Ruth Padel

 BOOK OF A LIFETIME

 I saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti (translated by Ahdaf Soueif), Bloomsbury

 I’ve read I saw Ramallah, by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, many times. I’ve quoted and used it in teaching poetry, given it to friends, But I first read it in Bahrain - when I was there for ten days, representing Britain at a poetry festival, then teaching Bahraini teenagers to write poems about “Identity” for the British Council. The air conditioning was unturnoff-able so it was freezing cold (though in the eighties outside) and we were all worried about our voices; but mostly I was obsessed with this book. I’d never read a memoir so poignant, human and generous; so much about what it is to live a writing life and be truthful in your work.

    When a poem doesn’t work, it’s usually because you’re not being tough and clear and truthful enough with yourself. This writer was clear and tough and truthful all the way through. He left his home, Ramallah on the West Bank in Palestine, when he went to university in Cairo. During his finals, June 1967, he was looking forward to going back to the flat at home. His mother was redecorating it to welcome him home. Then, in the Latin exam, he heard gunfire outside. Six days (and one war) later, he found that he, plus hundreds of thousands of other young people temporarily away from home, no longer had a home to go to. His town was no longer his. All he owned was the shirt on his back. He had the university certificate he’d promised his parents, but no wall to hang it on.

 “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.”

   The book is the story of his brief return, thirty years later. It is a study in surviving displacement and loss; and also in the human reality behind world politics. “Politics is the family at breakfast. Who is there, who is absent and why.” There are moving stories of what happened to friends and family in their many countries of exile; there is what he saw when he went back (excruciating conditions, described with restraint and dignity) plus the constant sense of using your life to think with existentially; to think about writing. When you’re displaced, he says, “every home you have “is the home of others too.” If you’re a poet you’re doubly a stranger. “Writing is a displacement – displacement from the normal social contract”. You try to get away from “the dominant used language to a language that speaks itself for the first time”. As if, he says, “the poet is a stranger in the same degree as he is free.”

  Whether you’re interested in poetry and its place in a life, in brave loving people who stay in touch with torn-apart families all over the world, or in what life is really like today on the West Bank, this is a wonderful truthful book. It stays with me all the time; and touches everyone I have given it to.   

Ruth Padel’s Tigers in Red Weather is out in paperback on 19^th October. She will be talking about it at the Nehru Centre, Mayfair, at 7.00 on Oct 20^th. Mourid Barghouti will be reading at the London Review Bookshop on 18^th October.