir, that is its poetic, affective, non-adversarial nature, that makes the political subject possible. As the French philosopher Jacques Rancière pointed out in Mute Speech (1998), the politics of literature lies not in the author’s engagement, in his explanation of social and political struggles, but in the construction of a specific sphere of experience in which certain issues are brought to light. Mute things speak better than any orator. To put this differently: Barghouti does not represent the Palestinian crisis, but evokes it in memories, portraits of family members, images of the landscape and the local architecture. Memory is alienation, displacement is dispossession of existence. 

The Bridge

The beginning of the journey back is on the bridge over the Jordan river. ‘The wooden planks creak between my feet’, Barghouti writes. The Westbank can only be visited via a bridge; it is a narrow, ‘unimportant’ bridge ‘no longer than a few meters of wood’ (9), but the crossing is managed by Israeli soldiers with guns. A bridge refers to the connection of two sides, to a possible transition, but this bridge is mainly an obstacle and testifies to power play and dominance, because in whose country is the bridge actually located? The names of the land are as many as the claims to the right over the land and the stories about the land:

[N]ow I pass from my exile to their . . . homeland? My homeland? The West Bank and Gaza? The Occupied Territories? The Areas? Judea and Samaria? The Autonomous Government? Israel? Palestine? Is there any other country in the world that so perplexes you with its names? (13)

Walking across the bridge, Barghouti recalls events from the thirty years that have passed, the many friends and relatives who have perished or died in exile. After all these years, he realizes that things are not clearer, after all nothing has changed, only the temporariness has become permanent:

In the disaster of 1948 the refugees found shelter in neighboring countries as a ‘temporary’ measure. They left their food cooking on stoves, thinking to return in a few hours. They scattered in tents and camps of zinc and tin ‘temporarily’. The commandos took arms and fought from Amman ‘temporarily’, then from Beirut ‘temporarily,’ then they moved to Tunis and Damascus ‘temporarily’. We drew up interim programs for liberation ‘temporarily’ and they told us they had accepted the Oslo Agreements ‘temporarily’, and so on, and so on. (26)

The repetition is effective, by underlining the temporariness of things hopelessness becomes clear: all attempts to improve the situation between Israel and Palestine, and to make better the living circumstances for Palestinians, were unsuccessful and unconvincing. 

When Barghouti has finally passed the guard posts and is allowed to enter the area, he notices the Israeli flags and the luxurious settlements. He wonders who lives here, whether residents carry weapons permanently on that ‘place that is ours and that they have made theirs’ (29). The settlements function like a rug being woven, little by little the area becomes fuller, and the roles are taken: the occcupier, the colonialist, the imperialist, the refugee, and the immigrant (these are the people who used to live here and then suddenly their rights were taken away).

‘From the summer of ’67 I became that displaced stranger’

During his journey back home, Barghouti ponders what he can do as a poet, who he is as a poet in this context: ‘My measure is aesthetic’, he writes, ‘[t]here are things that are right and ugly and that I will not do and will not follow even though I have the right’ (43). It seems that the poet keeps a distance, he just observes. Politics is everywhere, even when there is a difference between the ‘facts’ and the ‘reality’ in which people live: their emotions and positions. But the poetic distance does not hold: ‘Politics is the number of coffee-cups on the table, it is the sudden presence of what you have forgotten, the memories you are afraid to look at too closely, though you look anyway. Staying away from politics is also politics. Politics is nothing and it is everything.’ (44). Even memories are political, we read here, images from youth appear, as well as reminiscences of other people all long gone from this region and now spread over the globe.

Political is also the question of who has the right to Palestine. Barghouthi writes that he has never been interested in theoretical discussions about that right, ‘because we did not lose Palestine in a debate, we lost it to force’. Linked to that is the question of enmity between Jews and Palestines: ‘When we were Palestine, we were not afraid of the Jews. We did not hate them, we did not make an enemy of them . . . But when they took our entire space and exiled us from it they put both us and themselves outside the law of equality. They became an enemy, they became strong; we became displaced and weak’ (157). The power of the other over one’s own life is frustrating, but it is even more unacceptable when the life of a son is involved. Barghouti’s son Tamim should have a right to the place, because he was born in exile.

Barghouti visits Ramallah and Deir Ghassanah, the village he grew up in, where every house has a name and the people live off the olive and its oil. Entire generations, born in camps and places elsewhere, do not know this village and landscape, even though they still come from there.

