Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah

bio

Born July 8, 1944, Mourid Barghouti was a Palestinian poet and author of the autobiographical “I Saw Ramallah”, published in 1997, winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Literary Creativity in the same year, and appearing in English translation in 2000. He began university in 1963 in Cairo, majoring in English literature. On attempting to return home, he discovered Israel had barred him from re-entering. He remained in exile from his homeland for 30 years. Barghouti was imprisoned by and subsequently expelled from Egypt in 1977 for the assumption that he was opposed to President Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, after which he published Sidewalk Poems (قَصَايِد الرَّصيفِ). He is noted as one of the most prominent critics of the Oslo Accords. He was married to Egyptian novelist and critic Radwa Ashour (born May 26, 1946), who translated his 2005 poems Midnight (مُنْتَصَف اللَّيْل) in 2008. Radwa Ashour passed away on November 30, 2014, with Mourid Barghouti following on February 14, 2021.

quick points

• author of 12 books of poetry
• fiercely independent of cultural and political associations
• father of political scientist and poet Tamim al-Barghouti
• close friendship with Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali (creator of the Handala character, synonymous with Palestinian resistance) and Palestinian novelist and journalist Ghassan Kanafani

synopsis

I Saw Ramallah is a memoir by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, written in the latter stages of his career.

It is divided into nine chapters, each primarily based on an overarching theme, metaphor, or time period or place.

“The Bridge” describes the various names of the bridge, as well as the actual wait at the border control of the Occupied West Bank before entering his hometown after three decades of exile; “Uncle Daddy”, the story behind why his son first called him “Uncle” instead of “Daddy”.

Barghouti’s entire text, read in its entirety, proves powerful, but the last three chapters are the strongest in his book. We will get to the reason why following this brief synopsis.

Each chapter is a rumination, meditation, reflection, recount, reckoning, or lecture of sorts. Towards the end of the work, Mourid Barghouti himself laments:

As though by crossing that small wooden bridge I managed to stand in front of my days. I made my days stand in front of me. I touched particular details for no reason and neglected others, also for no reason. I chattered an entire lifetime to myself while my guests thought I was silent.

Throughout his time in Ramallah, the poet deliberately flits through his storied career, primarily in Egypt, Jordan, and Hungary. There are also anecdotes involving other parts of the West, Europe and the United States.

More importantly, he reflects on death. Plural, actually: deaths. The assassination of Naji al-Ali, the murder of Ghassan Kanafani, the death of his father, and the death of his brother, too.

It is a fascinating read, that simultaneously provides a retrospective on a poet little known outside his mother tongue as well as a first-person perspective history lesson on not only the settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing that had been at work during his lifetime, but the inner workings of a variety of ever-evolving movements, marches, authorities, bodies, negotiations, mischaracterizations, and turning points among governments and cultures in the East and West.

Mourid Barghouti shows his mettle in turns with his wisdom; he is both gentle and brutally honest, yet casts no aspersions, nor postures or grandstands in any way. His critiques are as valid as his revelations.

Overall, I Saw Ramallah is a work that takes on a special significance in this moment in history as the genocide in Gaza continues to be livestreamed, the entirety of Western liberal democracy continues to show its ass, and the things, especially towards the end of the book, that were fresh and relevant in 1997, demonstrate how this one short and sweet personal account of a singular poet of his time has aged like the finest of fine wines.

exploration

Mourid Barghouti’s book appeared among several of the recommended reading lists that caught my eye around the time I published my previous review for Omar El Akkad’s One Day. It seemed to me to be the most direct opportunity for historical treatment that wasn’t explicitly billed as a work of nonfiction, history, or political science. I thought to myself it would likely bear some resemblance to El Akkad’s work.

Yet, I published that review two whole months ago already now.

Mourid Barghouti’s work is not long, however, and the translation by Ahdaf Soueif is unquestionably masterful.

As someone who reviewed 30 books in 30 days earlier this year, it is hard not to feel ashamed of the amount of time it took me to finish reading Barghouti’s memoir.

I can only resist the urge to indulge such shame by attempting to wax poetic like Barghouti, by admitting that I have always taken a long time to read autobiographical works.

For example, beginning sometime around 2019 or 2020, I spent roughly three or four years reading How It Was by Mary Welsh Hemingway, albeit haphazardly yet committedly, missing out entirely on the hype surrounding her work and life story that was prevalent at the time. In a way, I feel that people have already moved on from Omar El Akkad in the same way they have from Mary Welsh, too (Timothy Christian’s celebrated biography of her, published in 2022, now finds itself neatly tucked away on Amazon under “Self-Help”, with a 70% discount).

