Interview

A life in writing: Mourid Barghouti

Interview by Maya Jaggi
'You have to strike a balance. I hate the terms 'resistance poetry' or 'exile poetry'. We're not one-
theme poets. There's no one face. I see both'
I learn from trees." The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti gestures around his mother's terraced
garden in the hilly Jordanian capital, Amman. "Just as many fruits drop before they're ripe, when I
write a poem I treat it with healthy cruelty, deleting images to take care of the right ones."
Barghouti has published 12 poetry books in Arabic since the early 1970s, as well as a 700-page
Collected Works (1997). He has read in overflowing amphitheatres and in refugee camps. Midnight
and Other Poems, his first major collection in English translation, is out this month from Arc.
It was his memoir, I Saw Ramallah, published by Bloomsbury in 2004 in a translation by Ahdaf
Soueif, that first won him a readership in English. The late Edward Said saw it as "one of the finest
existential accounts of Palestinian displacement". Reflecting on crossing the bridge from Jordan to
his West Bank birthplace in 1996 after 30 years' exile - a visit under Israeli control that he refused to
call a return - he described a condition of permanent uprootedness. A student in Cairo when the
1967 Arab-Israeli war broke out, he was prevented, like many others, from returning to the Israeli-
occupied West Bank. He was later exiled from Jordan for 20 years, Egypt for 18 years, and Lebanon
for 15 years. Yet all writing, for him, is a displacement, a striving to escape from the "dominant
used language" and the "chains of the tribe - its approval and taboos".
Barghouti lives in Cairo with his Egyptian wife, Radwa Ashour, a novelist and professor of
literature. He visits his mother, Sakina, aged 88, in Amman, where she moved in 1970 to make
contact possible with her four sons, only the youngest of whom was allowed home. But that year
coincided with Black September and the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan. Until martial law,
imposed in Jordan after the 1967 war, ended in 1989, Barghouti, who has worked for Radio
Palestine and as a PLO cultural attaché, was unable to renew his passport. At the Palfest literary
festival that toured the West Bank in May, he read only in his home town, for which he has a permit.
He was, as a Palestinian with a Jordanian passport, barred entry into Jerusalem, or any part of the
occupied territories outside Ramallah, without a separate permit.
Used to the "dual pressure", as he sees it, of Israeli occupation and the oscillating hostility of
neighbouring Arab dictatorships, he says he lives "on my memories". His sense of statelessness
deepened after the Oslo accords of 1993 created the Palestinian Authority, which he scorns. A close
friend of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died in August, Barghouti had mixed feelings at his
funeral in Ramallah. "People of all ages came carrying flowers, with lines of poetry on T-shirts, in
tears and sadness: this was fascinating." Yet he resents what he sees as the Palestinian Authority's
attempt to "monopolise Mahmoud. They didn't invite any writers to the ceremony. The guards
pushed away everybody who tried to come to the grave".
Driving now by Darwish's shuttered apartment in Amman, Barghouti says he never erases the dead
from his address book. His memoir is punctuated by deaths, of the Palestinian writer Gassan
Kanafani, assassinated by an Israeli car bomb in Beirut in 1972, the cartoonist Naj al Ali, killed in
London in 1987, and his elder brother Mounif, who died in the Gare du Nord in Paris in
unexplained circumstances. Politics, he writes in a poem, "is the family at breakfast. Who is there.
Who is absent and why".
Loss informs his long poem "Midnight", first published in Beirut in 2005, and translated into
English by Ashour, who sees it as the "mature culmination" of a poetic career. As its protagonist
stares on New Year's Eve through an open window, the falling pages of a calendar bring a "chaos of
memories, ghosts, relatives, wars, defeats, lusts, desires", Barghouti says, "and he's left with this
attack of time on his heart and mind and solitary body. It's about the lonely facing of realities and
disappointments". The poem contains a scene from Abu Ghraib. "I find I always imagine myself in
the place of the victim," he says. "When the twin towers were hit, I felt I was thrown from
windows, running from the fire - I lived it. In Abu Ghraib I was the hooded prisoner with electrodes
on his fingers." His poems have alluded to the massacre in the Sabra-Shatila Palestinian refugee
camps in Beirut in 1982, and the shooting of the child Mohammed al-Durrah by Israeli troops in
2000 as his father tried to shield him. "I was the father and son at the same time - with the victims,
the weak side, the lost cause, where there's no way out. The poem is my only power to identify with
them."

