MOURID BARGHOUTI REMEMBERED

Mound Barghouti, one of the major Palestinian and Arab poets of his generation, an inimitable memoirist and public cultural figure, was born in 1944 in the mountainous village of Deir Ghassaneh in Palestine (which rendered him ‘four years older than the State of Israel’, he half-jested). He died on 14 February 2021, at the family home in Amman, Jordan, from cancer.

Barghouti wrote fourteen volumes of poetry. Midnight, his only poetry collection in English, with a substantial Introduction by Guy Mannes-Abbott, was translated by his Egyptian wife, Radwa Ashour, a novelist, who also taught English literature at Am Shams University, Cairo, until she died in 2014. The couple had met while students at Cairo University. Their only child, Tamim, is today an accomplished poet, and father and son would read together in packed halls. In all, quite an illustrious trio.

The eponymous poem ‘Midnight’ is a long meditation that summons a cascade of ghosts, interior monologues, images of landscape and violence and domesticity, and quotes and paraphrases in a controlled narration by first- and second-person pronouns. A kind of solstice poem, it takes place at a point of inflection in time, when the sun is farthest, yet the earth is spinning us closer to our source of light — a long passage from pain to joy. One narrator, worn out by checkpoints and memorials, utters the Shakespearean: ‘Age zero. / Life: tomorrow / and tomorrow and tomorrow!’.

His autobiography, I Saw Ramallah, received the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. It is an account of his visit to this transformed city in 1996, after Israel began allowing temporary entry for Palestinian exiles following the Oslo peace accords. it offers rigorous reflections on the state of the place under Israel’s repressive occupation, juxtaposed with memories of the child and the cast-out grown-up; one challenge that confronted him was ‘stitching two times together’.

The English version of the memoir is a superb rendering of the original by novelist and critic Ahdaf Soueif: ‘The close reading necessary for translation brought home to me what an intricate and stylish work it is,’ she said in an email, in his Foreword, Edward Said wrote, ‘What gives this book profound authenticity is its life-affirming poetic texture.’ A sequel, I Was Born Here I Was Born There, an account of another visit to Palestine, this time with Tamim, has been translated by Humphrey Davies. The title comes partly from a joyous, disbelieving utterance by the author, ‘I was born here’, as the two of them stood in the room of the village house where the father loosed his first cry.

Barghouti led a peripatetic life of displacement and extended separation from his families, natal and marital. Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by Israel, including those who were outside the country during the 1967 war, he was banned from returning to his village, a déjà vu of 1948. And in 1977 he was expelled from Cairo because he, like many others, actively opposed President Anwar Sadat’s peace deal with Israel, which he reckoned would lead to more catastrophies for the Palestinians and isolate Egypt, once the beehive of Arab cultural production, and its political core. He ended up in Budapest, spending thirteen years without his wife and child.

No bitterness; the poet’s task is ‘cooling the language’, he insisted: ‘I rubbed the leaf of the orange in my hands, / as I had been told to do, / so that I could smell its scent / but before my hand could reach my nose / I had lost my home and become a refugee.’ And ‘I am awarded a BA in in the Department of English and Literature, and I fail to find a wall on which to hang my certificate.’

Many who remembered Barghouti in the Arabic press described him as a delightful conversationalist, quick witted with an infectious laugh, the way he also impressed me the few times I met him. Soueif told me that ‘Mound and Radwa were moral and political compasses, for me and for many others. They were eloquent, courageous and well loved.’

Already back in 1992, Salma Khadra Jayyusi, the force behind shelves of books of translated Arabic literature, said of Barghouti in Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, ‘His poetic sensitivity and great originality... produced some of the most compelling poetic experiments among the Arab poets of his generation.’ Ferial Ghazoul, editor of the international ALIF: The Journal of Comparative Poetics, from the American University of Cairo, wrote in an email, ‘Barghouti countered the demise of meaning by sculpting stunning texts embodying his circular exilic experience.’ And the writer Abdu Wazin said that ‘He left a deep stamp on Palestinian and Arab poetry [and] created a unique literature in its humanistic commitment.’ The news of his death and citations from his work trended in Arab social media.

On his method, he said that the first couple of lines of the poem shape all that follows, aesthetics, perceptions and length. His is a poetry of attention; Barghouti accomplishes this by various means, including frequent inversions of the taken-for-granted, and by shifting affective registers.

A poem of his can exhibit vulnerability, ‘there is al ways an arm without whose help we die’, or tenderness, as when, in the poem ‘Wake to Dream’, he gathers his late wife, mother and two brothers, ‘Behind the buttons of my light shirt / I continue the work of the living / I keep Radwa warm / Majid spends the evening with me / and Umm Mounif / picks the flowers from her garden / waiting for Mounif.’ (my translation). Or, it can bluntly interrogate unnamed ‘enemies’, reminding them of the futility of their visionless power: ‘Triumph is your vocation / How much victory do you need to be victorious?... / What, at the climax of your victory, it is / that makes you so scared?’

Barghouti dwelled intermittently on death in order to overcome the fear of it, and as a reminder that we should not wallow in despondency, but rather attend to the departed, and to what is to come. In ‘Wake to Dream’, he surprises the reader by an attempt to convince the Reaper that it is a failure:

Here we go walking in the mountains’ morning
we listen get tired slow down hurry up
get angry forgive
forget get lost ask for directions
recall a verse from the bard, al Mutanabbi,
and laugh at a joke that mixed with our tears.
Can I sway the mind of death
make it see that it is a failure?

(my translation)

Through his poetry, and a thousand years after his death, the legendary poet of the Arabic language still walked and recited his poem in the ‘mountains’ morning’, employing the feet and tongues of descendants. The poet becomes his poems, and lives on.

SHARIF S. ELMUSA

PNR 259 47:5 May-June 2021