Chalk it up to my atheism, but I also don’t necessarily ascribe superlative value to that which academic types (and those who depend on etymological rhetoric to make their point) refer to as “deep reading”—no, to me, deep reading is about as tangible and quantifiable as ether is to modern astrophysics.

The simple fact is that I work and make time for things that make my life easier between the days, and this, though preferable, is also work.

I spent more than a week writing this review because I wanted to reflect on Barghouti’s turns of phrase, his saliency, his lucidity, and digest his deconstruction of privilege, in particular (which I will split into five paragraphs instead of three for readability):

How can we explain today, now that we have grown older and wiser, that we on the West Bank treated our people as refugees? Yes, our own people, banished by Israel from their coastal cities and villages in 1948, our people who had to move from one part of the homeland to another and came to live in our cities and towns, we called them refugees! We called them immigrants! Who can apologize to them? Who can apologize to us? Who can explain this great confusion to whom? Even in a small village like Deir Ghassanah, we heard—in our childhood—words like ‘immigrants’ and ‘refugees.’

We were familiar with these words, comfortable using them. How is it that we did not ask ourselves then about their meaning? How is it that the adults did not scold us for using them?

The wish to count the faults of the victim has woken in me once again; it is not enough to register the faults of others, the Occupier, the Colonialist, the Imperialist, and so on. Disasters do not fall on people's heads like comets from the sky on a beautiful natural scene.

We too have our faults; our share of shortsightedness. I am certain that we were not always a beautiful natural scene. But this truth does not absolve the enemy of his original crime that is the beginning and the end of this evil. I know that it is the easiest thing to stare at the faults of others and that if you look for faults you see little else.

Which is why—after each setback that befalls us—I look for our faults too; the faults of our song. I ask if my attachment to the homeland can reach a sophistication that is reflected in my song for it. Does a poet live in space or in time? Our homeland is the shape of the time we spent in it. Perhaps I am ill-intentioned. I only believed a little of what Nazim Hikmet had to say. My troubles in exile were no worse than the troubles of my friends in their homelands. I cannot stand a fraudulent yearning.

This may come as a surprise if, like me, you’re unfamiliar with Mourid Barghouti’s life and work. During his life, he avoided all formal associations with movements, ideologies, governments, or schools of thought and remained critical of tribalism and the tendency to choose sides to a fault.

It may be a fault, but it’s a fault that would be a welcome sight for sore eyes in the current publishing landscape in North America, I might add. I digress.

Later in the book, Barghouti elaborates:

My own defect was that I find it too easy to retreat when I see something I do not like. I turn my back. The days have proved to me that it would have been better if I had put up with a little more and tried a lot more. I marginalized myself in order to put a distance between myself and the slightest hint of cultural or political despotism. The intellectual's despotism is the same as the despotism of the politicians of both sides, the Authority and the opposition. The leadership of both share the same features. They stay in their positions forever, they are impatient with criticism, they prohibit questioning from any source, and they are absolutely sure that they are always right, always creative, knowledgeable, pleasant, suitable,
and deserving, as they are and where they are.

He even goes so far as to admit that during any given protest or march, no matter how convinced he was of others’ rhythmic chants and slogans, he never felt compelled to repeat any of them for fear of associating with too much certainty to any one direction or assembly.

It’s funny, you know? The West constantly lionizes figures such as this. Surrealism had its precious Lautréamont, Modernists with their Joyce, Eliot and Pound, and, unforgettably, and more recently, Bolañomania.

The West loves an exile. The West idolizes the expat. But when a figure such as Mourid Barghouti enters the discourse, someone who, even when he chose his destination, never chose the duration of his stay, academics blink. For some reason or another, Barghouti doesn’t fit neatly enough into any Western boxes to be considered contemporary any longer, the result being, his biggest claim to fame in 2025 might be that his book has a foreword in it by Edward Said.

It’s just funny how that works. By any conceivable metric, the West should declare Mourid Barghouti’s work a natural wonder of the world, if not representing the return of a secular Messiah himself. But at least he still appears on some lists.

Bitterness aside, some of Barghouti’s text is so poetic, it summons tears from unfamiliar depths. Here he is describing reuniting with his wife and son for the first time since his expulsion from Egypt, in the opening of Chapter 4:

As the days passed I began to understand. You do not rejoice immediately when life presses a button that turns the wheel of events in your favor. You do not arrive unchanged at the moment of joy dreamt of for so long across the years. The years are on your shoulders. They do their slow work without ringing any bells for you.