Yet he also savours "life's ability to provide us with ecstasy and laughter." His office in the house
his mother built in Shmeissani, in affluent west Amman, looks out on to a laden grapevine that she
brought as a cutting from Ramallah. Inhaling a handful of leaves from a lemon tree transports him
to the land of his childhood.
He was born in 1944 in the mountainous village of Deir Ghassanah, west of the River Jordan in
Palestine. The cluster of villages was dominated by the Barghouti clan (the name he delights in
means flea) of politicians, poets and landowners. His father worked the land, then joined the
Jordanian army. Aged four when the state of Israel was declared, Barghouti learned of the
Palestinian nakbah, or catastrophe, as non-Barghoutis with different dialects appeared in his village.
"I was told they were refugees. The story unfolded of the destruction of villages, and the policy of
ethnic cleansing that drove them away." Hearing of a massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948 was
"the nakbah for me as a child - stories of those killed in cold blood that were disseminated all over
Palestine. They were meant to be, to encourage people to flee".
The second of four brothers, he moved with his family to Ramallah, aged seven. At school he
admired the Iraqi modernist poet of the late 40s Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, who "broke the classical
Arabic poem that had survived for 15 centuries unchanged, during the surge of Arab liberation
movements against British and French occupation". He studied English at Cairo university in the
60s, when Gamal Abdel Nasser was the "only Arab leader who treated culture seriously, making
tickets cheap to theatre, opera. It was a golden age". After Nasser's death in 1970, under Anwar
Sadat "the first thing that collapsed was cultural life. We're still living the same under [President
Hosni] Mubarak".
West Bank Palestinians "did not feel the nakbah as the people who lived it did; 1967 took shape as
our nakbah". Graduating as the Arab defeat in the six-day war led to military occupation, he spent
three years teaching in a technical college in Kuwait before returning to Cairo to marry Ashour,
whom he had met at university. He volunteered for Radio Palestine, reading news bulletins in his
sonorous voice. Unlike his workmates, he refused to join Yasser Arafat's Fatah. "I kept my
independence; I've never joined any political party, and never will. My colleagues are ministers now
in Ramallah. I defended the liberation of Palestine, but I never defended forged elections. Arafat
[who died in 2004] was not a democratic leader."
Sadat closed down the radio station in 1975, and the broadcasters decamped to Beirut as civil war
was breaking out. Under bombardment in the Lebanese capital, "we had the strange feeling that we
were fighting the wrong war." Then, "when the Syrians sent their army into Lebanon, Sadat, who
was quarrelling with the Syrians, reopened the station in Cairo. When he made peace with Israel [on
the eve of the Camp David accords of 1978], he closed it again. As Palestinians, we're played like
chess pieces."
Deported from Cairo in 1977 "in handcuffs, with only the clothes I was wearing", he left his wife
and five-month-old son Tamim behind. He went to Beirut, but was edged out. "I was a critical
voice." So he spent 13 years in communist Budapest, representing the PLO at the World Federation
of Democratic Youth. His wife and son visited twice a year, but they resolved that Tamim would
have an Arabic education; he is now a successful poet and film-maker. For Barghouti, Budapest was
a "beautiful city, drenched in art", but it "took me from the Arab literary scene. It was a great loss".
He published four collections, and poems in Darwish's journal Al-Karmel, but his style changed
with his desolate experience. With Poems of the Pavement (1980), "written in one breath, like a
fever", he learned to "write with a camera - visual, concrete, no abstract nouns. The beauty of a
poem is to cool down the language, because the flamboyant, bombastic tone of language is for
governments, generals, political parties. A poet has to do the opposite. A slogan lives only for a
minute". He adds: "You don't have the right to tell the reader how to feel, to say 'love me,
understand my cause, hate my enemies'. Show him a scene and leave him to respond; this is
democratic. I invite you to a window, a gallery, and leave you."
He grappled with "the dilemma of Palestinian writers, that we're expected to address the needs of
people denied self-expression under occupation, to express their pain. But this is a trap: you have to
strike a balance, not sacrificing the aesthetics for your readership. I hate the terms 'resistance poetry'
or 'exile poetry'. We're not one-theme poets. A moment of joy or misery is juxtaposed by its
opposite. There's no one face; I see both. I question myself all the time; if you oversimplify, you'd
better quit." Zuhair Abu Shayeb, a poet and editor at the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing
in Amman, says Barghouti "abandoned the heroic tone and slogans that plague modern Arabic
poetry. His is a poetry of coughs and headaches - the daily pains of the individual".
Poems of the Pavement influenced other Arab poets, "but I didn't live in the region to collect the
fruit. It took me seven years to publish another collection". Moving to Jordan in 1990 was the "most
prolific period of my life". In 1995 when his name was taken off an Egyptian blacklist, he returned
to Cairo, where the couple faced a difficult transition. "United with your family after a long exile,
you have the illusion that the first embrace will be the solution," Barghouti says. "You have to train
yourself to readjust without romantic or immature expectations." He also had to defuse his son's
anger at the Egyptian authorities. "I said 'there's no Palestinian family that hasn't paid a price -
losing someone, being jailed, houses demolished. If our price is just separation, it's endurable. Let's
not exaggerate'." Yet his son is denied Egyptian citizenship, or freedom to work there, since mothers
cannot bestow that right if their husbands are Palestinian. According to Ashour, "Tamim lives the
Palestinian experience in these details."
In Jafra, a Palestinian-run cultural café in downtown Amman, Barghouti says the contribution of
Palestinians has been great in Jordan, where they are the majority. But while their position there is
better than in Lebanon, where jobs are restricted, "those who are Jordanian citizens prefer to keep
silent to keep that status. They have a strong economic presence, and a weak political presence."
Political life "has been killed in the Arab countries. They're police states and you don't feel they're
independent; Palestinians are part of the security files."
Occupation creates a "transitory eternity", he believes, in which normal life is postponed: there is
"no coexistence with a tank". The Oslo agreements were not, in his view, "the work of leaders but of
people led and dictated to by the Israeli authorities and western powers. Every serious problem -
sovereignty, refugees, [the status of] Jerusalem - was postponed. They divided a cake which is
imaginary". As for the divide between the Fatah leadership in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza
(blockaded by Israel): "I'm against both. The corruption of Fatah is irreparable, and the naivety of
Hamas as politicians is irreparable - Gaza is a closed can; Israel has the fuel, the water, the
electricity, the food, the milk supply, the sewage plans. They're quarrelling about dust, a mirage.
The only government is Israel."

