If we were to identify a moment of universal sorrow, it would most likely be when we lose something that is part of ourselves. The loss may involve an insignificant material object or a person; at its most painful, it may be the loss of land.
For the poet Mourid Barghouti (1944-2021), this loss was at its most bitter. It was not partial but total: he lost his family, his home and his country all at once.
Born in the mid-1940s in the village of Deir Ghassaneh near Ramallah, the author of “Summer Poems” grew up surrounded by displaced people in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Mourid welcomed them in his village. But after the 1967 occupation, he was no longer there. He, too, was displaced, a long way from his country.
The occupation came as Mourid was graduating from the English department at Cairo University’s Faculty of Arts. At the time, bitter sarcasm was all he had. He captured his reality, stripped of memory and land, in the words: “I succeeded in obtaining my graduation certificate, and failed to find a wall on which to hang it.”
Perhaps this was the first metaphor that would later drive Mourid to resist disappointment and displacement through poetry, far from home. He also resisted through love and political commitment, which pushed him into further exile.
Mourid stayed in Egypt and married the late Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour in 1970, but this new family life, a substitute for the one he had lost, did not last long. His opposition to the Camp David Accords led to his imprisonment and then his expulsion from Egypt for 17 years. Another form of collective life thus fell apart: his wife Radwa and their son Tamim remained in Egypt, while Mourid set out on another long journey of exile, carrying the pain of the first exile.
Said’s focus on the “existential” dimension of exile perceptively captured Mourid’s experience of documenting his return.
Mourid moved between Baghdad, Beirut and Budapest, where he worked with the Palestine Liberation Organisation mission. In 1996, after 30 years in exile, he was finally able to return to Ramallah, though his family remained scattered across capitals.
Mourid’s exceptional experience expressed the crisis of the Palestinian diaspora while remaining distinctively his own. It found literary form in “I Saw Ramallah”, in which he bitterly revisits the journey to his birthplace, a place he had lost. The journey becomes more than a return: it explores the experience of the Palestinian diaspora and the act of writing the homeland through physical and metaphorical fences.
Memory as an alternative homeland
In his introduction to the novel, Edward Said describes Mourid’s carefully crafted text as intensely lyrical. It recounts the return to Ramallah in the West Bank after long years of exile, in what Said regards as one of the finest Palestinian accounts of the diaspora’s existential experience.
Said’s focus on the “existential” dimension of exile perceptively captures Mourid’s experience of documenting his return, because Mourid builds his narrative around a searching inner monologue that moves between two spheres. One consists of historical associations woven into the political, social and economic context; the other concerns personal and human presence, in both its individual and collective dimensions.
Mourid does not approach the question of “identity” as a matter for polemic. He grounds it in material, lived experience through a simple question: “Who is the Palestinian?”
It is usually tempting to appeal to emotion when writing about Palestine, because we have long had little to offer the cause beyond immediate sympathy that costs us nothing. Mourid sought instead to pose fundamental questions whose answers could be explored. His aim was to offer a comprehensive picture of Palestinians as individuals and as a collective, living in exile and scattered across cities.
The obsession with return at the centre of Mourid’s book does not depend on return being achieved. His book has nine chapters and opens with the bridge. He never moves beyond the material reality of writing from afar, because the homeland, in his account, remains distant however close it comes. Yet the emptiness between him and the homeland — a result of dispersal and the family’s fragmentation at more than one stage — can offer a way of understanding the Palestinian diaspora and its relationship to the land when the land itself is absent.
At the start of the book, Mourid makes clear that, despite its elemental heroism, this return is incomplete: he returns yet does not return, seeing the land through a veil.
In his book, Mourid remains attached to his locality. His attachment to identity takes shape through the act of remembering, as memory becomes an alternative homeland, or a portable model of it.
Barghouti’s realistic account reveals the limits of his return. Despite the presence of Palestinian officers on the Jordan River bridge separating him from Palestine, the occupation’s soldiers, both men and women, still have the upper hand in determining what happens. Those soldiers, as he puts it, “are the masters of the place.”
Politics is woven into Mourid’s question: Who is the Palestinian? His treatment of politics is far from abstract. Everything political in the book emerges from the constraints of Palestinian life, with its constant movement from one place to another. The book’s politics are neither remote nor selective; they are the “ordinary” reality of Palestinian life.
Despite his limited ability and despite reaching a land that can barely be seen from afar, Mourid remains attached to his locality in the book. His attachment to identity takes shape through the act of remembering. Memory becomes an alternative homeland, or a portable model of it. It travels with its bearer wherever he goes and is brought to life through writing.
Mourid draws contrasts between the present and the material, inhabits the space of estrangement that stretched over nearly 30 years, and documents everything with precision. Using words and phrases in the Palestinian dialect, he begins with himself and his own experience. But his universal perspective on the journey of return expresses the hope for the diaspora’s return and reunification.
A collective by necessity
Grounded in reality and its language, Barghouti’s text is filled with anxieties and a succession of fundamental questions. Separated from Tamim when his son was just one year old, Mourid would visit him for only a few months each year. He faced questions about his place in the world: where could he live, and where could he not? How long could he stay before having to leave again?
Successive losses — of land and family, then of wife and child — turned his movement across different lands into a fundamental struggle for the right to belong to a collective, particularly since his brother Munif died alone in France.
The book is haunted by the presence of major Palestinian and Arab cultural figures, including Ghassan Kanafani and the cartoonist Naji al-Ali. Both were Mourid’s friends and, ironically, both were assassinated.
Across the shifting rhythms of collective life and the wandering between places, the book remains alone once again. It offers an authentic experience with a poetic texture that seeks to explore the force of life, humanising that experience, however bitter, and giving it new meaning.
A scholarly article examined the metaphor of diaspora in “I Saw Ramallah” with great precision:
“Perhaps this is the truest metaphor for the condition of Palestinian men and women, and for their situation in a form more complex than the collective, more symbolic than society, more far-reaching in meaning than the country, more eloquent than the logic of the state, more mythical than ideology, less homogeneous than hegemony, more fragile in its centeredness than the citizen, more tightly knit than the self, more psychological than civility, and more revealing of the politics of assigning identity.”
In 2009, Mourid Barghouti returned with a new experience: passing on the legacy of memory to his son Tamim.
“I Saw Ramallah” is more than the story of an incomplete return. It depicts a condition that reveals the sensory relationship between the narrator — and every Palestinian — and the land, with both overshadowed by the misery of exile.
Drawing on the vitality of the present moment, “I Saw Ramallah” recounts Palestine’s history through cities and places, and more particularly through the writer’s relationship with them. It is grounded in a universal honesty and a reckoning with the self that lays bare flaws, helplessness, fear and longing.
Here, the Palestinian does not appear as the mythic figure that prevails in Arab collective memory. Palestinians, after all, differ from one another as individuals. But peoples do not remain the same under occupation, and individuals never remain the same when they are deprived of freedom and the right to live.
In 2009, Mourid Barghouti returned with a new experience: he passed on the legacy of memory to his son Tamim, like someone handing over the key to a house before departing this world. Mourid decided to take his son on a return journey to Palestine. He documented that journey in “I Was Born There, I Was Born Here”, drawing on the same theme of paradox that shaped “I Saw Ramallah”.