Anyone who has ever experienced the peculiar sensation of reuniting with loved ones may readily recognize themselves in this scene’s depiction. This effect prevails throughout his work. But it feels neither aphoristic or axiomatic, fatalistic or metaphorical. His powers of observation are so keen you feel it across the years, and every translated word pierces through your stubborn, weary heart. “The years are on your shoulders. They do their slow work without ringing any bells for you.”

Comedy and tragedy are two sides of the coin flip of every paragraph in Mourid Barghouti:

In my room, before I fell asleep, I looked over the drafts of the text I was preparing for publication under the title “The Logic of Beings.” I was given pause by what seemed a somewhat exaggerated use of comedy. But I said why not, let it be, it is like this. It is a tragedy, yes, it is a comedy, yes, I mean at the same time. In every dialogue the funny and the sad met in the same sentence. I do not believe an eye that ignores the comedy within the tragedy. It is always more comfortable to present tragedy as what happens to us rather than what our hands do. The situation is tragic but the tragedy is always tinged with comedy because it is without majesty. We fall silently, without that resounding noise that accompanies the fall of the hero in Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. The diabolic media machine fudges the meaning of the fall and presents it to us as a victory or a renaissance. This was not available in old tragedies. Hamlet said: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” and that was the end of it. You did not wake up next morning to a radio or TV program telling you that William Shakespeare was a trivial man with his own agenda and with no relationship to the struggle of the people, and that everything in Denmark is just fine, especially its wise leadership. You will not find an essay in the morning newspapers of the north that places its arms akimbo and yells in the face of poor William, son of Mrs. Umm William: “And what is the alternative, Mr. Shakespeare?” Did Anwar al-Sadat not say that he would applaud anyone who managed to do better than he did with his historic initiative? If only Oedipus had the eloquence to extract himself from his tragedies with such simplicity. But Oedipus cannot transform the catastrophe into a carnival or a festival. When Shakespeare wanted to write tragedy, he wrote tragedy; when he wanted to write comedy he wrote something completely different from Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth or Othello. We Arabs have become used to reading the tragedy and the comedy on the same page, in the same event, and in the same treaty, in the same speech, in defeat and in victory, in weddings and funerals, homeland and exile, and in the features of our one face every morning.

While completing the final steps of submitting his son’s birth certificate for a travel visa to Ramallah in the future, he goes on to detail his journey in Vienna, a vantage point for seeing the death and destruction taking place in the late eighties across the Levant:

Once, I was taking part in a symposium in Vienna. I left my seat to do a quick interview with a newspaper and returned to find a woman sitting in my place. She was the Israeli laywer Felicia Langer, who specializes in defending Palestinian detainees. She turned, saw me standing, and said: “My God, we occupy Palestinian places even in Austria.”

Several lines later, he continues:

We were in a break between two panels. At the same table, in the lobby of the hotel, we sat: two leaders from the Lebanese National Movement, Mrs. Langer, Yevgeny Primakov (the Soviet expert in Arab affairs), and two friends from Sweden. Somebody came to tell us that the Mufti of Lebanon had said it was lawful for the people of the camps in Beirut to eat cats and dogs. I was not sure if this was a real piece of news or another cry for help over the media to put an end to that apparently endless hell. But the accumulated tension because of what had been going on in the camps over the past days, the absurdity of the fighting and the killing, brought back to me once again the feeling of the mingling of tragedy and comedy. I said to Felicia: “Where should we go? Would you accept me as a refugee in your country?” I was of course using this expression deliberately to try to find out how she regarded our country. I was in a sense referring to Israel's responsibility for our being in Sabra, Shatila and Burj al-Burajneh, for our being in the camps at all, for our being despite ourselves in the countries of others, for the shape of our entire fate, whether in Palestine or in the Diaspora. I expected (because of her known position and her support for us) that she should be upset, that she would contemplate my question for a little while and see what lay behind it. But she was completely unable to pick up the resounding bitterness in my question. Her answer came as a shock, as a slap in the face: “I wish! But the laws of our government would not permit it.”

Who among us reading this now can deny the uncanniness (das Unheimliche) of the same lie being repeated nearly a quarter century later on the other side of the world about the brave Haitian people in Ohio? Better yet, who can deny, reading this now, that it won’t happen again in 25 years?

