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'Is the homeland really the medicine for all
sorrows?' asks the Palestinian poet Mourid
Barghouti
By Will Blythe | Newsweek Web Exclusive
May 22, 2003
Everyone
likes to say that you can't go home again,
and yet that's where everyone is always
trying to go. This is a dilemma that becomes
especially torturous when you've been
attempting for more than fifty years to
return to a home that you no longer
possess--as the Palestinians have since the
first Arab-Israeli war of 1948.
Memory plays tricks on the homesick, giving
their past a shine it never had when it was
the mere humdrum present. The fig trees are
bigger, the well water sweeter, the old
folks wiser. And this is true whether the
longing for the home place is embodied in a
nationalist cause or a solitary bout of
nostalgia. Exile is an even more poignant
condition when you're a poet, since in all
likelihood, you're already dislocated from
your own existence, like a ghost who's taken
up residence in someone else's house.
A
Palestinian poet might naturally be expected
to have extraordinarily complicated feelings
about exile and return, about the holy past
and the perfidious present, and
Mourid Barghouti's slender memoir "I Saw
Ramallah" (just out from Anchor Books;
208 pages; $12) is aptly and gloriously
mixed-up. He doesn't hide his constitutional
ambivalence behind the boilerplate of
nationalist rhetoric. "Is the homeland
really the medicine for all sorrows?"
Barghouti wonders while recounting a stay in
Hungary where he served as an emissary for
the PLO. He is suspicious of politics,
suspicious of leaders (Arab and Israeli),
suspicious of moderates
and
extremists, suspicious even of himself. Like
Greta Garbo, he wants to be alone. He would
prefer to be a poet, representative only of
himself. "My measure is aesthetic," he
writes.
And yet politics--the inherently political
nature of Barghouti's identity as a
Palestinian in this day and age--are
inescapable. And that's because, Barghouti
argues, the political is not simply "the
decisions of governments and parties and
states....Politics is the family at
breakfast. Who is there and who is absent
and why." His book is riven by an
appropriate complexity, whirling from
stoicism to anger to lament to doubt to
grief to remorse to sympathy to nostalgia to
despair to irony to laughter to tenderness
and back again in quick succession. It is
not especially joyous at any point, but this
seems a reflection of the author's character
as much as the "facts on the ground." Of
course, that character has doubtless been
formed by those very facts, so who knows?
Barghouti's facts are these. In June, 1967,
he is studying for his exams in English
language and literature at Cairo University.
Twenty-two years old, immersed in T.S.
Eliot, Shakespeare, and the New Criticism,
along with Brecht and Chekhov, Barghouti
evinces no special interest in politics. He
avoids joining the secret armed
organizations--Fatah, for one--of fellow
Palestinian students that are forming in
Cairo at the time. "One of the things my
mother could be blamed for is that she
taught us an excessive caution about putting
ourselves in any kind of danger," he writes
about himself and his brothers. "None of us
to this day can ride a bicycle."
As Barghouti studies in Cairo that June, war
breaks out between the Israelis and
surrounding Arab states--Egypt, Syria, and
Jordan. By the time the Six Day War
concludes, Barghouti has become an exile, a
displaced citizen by consequence of the
Israeli victory and occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza, unable to return there to his
village Deir Gassanah, just outside of the
Jerusalem suburb of Ramallah. "Displacement
is like death," he writes. "One thinks it
happens only to other people." He passes his
final exams, earns his degree, and rues that
he has no wall on which to hang his
certificate. The next thirty years, he roams
from one foreign city to the next, like many
Palestinians--Beirut, Budapest, Amman,
Boston, Cairo. "Since '67," he declares,
"everything we do is temporary 'until things
become clearer.'"
As a result of all this temporizing in the
wake of catastrophe, Barghouti must lead an
oddly posthumous sort of life, as if his
real life was going on elsewhere without his
knowledge, or as if it had stopped in June,
1967 and he is waiting for it to resume. He
cobbles an ad hoc existence together for
himself, his wife Radwa Ashour, an Egyptian
academic and novelist, and their son, Tamim.
Much of the time mother and son reside in
Cairo separately from Barghouti--Cairo being
yet another city from which he is eventually
banished for his activism during Anwar
Sadat's peacemaking with Israel. Tamim sees
his father so intermittently he calls his
him "Uncle Daddy." Family reunions occur in
hotels and apartments in Jordan and
Switzerland, Hungary and the United States.
