Book of the Week: 'I Saw Ramallah'

SAN DIEGO, D.C., May 13 (UPI) -- "I Saw Ramallah" is an eloquent cry from the heart, the moving story of a displaced person. The young Mourid Barghouti was a student at Cairo University when the Six-Day War with Israel broke out. Thus started his 30-year exile, in June 1967, unable to return home, his family scattered, his life turned upside down.

Written in Arabic, the novel won the Naguib Mahfouz medal for literature and wide acclaim in the Arab world. It is translated by Ahdaf Soueif, author of "In The Eye of The Sun" and "Map of Love," with a foreword by famous orientalist Edward Said.

In 1997, Barghouti was allowed to return to his native village and his narrative starts with his crossing of the short, wooden bridge separating Jordan from Israel: the Allenby bridge, or the Bridge of Return, as the famous Lebanese singer Fayrouz calls it.

But although this book is about his return to his homeland and his reunion with long-lost family and friends, what comes through is the ineffable sense of loss: loss of country, loss of dignity, loss of sense of belonging. As Barghouti says, "It is enough for a person to go through the first experience of uprooting, to become uprooted forever."

Barghouti experienced several uprootings. After living in Egypt for many years, and marrying an Egyptian scholar, Radwa Ashour, he was deported by Egyptian authorities and moved to Hungary.

His mother lived in Amman, one brother in Qatar, another in Paris. Like many exiles, they kept in touch, at first by mail, then later by phone. Family reunions were fraught with tension and the sadness of impending departures.

"Can the earth contain

"The cruelty of a mother making her coffee alone

"On a Diaspora morning?

"She wants to go to a planet away from the earth

"Where all directions lead to the harbor of the bosom,

"The gulf of two arms

"That receive and know no farewells.

"She wants airplanes to come back only.

"Airports to be for those returning,

"The planes to land never leave again."

The narrative is interspersed with Barghouti's poetry, poignant and incisive. This one illustrates the mother's distress, the loss that nothing can replace.

The most painful experience is that of learning the death of a loved one living far away. Barghouti learns, in Budapest, of his father's death in Amman from his brother Mounif who is living in Qatar. Seven years later, he is in Cairo when he is told of Mounif's death in Paris.

Anyone secure in his country, in his nationality, cannot understand the psychological torment and the physical impossibility, or difficulty, in obtaining travel documents: passports, visas, permits to leave or enter a country. Unless you have experienced it, you cannot understand the humiliation inflicted by border and customs officials, the tedium of long hours of waiting, the apprehension of being rejected.

"I am a child of mountains and stability. Since the Jews of the twentieth century remembered their Holy Book I have been afflicted by a Bedouin traveling, and I am not a Bedouinh," he wrote.

Barghouti is not a politician, he is a poet. But politics have invaded his life, and there is no avoiding them or their consequences. "The Palestinian has his joys too. He has his pleasures alongside his sorrows. He has the amazing contradictions of life, because he is a living creature before being the son of the eight o'clock news."

Barghouti does not idealize everything about Palestine, Ramallah or the Palestinians. He notes the betrayals, both national and personal, the good and the bad. "Life, as you see, will not be simplified."

Even something as simple as a birthday or an anniversary can become tainted. Barghouti learns of the death of his friend Naji, a prominent Palestinian cartoonist, on July 22, his wedding anniversary; and Ghassan Kanafani, the writer, is killed in Beirut on July 8, Barghouti's birthday.

Barghouti points out what he considers the irony of Israelis being perceived by world opinion as the good guys, as the victims. Yitzhak Rabin gave an eloquent speech in the White House garden that brought tears to his listeners' eyes. "We are the victims of war and violence. We have not known a year or a month when mothers have not mourned their sons."

Barghouti writes, "Rabin has taken everything, even the story of our death."

Rabin was able to present the Palestinians as the aggressors, as the initiators of the violence in the Middle East. He omitted to point out why these aggressions were taking place, what had started the whole thing in the first place. As Barghouti points out, "It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from "Secondly." Yes, this is what Rabin did. He simply neglected to speak of what happened first. Start your story with "Secondly," and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with "Secondly," and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim."

Yes, it takes eloquence and linguistic skill to get your message across to people and Barghouti has both. He brings us his message of loss and hope; hope because as long as there is life there is hope; hope because his son Tamim has been promised a visa and they will be able to visit Ramallah together. The country that Tamim knows in name only, the relatives he knows only through family stories, the house in which his father was born, the earth that fed him and generations of Barghoutis before him.

As the author says it is not imperative to live where you were born, but only to have the choice. So many people choose to emigrate to America, Australia or Canada, but it is different when it is not one's choice and the possibility of return is removed.

("I Saw Ramallah" by Mourid Barghouti, Anchor Books, 182 pages, $12.)