PREFACE TO MOURID BARGHOUTI'S MIDNIGHT AND OTHER POEMS

Ruth Padel, London 2008

 

When a poem doesn’t work, it’s usually because you’re

not being clear and tough enough with yourself. Mourid

Barghouti is clear, tough and – as his new book of poems

demonstrates – beautifully disciplined in his sparing,

sophisticated use of tragedy and loss. I use his memoir, I Saw

Ramallah, in teaching poetry. It is one of the wisest of poets’

memoirs, a study in surviving loss and in the human reality

behind world politics: “Politics is the family at breakfast.

Who is there, who is absent and why.” It is also an important

testimony in what it is to live a writing life and be exactingly

truthful in your work, even in the most extreme conditions:

when you have been exiled from your native land. “They

call us naziheen, the displaced ones,” he says. “From the

summer of ’67 I became that displaced stranger whom I had

always thought was someone else.”

His new long poem, ‘Midnight’, universalizes the predicament

of the poet who has had to call his ‘room the world’

and survives ‘only by mere chance’.

This poet-narrator is every human being, “like the beggars

at the traffic lights / … born for joy.” Irresponsibly, Death

has allowed him to live while “others… have died”. Born

“in the homestead of the Orient, / surrounded by miracles

and ballads / and hillsides wet with dew”, Barghouti’s poetnarrator

stands “hidden, / like electricity in two clouds”, to

interrogate the Occident: the Western culture from Galileo

onwards which has culminated in “sudden stains upon the

windows of the ambulance”; and in the teeth of that

bulldozer which “hooked” his grandfather’s coat and wiped

away the home cherished by his grandparents and their

grandparents.

From this “window” on the world, the poet remembers

8

“white bells touched with the gold of morning, / or was it

the blossoms / in the orange and lemon orchard…?” The

olive-studded hillsides are “traversed by dynasties / like combs

through tangled hair, / which neither crown nor talisman,

nor light nor darkness / could protect”. Hills that were “sacred

to those who, for centuries, / repeated their incantations / as

they dusted off parchments…”.

His lost heritage is the whole world’s loss, every human

being’s loss from “the beggars at the crossroads” to “the

balcony of the moon”.

But there is no rant or blame, just a memory of the orange

orchard “when, suddenly / the scent of flowers made me feel

dizzy” and his grandfather caught him in his arms and scolded

him for fainting.

Boy, what a disgrace!

He said to me, as if he had said to me:

Boy, you will learn how to love a woman

and, like Abdel Wahab, you will write poetry.

Who’s Abdel Wahab, Grandpa?

Why, he’s the village madman,

he did nothing but write poetry

and poetry is all he left.

The long-lost grandfather opens his hand – “amputated /

many years ago” – in forgiveness. There is life after the rubble,

says this beautifully-disciplined long and distilling poem,

“after all the rubble has finally been cleared”. ‘Midnight’ is

an affirmation of life in the face of total loss. “Life is hidden

somewhere, / I know, / somewhere not far from here.”

Ruth Padel, London 2008