a book
I Saw Ramallah
Mourid Barghouti · 1997 · 212 pages
WINNER OF THE NAGUIB MAHFOUZ MEDAL FOR LITERATURE A fierce and moving work and an unparalleled rendering of the human aspects of the Palestinian predicament. Barred from his homeland after 1967’s Six-Day War, the poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile—shuttling among the world’s cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over the Jordan River into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the city of his youth. Sifting through memories of the old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters in this mere “idea of Palestine,” he discovers what it means to be deprived not only of a homeland but of “the habitual place and status of a person.” A tour de force of memory and reflection, lamentation and resilience, I Saw Ramallah is a deeply humane book, essential to any balanced understanding of today’s Middle East.
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sourced from public statements
Susan Abulhawa
“The language for me is almost more important than the story which is a moving account of his homecoming. Mourid writes very much in the Arab tradition of poetry. And he depicts a situation that so many of us in exile or living under occupation feel… This is the untold story – for all these years Palestinians have been going on with their lives, getting an education, getting jobs, getting married, and dealing with this occupation as best they can, going through checkpoint after checkpoint, roadblock after roadblock, one procedure after another, and yet they still live. That’s what is so often missing in the dominant mainstream narrative about Palestine and how Palestinians have been resisting passively for 62 years simply by going on, refusing to break or hate.”↗