Something about the duality of Hamlet serves the biographer’s purpose best. It’s a theme that came up in André Maurois’s life of Byron, to significant effect, I recall, as well. Barghouti, always self-aware, touches on the theme like a leitmotif sporadically throughout his memoir, to lesser effect maybe, but doubly convincing for its total disregard of theatrics:

The Israeli flag was raised in Cairo just one hundred meters away from the statue of the ‘Renaissance of Egypt,’ in which the great sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar immortalized the revolution of 1919. At University Bridge it flutters above the waters of the Nile only three hundred meters from the dome of Cairo University, the dome of all those sit-ins, the dome toward which once, long ago, when I was a young student at the university, I saw a procession of cars heading, out of which climbed Jawaharlal Nehru, Josip Broz Tito, Zhou Enlai, Kwame Nkrumah, and Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser. They climbed the marble staircase and sat in the Festival Hall, in front of them their papers and their files, and unforgettable words made their way from them into the consciousness of a young boy from the mountains of Deir Ghassanah. Words about independence, development, and freedom. Words, words, words, O Prince of Denmark!

This is from Chapter 8, “Reunion”, where he describes the 2-day march that took place following the end of the Six-Day War in ‘67 that led to the reinstatement of Nasser as president of Egypt.

It is a chapter that contains his indelible testament: “That is the one definite milestone for what followed and is following until now. Yes, ‘67 has been stamped permanently on my mind since I lived it in my early youth.”

Mourid Barghouti was only 22 at the time. I Saw Ramallah was published thirty years later.

A familiar name makes a lasting appearance in the same chapter:

Since 1967 the last move in the Arab chess game has been a losing move. A move backward, negating everything that came before it, however positive those opening moves were. After the Battle of al-Karama, which the Palestinians and the Jordanians fought together against the enemy, we turned in Black September against ourselves. After the war of 1973 and the crossing of the Suez Canal we went to Camp David. After our opposition to Camp David we Arabized it and generalized it and accepted what was even less useful and more scandalous. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] turned from heroic resistance to fighting within itself and moderation and adaptability in face of the conditions set by the enemy. After the popular Intifada on the land of Palestine we went to Oslo. We are always adapting to the conditions of the enemy. Since ‘67 we have been adapting. And here is Benyamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, calming America's fears for the current agreement by saying that the Arabs will in the end adapt to his harshness because they always adapt to whatever they have to.

This is why I think Chapter 8 signals the beginning of the strongest part of the book, where the author’s memory catches up to us in the present day.

It’s also this chapter where he draws towards a conclusion with this, one of his most compelling paragraphs:

It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from “Secondly.” Yes, this is what [Yitzhak] Rabin did [in the White House garden]. He simply neglected to speak of what happened first. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim. It is enough to start with “Secondly,” for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous. Start with “Secondly,” and Gandhi becomes responsible for the tragedies of the British. You only need to start your story with “Secondly,” and the burned Vietnamese will have wounded the humanity of the napalm, and Victor Jara's songs will be the shameful thing and not Pinochet's bullets, which killed so many thousands in the Santiago stadium. It is enough to start the story with “Secondly,” for my grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, to become the criminal and Ariel Sharon her victim.

It’s been 25 years since this work appeared in English, and it gives me pause for thought, to think of what it’s like to hold this piece of history in my hands that has sentences that cut through years of bullshit that could have been written yesterday:

But I cannot accept any talk of two equal rights to the land, for I do not accept a divinity in the heights running political life on this earth. Despite all this, I was never particularly interested in the theoretical discussions around who has the right to Palestine, because we did not lose Palestine in a debate, we lost it to force.

In a summer of record wildfires, military aggression, and live images and videos of the genocide being unleashed by Israel in Palestine, it is a welcome, but heartbreaking book to read.

No bells ring over my shoulders, opening my Instagram in bed this morning to read “Houthis vow to assassinate Netanyahu,” no. But I open the comments section to witness others’ reactions, and the first thing I read says: “Wouldn’t it be great if Trump and Netanyahu died in the same week?” Then, and only then, do I crack a smile.

It soon fades, however, as I quickly realize all the work there will still be left for us to do.

I think my favourite quote from Mourid Barghouti comes from his interview with Githa Hariharan at the Indian Cultural Forum, which you can watch via Youtube below.

In it, he paraphrases the poem of al-Shabi, in a way that is more economical yet direct than any written translation out there: “if people decide to live, destiny will obey.” He says with this one line of poetry, the Tunisian was able to spark revolution, in Tunisia and in Egypt, a century after it was composed.

But in saying so, I think Barghouti best summarizes himself and his ability to prioritize good writing over politics, in spite of their allure—for good writing, when and only when it qualifies as good writing, makes the best political statement: