May 14, 2012
In a series of grim, emotive essays set in the occupied territories of Israel, the long exiled Jordanian Palestinian poet Barghouti (I See Ramallah) recounts his return with his grown son and delineates the terrible changes he witnessed in the villages of his childhood and within his own family. Born in Deir Ghassanah, near Ramallah on the West Bank, in 1944, and displaced from his home with his family after the Nakba (as the Arabs call the “catastrophe” (nakba means catastrophe in Arabic) of the founding of Israel in 1948), Barghouti was largely schooled in Cairo; after being forcibly expelled from Egypt in 1977, despite being married to an Egyptian woman and with a newborn son, Tamim, the author lived in Budapest for 13 years, hindered from seeing his family except for short periods and essentially rendered helpless to protect them. In the essay “Father and Son,” Barghouti reconstructs the moment of returning to the land of his youth with the then 21-year-old Tamim, who had finally received an Israeli entry permit and was able to see firsthand the police state under which the Palestinian villages were held, involving arbitrary checkpoints, arrests, and interrogation. Yet while relentlessly critical of the Israelis, Barghouti also comes down hard on the failed Palestinian leadership, describing how his land was lost “through drowsiness, slumber, and trickery.” Barghouti vividly describes the Palestinian sense of “invisibility” juxtaposed with Israeli aggression to portray an untenable yet fiercely ongoing state of flux and conflict.
June 1, 2012
The emotionally powerful memoir of an exiled Palestinian poet. Barghouti (Midnight and Other Poems, 2008, etc.) won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for I Saw Ramallah, an account of his return to Ramallah in 1996 after a 30-year absence. In this sequel, he returns to introduce that land to his son, Tamim, who was born in Cairo to Barghouti's Egyptian wife and is a stranger in his father's homeland. When the author writes of olives and coffee as metaphors for relationships, the poet in him shines through. When he writes of Israelis, his hatred is raw and his language loaded. Barghouti leaves no doubt about his feelings about Israel, nor about the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, whose "corruption is firm, deeply rooted, and beyond redemption," nor about Arab dictatorships, which are "enamored to the point of scandal with their colonizers." Barghouti's chapters can be read as stand-alone essays, and one of the most unforgettable is "The Ambulance," an account of slipping through the Qalandya checkpoint by riding inside an ambulance bearing a fragile old woman to a hospital in Ramallah. The memoir is full of flashbacks, and in this piece the flashback is to the death of his older brother Mounif. The fragments of poems embedded throughout the book often provide powerful images that speak louder than the author's sometimes harsh condemnations. A moving picture of one man's personal grief and undying anger.
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February 15, 2012
Forced out of Israel after the Six-Day War, esteemed Palestinian poet Barghouti has lived a life of exile. As recounted here, he returned home in 1996 for a visit with his Cairo-born son, Tamim. Then, back in Egypt, Tamim was arrested for protesting against the Iraq War and held in the same prison cell his father had occupied before he was expelled for a time from Egypt. At first glance meditative and pointed; for anyone interested in the Middle East.
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
June 1, 2012
Acclaimed poet Barghouti and his son, Tamim, a well-known poet in his own right, travel together to the former's hometown in Palestine to recover, on one hand, and discover, on the other, a sense of origin and genesis. Partly a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of literary ambassadors, part memoir, part metaphorical rumination, this is an account of personal and national identity, for so inseparably intertwined are the idea of Palestine and the displaced people who consider themselves its citizens. Barghouti intersperses straightforward narrative, diachronic asides, and political recollections and finds beauty in small blessingsthe significance of olives, of pockets, of cardamom in coffeebut also in momentous events, such as his son's arrival at a literal and figurative crossroads in Jerusalem. Later, we see nightmarish scenes of intrusion and capture, interrogation and harassment, but also Tamim as he guides a blind man to a mosque without knowing where it's located. Loaded and partisan, Barghouti's language of freedom fighters and occupation is especially relevant in the Arab Spring era, for it embraces a population too often overlooked.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)