Mourid Barghouti

Mourid Barghouti, the Palestinian poet, was born  in the mountainous village of Deir Ghassaneh near Ramallah in 1944 and later studied English literature at university in Cairo. He graduated in 1967, only to become a refugee as a result of the war with Israel.

He has spent much of his life in exile and currently lives in Cairo. In addition to his writing, he has worked as a teacher in Kuwait and Egypt, in Budapest as  representative of the PLO, and in Cairo for Palestine Radio.

He has published 13 books of poetry in Arabic, including a Collected Works (1997), and has read his poems in many Arab and European countries. In 2000 he received the Palestine Award for Poetry.

In 1996 he was allowed to return to Palestine and the result was I Saw Ramallah, an autobiographical memoir about the ironies of homecoming, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.

Source: http://www.mouridbarghouti.net/Mouridweb/English/index.htm

My Writing World

Life will not be simplified. Oversimplification is my enemy as a poet. In the last 50 years life in my part of the world has been a braid of the normal and the abnormal. People pursue their everyday life amidst historical extremities of war, emigration, oppression and uncertainty. In my work, I attempt to defy the conventional language by which this unconventional world is described; I try to see the astonishing in the usual, and the usual in the extreme; the main paradox of Palestine being that bombardment is less news than a family reunion! Formally too I am fascinated by this braid of the usual and the unusual, just as war and peace express themselves in the number of family members present at the breakfast table, I attempt to express the strangeness of my world in words that are not strange at all. I want my language to be physical, precise, visual, concrete, daily and normal, just to reveal how abnormal the condition it describes is. In doing this, I attempt to suggest a new language that defies the fake and flamboyant governmental grandeur, aimed at belittling complex reality by a flat two dimensional metaphor. No theory terrorizes me, life is richer than all our ways of writing it and a beautiful poem can turn all literary theories upside down.

Exception

All of them arrive:
river and train    
sound and ship
light and letters
the telegrams of consolation
the invitation to dinner
the diplomatic bag
the space ship
they all arrive
all but my step towards
my country . . .


Without Mercy

There is a sweet music,
but its sweetness fails to console you.
This is what the days have taught you:
in every long war
there is a soldier, with a distracted face and ordinary teeth,
who sits outside his tent
holding his bright-sounding harmonica
which he has carefully protected from the dust and blood,
and like a bird
uninvolved in the conflict,
he sings to himself
a love song
that does not lie.

For a moment,
he feels embarrassed at what the moonlight might think:
what’s the use of a harmonica in hell?

A shadow approaches,
then more shadows.
His fellow soldiers, one after the other,
join him in his song.
The singer takes the whole regiment with him
to Romeo’s balcony,
and from there,
without thinking,
without mercy,
without doubt,
they will resume the killing!

© Translation: 2009, Radwa Ashour
From: Midnight and Other Poems
Publisher: Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire, 2008


A Night Unlike Others

His finger almost touches the bell,
the door, unbelievably slowly,
opens.
He enters.
He goes to his bedroom.
Here they are:
his picture next to his little bed,
his schoolbag, in the dark,
awake.
He sees himself sleeping
between two dreams, two flags.
He knocks on the doors of all the rooms
– he almost knocks. But he does not.
They all wake up:
“He’s back!
By God, he’s back!” they shout,
but their clamour makes no sound.
They stretch their arms to hug Mohammed
but do not reach his shoulders.

He wants to ask them all
how they are doing
under the night shelling;
he cannot find his voice.
They too say things
but find no voice.
He draws nearer, they draw nearer,
he passes through them, they pass through him,
they remain shadows
and never meet.
They wanted to ask him if he’d had his supper,
if he was warm enough over there, in the earth,
if the doctors could take the bullet and the fear
out of his heart.
Was he still scared?
Had he solved the two arithmetic problems
in order not to disappoint his teacher
the following day?
Had he . . . ?
He, too, simply wanted to say:
I’ve come to see you
to make sure you’re alright.
He said:
Dad will, as usual, forget to take his hypertension pill.
I came to remind him as I usually do.
He said:
my pillow is here, not there.
They said.
He said.
Without a voice.
The doorbell never rang,
the visitor was not in his little bed,
they had not seen him.
The following morning neighbours whispered:
it was all a delusion.
His schoolbag was here
marked by the bullet holes,
and his stained notebooks.
Those who came to give their condolences
had never left his mother.
Moreover, how could a dead child
come back, like this, to his family,
walking, calmly, under the shelling
of such a very long night?

© Mourid Barghouti
From: Midnight and Ohter Poems
Publisher: Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire, 2009

© Translation: 2009, Radwa Ashour
From: Midnight and Other Poems
Publisher: Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire, 2009

MY GRANDFATHER’S CLOAK

With a gentle hand, the storm grasps
the handle of the door of the world;
like a hesitant stranger, it lets itself in,
stripping off its masks one after the other.
Dropping lightning into woods,
darkness into torches,
despair into ships,
the devil into horse’s hooves,
blueness into the lips of the carriage driver,
and throwing me naked
into the jaws of the night.
The storm
nearly wrenches loose the stag’s horns.
The muscles of the waves
almost push back the coastline.
The sea is a team of phosphorescent horses
whipped by unseen lashes;
they chomp the drizzle, the horizons and the stars
and carry on their flying hooves
the stench of sulphur.
There are no boats on the sea,
the harbour is a sheet of shattered porcelain.
Nothing protects the trembling coast,
not even the fur of the sea’s foam.
Two chairs on the sand escape the storm
as if they were two lame runners
in a race.
Even the most proficient of animal-tamers,
cannot restore the unfettered waves
to the guards’ control.
I take refuge in that house with the imposing dome,
merciful arches,
warm blankets
and my grandfathers’ pictures
(worn out at the edges
in spite of the solidity of their moustaches),
pictures secure on the walls
as if they were built into them.
My grandfather, still harbouring the illusion
that the world is fine,
fills his rustic pipe
for the last time
before the advent of helmets and bulldozers!
My grandfather’s cloak gets hooked
on the bulldozer’s teeth.
The bulldozer retreats a few metres,
empties its load,
comes back to fill its huge shovel,
and never has its fill.
Twenty times, the bulldozer
comes and goes,
my grandfather’s cloak still hooked on it.
After the dust and smoke
have cleared from the house that once stood there,
and as I stare at the new emptiness,
I see my grandfather wearing his cloak,
wearing the very same cloak –
not one similar to it,
but the same one.
He hugs me and maintains a silent gaze,
as if his look
could order the rubble to become a house,
could restore the curtains to the windows,
and my grandmother to her armchair,
as if it could retrieve her coloured medicine pills,
could lay the sheets back on the bed,
could hang the lights from the ceiling,
and the pictures from the walls,
as if his look could return the handles to the doors,
and the balconies to the stars,
and persuade us to resume our dinner,
as if the world had not collapsed,
as if Heaven had ears and eyes.
He goes on staring at the emptiness.
I say:
what shall we do when the soldiers leave?
What will he do when the soldiers leave?
He slowly clenches his fist,
recapturing a boxer’s resolve in his right hand,
his coarse bronze hand,
the hand that tames the thorny slope,
the hand that holds his hoe lightly
and with ease,
the hand which, with a single blow,
splits a tree stump in half,
the hand that opens in forgiveness,
the hand that closes on the candy
with which he surprises his grandchildren,
the hand that was amputated
many years ago.

© Translation: 2009, Radwa Ashour
From: Midnight and Other Poems
Publisher: Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire

INTERPRETATIONS

A poet sits in a coffee shop, writing.
The old lady
thinks he is writing a letter to his mother,
the young woman
thinks he is writing a letter to his girlfriend,
the child
thinks he is drawing,
the businessman
thinks he is considering a deal,
the tourist
thinks he is writing a postcard,
the employee
thinks he is calculating his debts.
The secret policeman
walks, slowly, towards him.

© Mourid Barghouti
From: Midnight and Other Poems
Publisher: Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire, 2009

© Translation: 2009, Radwa Ashour
From: Midnight and Other Poems
Publisher: Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire, 2009

Recommended Reading (click here to get a link to Voices' Bookstore)