When Barghouti is in Ramallah, a city with a Christian-Islamic texture, he realises that it is less modern than it used to be: ‘[t]he occupation forced us to remain with the old’ (69).  There have been no new developments; progress was deliberately held back: ‘The Occupation kept the Palestinian village static and turned our cities back into villages’ (147). There are no bookshops, no theatres. It is as if the plan was ‘to turn every Arab city into a rural hinterland for the Hebrew State’ (147). The suggestion is that if you keep people poor and backward, they will be easier to dominate, or more likely to move away themselves (thus making room for Zionists). Around Ramallah new orderly settlements can be seen while passage to nearby Jerusalem is blocked to Palestinians.

Displacement is a status quo and also a feeling

What does it do to a person when he lives in exile for thirty years? Barghouti asks the question and gives several answers. He compares himself to a Bedouin traveller, he counts the number of houses he has stayed in (thirty), and then realizes that he has never owned anything: ‘I have never been able to collect my own library. I have moved between houses and furnished apartments, and become used to the passing and the temporary. I have tamed myself to the feeling that the coffeepot is not mine. My coffee cups belong to the owner or are left behind by the previous tenant . . . Several times I have given up all the geraniums that I grew on the changing balconies’ (91). It is the poet who is able to shift between grand ideas, serious statements, and details; in the details is the peculiarity of life. The caring for ordinary plants affirms Barghouti’s existence, even if the place is random and temporary.

Displacement is a status quo and also a feeling: ‘Displacements are always multiple.  . . . . When it happens you become a stranger in your places and to your places at the same time. The displaced person becomes a stranger to his memories and so he tries to cling to them’ (131). Four million human beings were displaced in 1948, they moved to camps in Lebanon, to Egypt, Jordan and other places. The displaced person ‘draws close when he is far away and feels distant when he is near. And he desires his two states and his two positions at the same time’ (132). The poet realises that in his work he evokes his country, conjures it up, when that place is no longer there. ‘Poetry itself is an estrangement’ (4), he contemplates. 

Transnational literature?

According to German literary scholar Sigfrid Löffler (2014;17) many of the most interesting contemporary writers are migrants: ‘This new world literature is a dynamic, rapidly growing, post-ethnic, and transnational literature, a literature without permanent residence, written by migrants, commuters between the cultures, transit travelers in a world in motion, whose most advanced representatives such as Taiye Selasi, Mohsin Hamid, or Teju Cole have also left post-colonialism behind’. I think that such a statement is too optimistic in the context of Barghouti’s memoir; since being displaced for him is not necessarily being trans-nationalist, precisely because the local permeates, the local is in his Arabic language, and is constantly memorized and missed. This could be made more clear by referring to the difference between Barghouti’s I saw Ramallah and Edward W. Said’s Out of Place (1999), characterised as a memoir as well. Said is extensive in sharing details about his family, his education, his life in Egypt and later in the United States. Even when he describes himself as ‘an outsider’, we acknowledge his talent for connecting differences, undoubtedly based on his education at Harvard and Princeton. Said writes fluently in English. Barghouti is less explicit and more evocative, and as a poet the opposite of the public intellectual Said. We could argue that Barghouti is not ‘the commuter between cultures’, but the traveller lost in time and space.

Barghouti writes this stanza when he returns to a house from his childhood, in Dar Ra’d. There used to be a large fig tree that has now been cut down; he meets the neighbours but no longer recognizes anyone:

Does Dar Ra’d reject my story about Dar Ra’d?

Are we the same at parting and at meeting?

Are you you? Am I me?

Does the stranger return to where he was?

Is he himself returning to a place?

Our house!

And who will wipe the weariness off the other’s brow? (55)

Seeing the place, seeing Ramallah back, the poet knows that it is not the same, that he does not belong there as he used to be. 'Does the stranger return to where he was?' Historical and political events have ruined life for ever. Who has the right to claim 'Our house'?

References

Barghouti, Mourid (2001). I Saw Ramallah. Translated by Ahdaf Soueif, with a foreword by Edward W. Said. New York: Anchor Books.

Löffler, Sigrid (2014). Die Neue Weltliteratur: Und Ihre Grossen Erzähler. München: Beck. 

Rancière, Jacques (2011). Mute Speech, Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics. Translated by James Swenson with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Columbia University Press.

Said, Edward W. (2000). Out of Place, A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books.