Issues : Fall 2002 / Spring 2003 : Book Reviews : I Saw Ramallah

Book Reviews

I Saw Ramallah

Mourid Barghouti (Translated by Ahdaf Soueif)
Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2000
(xi + 184 pages) $22.50 (paper)

Reviewed by Dana Hearn

I Saw Ramallah opens with a journey, a crossing, a return. Bearing the weight thirty years of exile, Mourid Barghouti crosses over the Allenby Bridge into the West Bank - into a homeland that he never really left behind. In the autobiographical account that follows, he tells his own story and that of the Palestinian people, weaving faces, times, and places together with compelling prose punctuated by poetic verse. His narrative, translated from the Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif and prefaced with a foreword by Edward W. Said, juxtaposes past and present, memory and reality, and art and life. Barghouti does not, however, languish in static juxtaposition. Rather, he eases from the abstract to the concrete and back again, smudging their edges and blurring the boundaries that would seem to define and divide them. The result is a dynamic and layered examination of displacement and return that probes the complexities of personal and collective identity. This examination is shared with English-reading audiences through the thoughtful mediation of Soueif, an Egyptian novelist and literary artist in her own right, whose works include In the Eye of the Sun (1992) and The Map of Love (1999).

Barghouti enters the world of exile in June 1967. He exits a final exam during his final year at Cairo University to discover a region wracked by war. Another discovery, of his inability to return to his village on the outskirts of Ramallah, is slower in coming. Only with the war's tragic conclusion and the passage of weeks does Barghouti realize that he is one of the "naziheen, the displaced ones" (3). From that moment onward, the dream of return and its ultimate - if incomplete - realization is infused into his experience of life, his consciousness of self, and the written record that he presents to the world. I Saw Ramallah is thus first and foremost a personal exploration of exile, return, and unshakable displacement that assumes new forms but never disappears.

Notwithstanding the personal nature of his journey, Barghouti identifies his experience with that of the collective. He ponders what forced detachment and dispersal have meant for his family, his friends, and the Palestinian people. His conclusions, reached while in exile and during his return visit, suggest a tragic loss of 'the rooted' and 'the concrete' and a subsequent drift toward abstraction. Both those exiled from Palestine as well as those who remained suffer from diminished intimacy with their homeland. Among the exiled, the Occupation "created generations . . . that have to adore an unknown beloved," and transformed the "children of Palestine [in]to children of the idea of Palestine" (62). For those who remained, the Occupation weakened the intimate connection between a land and its people; Barghouti returns to a courtyard stripped of its fig tree and a village reliant on remittances from the Persian Gulf rather than the oil of its olives. Displacement and distance are thus pervasive; the symbols and abstractions they inspire, however romantic or powerful, stand in sharp contrast to the very real, very threatening presence of Israeli checkpoints and settlements.

In contemplating the act of return, Barghouti looks beyond obvious spatial implications to locate it in both space and time. Upon returning to Ramallah and his village, Deir Ghassanah, he enters a world that is familiar and yet strange; time has moved ever onward in his absence, and he asks himself, "What do your people know of you now?" (85). Struggling with the "problem of stitching two times together," he draws parallels between this homecoming and another - his return to Egypt in 1994, seventeen years after his "preventative deportation" from that country during the presidency of Anwar Sadat (76, 90). This earlier return led him "home" though not to his homeland, allowing him to reenter daily life with his Egyptian wife, Radwa, and their son Tamim. Finding his way back to Cairo after years in Baghdad, Beirut, Budapest, and Amman, Barghouti discovered that a return to place is not a return in time. He writes, "Sensations of a new beginning and of the resumption of a broken past jostled with each other" - sensations that would resurface upon his return to Palestine in 1996 (73). Confronted with changes in the villagers and cognizant of changes in himself, he ponders, "They lived their time here and I lived my time there. Can the two times be patched together?" (85). He does not, it seems, know the answer.