The telephone becomes simultaneously the
most welcome and feared of devices, bringing
news of graduations and weddings, illness
and death. Barghouti's dear older brother
Mounif dies in France, and is buried abroad.
His friend, the acerbic cartoonist Naji, is
assassinated in London, buried in Surrey.
Not even a corpse gets to go home.
There are, however, some advantages to life
in exile. Barghouti comes to appreciate
hotels; they tutor him in the wisdom of the
transient life. "They taught me not to hold
on to a place, to accept the idea of
leaving....Hotels absolve you from
immortalizing the moment but at the same
time provide a theater for short acts and
surprises....In the hotel there is no
neighbor to watch what you do all the time.
There are no traps of social obligations. It
is the place where you can glory in
laziness." As with so many modern writes,
exile for Barghouti appears perhaps as the
truest existential condition, since another
crucial psychic fact of the contemporary age
is that everyone is always trying to leave
home and never quite can, home also being
the scarred memories carried around
sightlessly like a tattooed inscription on
one's back. Alienation, though, is always
better in a five-star hotel.
And yet for all of exile's liberties,
Barghouti leaps at the chance to return for
a visit to Ramallah and Deir Ghassanah when
the restrictions on such visits are
liberalized by the Israelis after the
signing of the Oslo Accords. On a blistering
June day in 1996, he walks across the Bridge
of Return between Jordan and the West Bank
and enters a land that defies his
recollection. "Last time I was clear and
things were clear," he writes of the time
travel he is undertaking. "Now I am
ambiguous and vague. Everything is ambiguous
and vague."
His first morning in Ramallah, Barghouti
throws open the window and spies a cluster
of elegant homes. "A settlement," he is
told. He arrives at his family's house in
Deir Ghassanah to discover that the huge fig
tree in the courtyard, so dominant in his
memories, has been chopped down and replaced
with a large cement block. This pains him
deeply. He makes a confession: "Each time
[my host] asked me about a home, a landmark,
a road, an event, I quickly replied, 'I
know.' The truth is, I did not know; I no
longer knew." Reality and metaphor have been
exchanged for Barghouti. "The long
Occupation has succeeded in changing us from
children of Palestine to children of the
idea of Palestine." He acknowledges that
this is not only the result of politics, but
the nature of time itself.
I
can't vouch for Barghouti, the poet. Poems
rarely survive the bumpy passage of
translation, and the excerpts of his verse
rendered here from the Arabic--"She wants
airplanes to come back only/Airports to be
for those returning/The planes to land and
never leave again," for example--neither set
the heart racing nor make me wince. Prose is
a hardier traveler, however, able to migrate
vast distances on foot, and the writing in
"I Saw Ramallah" reveals Barghouti to be
both an adventuresome stylist and a subtle,
watchful thinker.
This extraordinary book is not without
liberationist fire, but it is hardly a
polemic in the traditional vein. If "I Saw
Ramallah" makes any exhortations at all, it
does so in a whisper and a mutter and a
lyric, aware of its internal contradictions
but determined to speak truthfully anyway.
Of necessity, Barghouti has become a
scientist of memory, created in the
laboratory of exile--imagine Proust if he
had been barred from going back to Combray
by soldiers at the garden gate. What further
mysteries in the nature of memory might he
have explicated? (It's fun, in any event, to
imagine a Palestinian Proust, in slippers
and kufiya.) By 1996, Barghouti had, for 30
years, carried inside himself his
home--thirty years to study the treacheries
of nostalgia. And at last, the trip to
Ramallah and Deir Ghassanah to see how the
imagination trumps the actual. And how the
actual takes its revenge on the imagination
by shrinking and disappearing.
That "time will coldly discipline
you...[that it] makes us reel with realism,"
as Barghouti puts it, is not necessarily
news, but to publish these claims of
introspection in a political atmosphere
demanding blood and apocalypse--that is very
brave and redemptively human indeed.
Barghouti's quietly-delivered verdict in "I
Saw Ramallah" seems to be this: The fact
that you can't go home again doesn't mean
you shouldn't be able to--just that home
won't be there when you finally arrive. This
is a hard truth that the messianic of all
stripes would do well to remember.
Will Blythe is the former literary editor of
Esquire. He has written for The New York
Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, The New
Yorker, Elle and other publications. He
edited the book "Why I Write," now available
in paperback from Little Brown.
©
2003
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