He recounts one "very painful experience". In 1999 he took a job under the Palestinian Authority in
Ramallah, as director of a World Bank-financed programme to create a database of archaeological
and cultural sites. Three years' funds had already been swallowed up, and he was "brought in as an
honest person. I accepted because I'm always accusing myself of turning my head away when I see
anything ugly". He tracked the leakage to forged bills, but says the culprits were "defended by their
bosses". He resigned. On whether there is a dilemma in exposing the failures of an authority under
occupation, he says: "The Palestinian people are not a beautiful landscape. They're a people who
make mistakes, including corruption." When he sought to oust the culprits, "they tried to find out
what my price was. I found my office refurbished with leather chairs. I went crazy. It hastened my
decision to resign. I said: 'listen, I have nobody who supports me in your government. I have only
this' - I raised my pen. 'I will write you all one day.'"
He has done so in a sequel to I Saw Ramallah, a memoir that will be published in Arabic in March.
It records a trip to the West Bank in 1998 with his son, seeing it for the first time. "It's to make
every trivial detail into a chronicle of history. Everything starts from the individual - the body's
pleasures and pains. If you don't see that, you misunderstand history."
While you can whisper a poem in a free society, Barghouti has said, people want loud, direct poetry
in times of injustice. Yet he has built an eager audience. "You can't expect people with military
boots on their necks, facing checkpoints and closures, to understand your sticking to your aesthetic
rules," he says. "But my experience says you can read visionary poetry even in a refugee camp. I
say 'try it - take this adventure'." For him, "when the poem's written and it's beautiful, I can endure
anything."

Barghouti on Barghouti
Advertisement
 Object 1

"Silence said:
truth needs no eloquence.
After the death of the horseman,
the homeward-bound horse
says everything
without saying anything."
• 'Silence' translated by Radwa Ashour from Midnight and Other Poems, published by Arc
Many times I have been asked the question: to whom do you write? Or is there any imagined reader
in your mind? I think that a poet goes to the empty page to listen to his inner tune but that tune itself
is composed through years and centuries by a universal orchestra. That is why we publish the poem
to be read by unknown others. When I started the opening two lines of this very short poem, I
realised I was talking to myself, not to my readers, as if to solidify my hatred of rhetoric and
eloquence and my love for simplicity and concrete language. As a Palestinian with a negated history
and a threatened geography, craving world attention and understanding, I was hesitant to have the
poem published. But I decided to publish it because I needed to be its reader. I was trying to
convince Mourid Barghouti that pain, even the Palestinian pain, does not mean shouting loudly.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/dec/13/mourid-barghouti