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‘Who would dare to make it into an abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360701642383

1470-1308

Anna Bernard,

Islamic Studies and History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Darwish is labelled thus by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché in their introduction to Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, trans. and ed. Akash and Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). Barghouti's only collection available in English at the time of writing is A Small Sun, trans. Mourid Barghouti and Radwa Ashour (Halesworth: Aldeburgh Poetry Trust, 2003). 2. See 'Reading list', The Dialogue Project, viewed 19 July 2006, < http://thedialogueproject.org/Books/books.htm >; 'Reading program 2005: Education for mission', General Board of Global Ministries: The United Methodist Church, viewed 19 July 2006, < http://gbgm-umc.org/e-store/detail.cfm?id=908 >; and 'Bibliography: Israeli-Palestinian conflict', Middle East Fellowship, viewed 19 July 2006, < http://www.middleeastfellowship.org/node/9 >, as well as numerous university courses in literature, history, and politics. 3. At the time of writing, the book has also been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. All citations will be from the Random House edition: Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, trans. Ahdaf Soueif (New York: Random House, 2003). Secondary reference will be made to the location of the passage in the original Arabic text: Ra'aytu Ram Allah (Beirut: Al-Markaz al-Thaqāfi al-'Arabi, 2003). Henceforth cited parenthetically. 4. The publication of an English translation by the American University of Cairo Press is awarded to all winners of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal. 5. 'Reading program, 2005'. 6. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 46. 7. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, 2nd ed. (London: Vintage, 1992), p. xxxi. 8. Glenn Bowman, 'Tales of the lost land: Palestinian identity and the formation of nationalist consciousness', New Formations, 5 (1988), p. 36. 9. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 34; Raef Zreik, 'Palestine, apartheid, and the rights discourse', Journal of Palestine Studies, 34.1 (2004), p. 71. 10. Doctoral dissertation, quoted in Said, After the Last Sky (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 157. See also Hanan Ashrawi, 'The contemporary Palestinian poetry of occupation', Journal of Palestine Studies, 7.3 (1978), pp. 77–101. 11. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Introduction, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 71. 12. Salah D. Hassan argues that Jayyusi's introduction espouses 'a rather reactionary position' by using 'modernism' and 'avant-garde' as 'code words for stylistically mature writing'. Hassan, 'Nation validation: modern Palestinian literature and the politics of appeasement', Social Text, 75, 21.2 (2003), p. 20. 13. Richard Allen Greene, Mideast writers reach across divide, BBC News Online, 8 June 2004, viewed 20 July 2006, < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3776305.stm >. See also el-Youssef's rather dismissive review of I Saw Ramallah: 'The homecoming of a poet', Banipal (Spring/Summer 2001), p. 132–133. 14. Barghouti, 'The servants of war and their language', Autodafe, 3 (2003), p. 43. 15. Ibid., p. 42. 16. Ibid., p. 43. 17. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 32–33. While Said argues in this text that the artist and the intellectual have different responsibilities (the artist to particularize, the intellectual to universalizse), he later assigns them a similar public role. See 'The public role of writers and intellectuals', Nation, 17 September 2001. 18. I am paraphrasing Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), p. 3. 19. Barghouti's wife, the Egyptian novelist and literary critic Radwa Ashour, has been quoted as saying of el-Youssef, 'if any literary work seems committed or concerned with politics he'll attack, as if a writer must not have anything to do with politics'. She does not specifically mention his review of I Saw Ramallah. Aida Edemariam, 'Mapping the divide', Guardian, 11 June 2005. 20. See Terry Eagleton, 'Nationalism: irony and commitment', Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 37–38. 21. Barghouti, 'The servants of war and their language', p. 45. Emphasis in original. 22. Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 38. Emphasis in original. 23. William Wordsworth, 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey', William Wordsworth: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 133. 24. Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 60. 25. Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 15. See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader (London and New York: Perennial Library, 1975), pp. 20–39. 26. Tom Paulin, 'The poetry of displacement', rev. of I Saw Ramallah, Independent, 19 March 2004. 27. Fouad Moughrabi, 'Poetic return', rev. of I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti, Journal of Palestine Studies, 32.2 (2003), pp. 109–110. 28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 4. 29. Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 62. 