Summary
Palestinian poet and author of the memoir Raʾaytu Rām Allāh (1997, Eng. I Saw Ramallah, 2000/2003, translated by Ahdaf Soueif), whose account of visiting the West Bank in 1996 after a thirty-year absence is the subject of Chapter 3 of Rhetorics of Belonging (PDF p.12, p.23).
Details
- Bernard gives Barghouti’s name in its common English spelling rather than the IJMES transliteration Murīd al-Barghūthī, as an example of her transliteration practice (PDF p.8).
- In Bernard’s reading, Barghouti counters Said’s emphasis on the exilic character of Palestinian identity — which persists even in Said’s foreword to Barghouti’s text — by foregrounding the contrast between his own exile and Palestinians who continue to live in the West Bank, developing an existential materialist aesthetic that privileges the ‘truthfulness’ of sensory experience (PDF p.23).
- Barghouti is placed, with Sahar Khalifeh, among the writers in Bernard’s corpus who position themselves most explicitly as expressing a national consciousness (PDF p.33).
- Bernard’s Chapter 3 (PDF p.75-86, unfinished in the parts read so far) gives the memoir’s history: Raʾaytu Rām Allāh (1997) won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1997 and the Palestine Prize for Poetry in 2000; the English edition (American University in Cairo Press, 2000), translated by Ahdaf Soueif with a foreword by Said, was followed by Random House (2003) and Bloomsbury (2004) releases (PDF p.75-76).
- Its metropolitan reviewers (Paulin in the Independent, Pryce-Jones in the Daily Telegraph, Moughrabi in the Journal of Palestine Studies) all assumed Barghouti’s national representativeness, a consensus Bernard traces in part to Said’s foreword (PDF p.76-77).
- Barghouti’s ‘Palestinian aesthetic’, set out in his Autodafe essay (2003b), refuses both sloganized political writing — ‘that rubbish they call the “poetry of the stones”’ (ISR, 160, quoted PDF p.80) — and abstraction: the Occupation turned Palestinians ‘from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine’ (ISR, 62–63, quoted PDF p.80), and his narrative mode privileges concrete detail and ‘the truthfulness of the five senses’ over an idyllic, pastoral Palestine (PDF p.78-86).
- Chapter 3’s completion (PDF p.87-96) shows Said’s foreword reading rests on an incomplete citation of ISR, 131: Barghouti’s exile passage continues that strange cities become less strange — “Life does not like the grumbling of the living” (ISR, 131, quoted PDF p.88-89) — and Barghouti refuses to thematize exile as the defining characteristic of collective Palestinian existence (PDF p.89).
- Bernard reads the cut-down fig tree in Deir Ghassanah (ISR, 55-57) as figuring the village’s economic collapse and population dispersal under occupation, juxtaposed with Barghouti’s material comfort in Budapest exile, so that the ‘pleasures of exile’ signify material disparity between the occupied West Bank and the bourgeois diaspora (PDF p.89-91).
- Barghouti’s strategic ‘we’ puts forward a coalitional rather than identitarian Palestinian national formation: its members are joined by total subjection to Israeli policy and a general demand for self-determination, not by shared identity or experience (PDF p.91-95).
- The memoir ends expectantly, not with exile reinvoked: “In Amman I will wait for Tamim’s permit. I will return here with him. He will see it. He will see me in it, and we shall ask all the questions after that” (ISR, 182, quoted PDF p.96).