Even as Barghouti's prose winds through philosophical and poetic musings, it is not aloof from conditions 'on the ground.' His personal story is embedded within a larger narrative, and this narrative encompasses not only the past, but also the present. In allowing for re-entry of some refugees of the 1967 War, the Oslo Accords occasioned Barghouti's return and set the stage for his book. I Saw Ramallah does not, however, offer a grateful, glowing review of the so-called peace process. Even writing in 1996, Barghouti sees through Oslo's illusory promises and deceptive arrangements. He is very much aware of the continuing Occupation, and states of the Israelis, "They send us one message, all the time and in every way: 'We are the masters here'" (141). Indeed, he is saddened by Palestinian acceptance of a "dictated reality" and laments that "Israel succeeded in tearing away the sacred aspect of the Palestinian cause" (140, 61). He decries what is missing - Palestinian right of return, freedom of movement, and true sovereignty - as well as what exists - Israeli settlements, checkpoints, and pervasive control. The scene is one of oppression rather than peace.

In sketching this scene, however, Barghouti does not omit or obscure the uncomfortable complexity of reality. Whether assessing Palestinian history, the post-Oslo present, or his own 'place' in the national struggle, he acknowledges that "it is not enough to register the faults of others, the Occupier, the Colonialist, the Imperialist, and so on" (41). His narration of the past thus incorporates injustices that his fellow villagers - and he himself - perpetrated against their own people. Prior to 1967, they viewed the 1948 refugees who resettled in their midst as outsiders; only after experiencing exile and displacement himself does Barghouti realize that he has contributed to the displacement of others. The author's narration of the present is even more critical and far less forgiving. Disturbed by the imbalanced, inequitable distribution of power and wealth, he offers a harsh critique of post-Oslo leadership. He unabashedly exposes political and economic corruption, the lack of due process, and the emergence of hegemonic and repressive governance. Recalling the "freedom fighter" image of the first Intifada, he declares: "Now here is that same freedom fighter (chained with the conditions of his enemies), exercising his direct authority on the ordinary citizen" (125). The impotence of this new "freedom fighter" renders the transformation all the more tragic. For, as Barghouti makes clear, the leaders' "marks of personal power do not fit with the absence of their national power or with the power of the Palestinians in general according to the strange arrangements of Oslo" (110).

In revisiting conditions of exile, recounting stories of return, examining manifestations of displacement, and grounding personal experience in past and present realities, Barghouti evokes themes that frequently surface in versions of the 'Palestinian narrative.' Although the author would likely resist efforts at simplistic, rigid categorization of him and his work, I Saw Ramallah could be classified as personal account literature. In the case of Palestinian writers, this genre "is perhaps the greatest witness to the age of catastrophe"; it tends to foreground "political immediacy," a sense of the "collective," and "frequent concern with 'national identity.'"¹ It provides an outlet for sharing Palestinian narratives that are often missing or distorted in mainstream accounts.

The value of I Saw Ramallah, however, lies not only in what the author shares, but also in how he shares it. Barghouti does not merely tell the reader about the convergence and confusion of place and time that make complete return elusive; rather, he shows the reader by way of narrative style. Neither his story nor those of family members or well-known Palestinian figures unfold in a simple chronological fashion. Details emerge gradually, easing into focus a gainst a abckdrop of prose and poetry that is constantly shifting in time and space. Likewise, the author shows rather than dictates the meaning of 'displacement.' He invites the reader to draw parallels hetween his identity as a poet and his identity as an exile. As a writer, he "clings to his own way of receiving the world and his own way of transmitting it" (133). The process and product of writing become a way of filtering and framing one's present and past, of defining and being defined. This implies distance between art and life, and between artist and audience. As Barghouti himself declares, "Writing is a displacement" (132).

So where does this exile, this returnees, leave us? And where, finally, does he find himself? As Brghouti's narrative draws to a close, we see him lying on a bed during the final night of his return visit to Ramallah. Resting "under a window that looks out on countless questions," he looks ahead to a second return, the one he hopes to make with his son Tamim (181). Finally, then, Barghouti and his readers are left sifting through "scattered fragments." Together, they await the future, answers, and hope (182).

ENDNOTES

¹ Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 66-67.