30. I use the masculine pronoun because even though Barghouti does not expressly limit his concept of intellectual responsibility to male poets, the literary/artistic space of his narrative is dominated by male artists. 31. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 4. 32. Ibid., p. 15. 33. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 13. Emphasis in original. 34. Said makes extensive use of Williams in both The World, the Text, and the Critic and Culture and Imperialism; Timothy Brennan and Emily Apter identify Said's concepts of 'worldliness' and 'secular criticism' as approximations of Auerbach's irdisch or irdischen. Brennan, 'Edward Said and comparative literature', Journal of Palestine Studies, 33.3 (2004), p. 33; Apter, 'Saidian humanism', boundary 2, 31.2 (2004), p. 39. 35. Said, After the Last Sky, p. 38. 36. Cited in Hugh Galford, rev. of I Saw Ramallah, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Jan/Feb 2001), pp. 103–104; Paulin; Avi Shlaim, 'Earth and stones', rev. of I Saw Ramallah, Guardian, 17 April 2004. 37. Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 139. 38. 'The 1967 Palestinian refugees – also waiting to go home', BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, 6 June 2002, viewed 1 August 2006, < http://www.badil.org/Publications/Press/2002/press261-02.htm >. The most recent UNRWA report records 4,283,892 Palestinian refugees registered in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. 'Table 1: Number of registered persons', United Nations Relief and Works Agency, 30 June 2005, viewed 2 August 2006, < http://www.un.org/unrwa/publications/pdf/comgen-report2005.pdf >. 39. Literally, 'to nothing'. 40. Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Adonis, Victims of a Map, trans. Abdullah al-Udhari (London: Al Saqi Books, 1984), p. 31. 41. Said, After the Last Sky, p. 164. 42. Samih K. Farsoun with Christina E. Zacharia, Palestine and the Palestinians (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 204. See Farsoun, p. 149–166, and Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement 1949–1993 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 464–94, 589–606 for a discussion of the actions of the 'state-in-exile' (Sayigh) during this period. 43. Salim Tamari, 'The local and the national in Palestinian identity', Israeli and Palestinian Identities in History and Literature, ed. Kamal Abdel-Malek and David C. Jacobson (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 3–4. 44. Ibid., p. 3. 45. From 'al-manfa', or 'exile.' Barghouti uses both this term and 'al-ghurba', which means 'exile' or 'estrangement', to describe the experience of individual and collective displacement. 46. Jan Selby, 'Edward W. Said: truth, justice, and nationalism', Interventions, 8.1 (2006), p. 50. 47. Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing Between Home and Diaspora (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. ix. 48. Said, 'Reflections on exile' (1984), Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 175. 49. Ibid., p. 186. 50. Ibid., p. 186. 51. Brennan, 'The national longing for form', Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 60–61. 52. The Arabic reads: 'But the difference [al-mufārqa] that hides [in this] is that strange cities do not stay [ta'aud, literally 'return'] completely strange. Life dictates that the stranger adapt every day. This can be difficult at the beginning, but it becomes less difficult with the passage of days and years. Life is not pleased by [la ya'ajibha] the grumbling of the living' (Ra'aytu Ram Allah, p. 157). 53. Benita Parry, 'Countercurrents and tensionsin Said's critical practice', Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, forthcoming ). 54. Ibid. 55. Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 122. 56. Said, 'Reflections on exile', pp. 174–184. 57. Said, The Question of Palestine, p. xxxi. 58. Said, 'Reflections on exile', p. 184. 59. This is not to say that Said never discusses the lives of Palestinians living under occupation; see his essays in The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969–1994 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), especially 'Return to Palestine-Israel' (pp. 175–199). I am arguing, rather, that his reading of I Saw Ramallah overlooks Barghouti's attempt to distinguish their experiences from those of Palestinians living in exile. 60. Though David Pryce-Jones criticizes Barghouti for capitalizing words like 'Occupation', thus transforming the Israelis into 'abstractions not humans', the capitalization is clearly Soueif's decision as translator, since capitalization is not possible in Arabic. Pryce-Jones, 'The West Bank in black and white', rev. of I Saw Ramallah, Daily Telegraph, 9 March 2004. 61. Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 90. 62. See Carol Bardenstein, 'Trees, forests, and the shaping of Palestinian and Israeli collective memory', Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England), pp. 148–170, for a discussion of the use of the tree motif in Palestinian literature. 63. Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine, p. 206. 64. Said, 'Reflections on exile', p. 186. 65. Bowman, 'The exilic imagination: the construction of the Palestinian landscape from its outside', The Landscape of Palestine: Equivocal Poetry, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Roger Heacock, and Khaled Nashef (Birzeit, Palestine: Birzeit University, 1999), p. 57.