Product Description

In 1966, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, then twenty-two, left his country to return to university in Cairo. A year later came the Six Day War and Barghouti, like many Palestinians living abroad, was denied entry into his homeland. Thirty years later, he was finally allowed to visit Ramallah, the city he had grown up in. A rickety wooden bridge over a dried-up river connects the West Bank to Jordan. It is the very same bridge Barghouti had crossed little knowing that he would not be able to return. I Saw Ramallah, his extraordinarily beautiful account of homecoming, begins at this crossing, filled with its ironies and heartaches. In half bemusement, half joy, Barghouti journeys through Ramallah, keenly aware that the city he had left barely resembles the present-day city scarred by the Occupation - and he discovers in this displacement, that the events of 1967 have made him permanently homeless.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60074 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-16
• Original language: Arabic
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
'The most eloquent statement in English of what it is like to be a Palestinian today' Times Literary Supplement 'An important literary event One of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we now have' Edward Said 'The passionate pain of exile, recounted at the end of a day by a true poet' John Berger 'Beautifully translated by Ahdaf Soueif The graceful cadences of Soueif's prose catch the ontological trauma of being a displaced person Outside any political faction, Barghouti manages to be temperate, fair-minded, resilient and uniquely sad. This is an impressive addition to the literature of exile' Tom Paulin, Independent

Guardian
‘Intensely lyrical … Much of this beautifully written and evocative book is a lamentation on the conditions of exile’

Sunday Business Post
‘Thoughtful, unsentimental, extraordinary … It has universal appeal … you must read it’

Customer Reviews

Literary Integrity
This is a book of integrity and eloquent sincerity. This, more than any academic treatise, is a book that left me feeling angry and ashamed of the complicity of my country in the human tradegy that has been inflicted on the Palestian people.

This is a unique book that should be required reading for every secondary school child in this country, to sit alongside such titles as the "Diary of Ann Frank" as a testament to mans inhumanity to man.

Leaves you speechless
Words of wisdom have a way of entering our lives, just when the view becomes out of focus and we are drawn into the monotony of day-to-day life. This is my introduction to my feelings towards Palestine.

These feelings were awakened in me after reading an excellent book by Mourid Barghouti, the famous Palestinian poet. "I saw Ramallah". It is touching but most of all, very personal; an unattached account of what Palestinians go through today. Here is an excerpt from the book that touched my soul:


"So, when Yitzhak Rabin spoke so eloquently of the tragedy of Israelis as absolute victims, and the eyes of his listeners in the White House garden and in the whole worlds grew wet, I knew that I would not forget for a long time his words that day:

`We are the victims of war and violence. We have not known a year or a month when mothers have not mourned their sons.'

I feel a tremor that I know so well and which I feel when I know that I have not done my best, that I have failed: Rabin has taken everything, even the story of our death.

This leader knew how to demand that the world should respect Israeli blood, the blood of every Israeli individual without exception. He knew how to demand that the world should respect Israeli tears, and he was able to present Israel as the victim of a crime perpetrated by us. He changed facts, he altered the order of things, he presented us as the initiators of violence in the Middle East and said what he said with eloquence, with clarity and conviction. I remember every word Rabin said that day:

`We, the soldiers coming back from the war, smeared with blood, we saw our brothers and our friends killed in front of us, we attended their funerals unable to look into the eyes of their mothers. Today we remember each one of them with eternal love.'

It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story with `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. It is enough to start with `secondly', for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous. Start with `secondly' and Ghandi becomes responsible for the tragedies of the British. You only need to start with `secondly', and the burned Vietnamese will have wounded the humanity of the napalm, and Victor Jara's songs will be the shameful thing and not Pinochet's bullets, which killed so many thousands in the Santiago stadium. It is enough to start the story with `secondly', for my grandmother, Umm `Ata, to become the criminal and Ariel Sharon the victim."

Mourid Barghouti

A classic
"It is enough for a person to go through the first experience of uprooting to become uprooted forever." This is a classic book on the experience of displacement and exile. It is lyrical, empassioned and powerful; the literary equivalent to Schumann's liede. To those media reviewers who saw only the narrow political spectrum, we might ask, in Barghouti's words, "can he notice my humanity?" I hope he receives the Nobel prize for literature.