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.
