Middle East politics made poetic, personal

Talks began recently between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the new Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to discuss the U.S.-backed peace initiative calling for the creation of a Palestinian state. It remains to be seen whether this “road map” to peace might actually lead somewhere, but if a viable peace were to result, it would end nearly 32 months of intifada and decades of horrific conflict.

As the world stage is occupied by these dealings, an elegiac memoir, “I Saw Ramallah,” by Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti (which won the 1997 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and is being published for the first time by an American publisher) etches an intensely personal face on the effects of Middle East hostilities. Barghouti details the plight of displaced Palestinians as filtered through the specifics of his own life, writing of his long-awaited homecoming to Ramallah on the West Bank after 30 years in exile.

A student attending university abroad in Cairo when the Six Day War began on June 5, 1967, Barghouti was barred from his homeland from that point until 1996, when, following the Oslo Accords, he was allowed entry for a short visit. “Displacement is like death,” he writes. “One thinks it happens only to other people.... I became that displaced stranger whom I had always thought was someone else.”

The memoir begins as he stands on the very bridge he’d crossed three decades earlier, leaving Ramallah. “How was this piece of dark wood able to distance a whole nation from its dreams? To prevent entire generations from taking their coffee in homes that were theirs? ... How was it able to scatter us among exiles, and tents ... ,” he asks. “And now I pass from my exile to their ... homeland? My homeland? The West Bank and Gaza? The Occupied Territories? The Areas? Judea and Samaria? The Autonomous Government? Israel? Palestine? Is there any other country in the world that so perplexes you with its names?”

The story unfolds, rich in imagery and poetic language, on two narrative planes. The first tells of his bittersweet homecoming, trying to find the town he’d once known amid the settlements and changes, to locate the familiar faces he’d imagined re-encountering, but which now are gone.

The second tells of his life in exile, the countries he’s lived in and the ways he’s made a life for himself, his wife and son, always aware that he’s a stranger in a foreign land.

As Barghouti tours the areas he once walked daily, the home where he was born, the school he attended, he wants “to attach one moment to another, to attach childhood to age ... to attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now.” This wish cannot be met. Just as too much has changed, too much has stayed the same. The region has been held back from progress, stalled in time; Palestinian villages have been kept static, he writes, and cities have been turned back into villages.

With tangible details, he shapes the tale, writing, for instance, of his family’s fig tree and all the stories he’d told his son of the wonderful tree and its fruit. When he returns home, he finds that the tree’s been cut down. “To whom shall I feed the figs, my son?” his uncle’s widow asks. “No one to pick the fruit and no one to eat.” The Palestine he’d remembered is not one to which he can return. The long occupation, he tells us, has changed him from a child of Palestine to a child of the idea of Palestine.

Filled with specificity and clear-eyed narration, Barghouti’s tale focuses not so much on the politics of the West Bank but on the human toll of displacement, the experience of losing both one’s homeland and its shared history. The Palestinian, he writes, has become a telephonic person, living by the sound of voices carried across huge distances. “At one-thirty in the morning, [my brother] Mounif informed me from Qatar of the death of my father in Amman. I was in Budapest. At two-fifteen in the afternoon, seven years later, my brother ‘Alaa informed me from Qatar of the death of Mounif in Paris. I was in Cairo.”

Politics, to Barghouti, is a matter of the family at breakfast: “Who is there and who is absent and why. Who misses whom when the coffee is poured into the waiting cups.... Where are the children of this mother who, in her slightly crooked spectacles, sits knitting a pullover of dark blue wool for the absent one who does not write regularly?”

By illuminating so vividly his own experience, Barghouti succeeds in making the personal political. His narrative never attempts to instruct readers on how things ought to be handled in the strife-torn region, but depicts crisply how things actually are for this one displaced man. In doing so, he paints a candid portrait of what’s at stake with the peace process and an unsentimental view of the human price that’s already been paid.