Mourid Barghouti

Place as time

I am four years older than the state of Israel; I’ll probably die before the Israeli occupation army leaves my country. A lifetime of exile left me with incurable displacement and unstoppable memory. Memory is residence in time. When I was given a permission to visit my country after thirty years of life in the countries of others, I did not want to relive the landscape but to restore my moments in it.

to sew patches of time together, I want to attach one moment to another, to attach childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all presents to all absences, to attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now. (I Saw Ramallah)

If you stop to contemplate the cliché a place in history you’ll realize that history is a place. For a place to be a place, however, we have to be able to move in it, to it and from it. When such ability is denied, the place acquires different meanings; it becomes a symbol and an identity. The Berlin Wall and the Israeli Wall cannot be looked at as sites, they are concepts and judgments. Place is like childhood, it is not a mass or a structure which stands outside us or which we leave behind, it keeps functioning throughout all stages of life in our actions and reactions. I am inundated, not by the dream house of Gaston Bachelard, but by the true temporality of all my other houses. Deprived of my personal geography I cling to my personal history.

Displacement does not lead to spongy romanticism but to firm realism.  It does not lead to nostalgia, but to resentment. The remote, cloudy place is, paradoxically, restored in words that are condensed, specific and solid. Be it poetry or prose, this necessarily leads to conceptual exactness and precision. A place becomes an idea not an ideology. I do not praise every thing in my homeland and I do not criticize every thing in exile.

The vagrant holds on to nothing. The one whose will is broken lives in his own internal rhythm. Places for him are means of transport to other places, to other conditions, as though they were wine or shoes. (I Saw Ramallah)

The cruelest aspect of displacement is that it makes us strangers not only in the outside world but also among our own people. When I returned to my village accompanied by a relative, I found myself nodding and smiling as he introduced me to people I was supposed to know quite well, of course I did not know who they were and had to pretend I did. The failure to recapture the intimacy has redefined the whole place

Life does not allow us to consider repeated uprootings as tragic, for there is an aspect to them that reminds us of farce, and it will not allow us to get used to them as repeated jokes, because there is always a tragic side to them. The person on a swing gets used to moving in two opposite directions; the swing of life carries its rider no further than its two extremes, farce and tragedy. (I Saw Ramallah)

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This absurdity in the relation with space on a personal level is to be doubled and more puzzling   from a universal perspective. Let us just think of the following paradox: Geographical explorations of the world  and scientific discoveries of the human body led to the expansion of the physical world but resulted in the narrowest minded discourses of colonialism, slavery and racism; millions of innocent people suffered extinction and collective death; Continents were robbed of their raw materials and natural resources; millions of humans were enslaved and uprooted and settlers or armies occupied distant countries. After a short period of relative international security, Earth, our common and only place, is now living in fear and uncertainty. The single-sided intolerant claims of truth with which the world is now ruled, and the ideology of terrorism, might take the planet to its destruction. The idea of sharing a space, the essential idea behind love, peace and justice, has never been as threatened as it is today. What would we gain if all the scientific achievements and explorations of mind resulted in such a wider space and such a narrower mentality?  Art probably comes at the top of human activities that open up closed worlds and make it possible to understand the experience of others in far away places and distant times. Art opens up space, it means space; the discourse of the present masters of the world closes the world, reduces it into us/them, into the good guys, the ones who are like us, and the bad guys, those who are different. This discourse means confinement, exclusion, reduction and, eventually, death.

The endeavour of poets, the guardians of individuality, has always been to articulate the complexity and diversity of human experience and to encompass and recreate our consciousness of our relation to the self, the other and the universe, and, like meticulous craftsmen,  they work to bring together the physical and the spiritual, the general and the particular, the conceptual and the palpable, the local and the universal; and the question comes out: What does it mean to have a planet with hundreds of races, cultures, styles, affiliations, languages and histories, all dominated by one power, one ideology and one judgment?

30 years of forced exile taught me that there is no convincing lexical definition of the word place. In the past five years 69 pregnant Palestinian women had to give birth to their babies at Israeli military checkpoints, they were denied access to hospitals. To the woman who was forced to give birth near the boots of Israeli teenagers in uniform, the meaning of a bed, whether in the maternity hospital or at home, is different; to the child whose future life is likely to be threatened everyday as it was threatened on the first day, the meaning of a cradle is different. On the other hand, children’s getting to their classrooms through mountainous detours, over-passing the military checkpoints, becomes a triumphant moment.

It is not Lotman who taught me the meaning of obstacles and barriers that make the space narrower but it is my everyday experience as well as that of my family and my people. Life has put me face to face with the following question: What happens when the place becomes the absence of the place? What happens when the difference between where and when is blurred or mixed? What happens when the painful here becomes a dream of a pleasant elsewhere? Such questions necessarily lead to the only answer; place is freedom; isn’t the concept of freedom mainly related to our lot of a certain place? The difference between the horizon and the prison cell is also a feeling. In some personal as well as national cases these two opposite places can be one and the same thing.               

Man said:

          Blessed are the birds in their cages

          For they at least, know the limits

          Of their prisons!

Mourid Barghouti

Poets contribution to the Norwich discussions: “New Writing Worlds”