Over the last decade or so, we have seen moves to dismantle colonial legacies in places like South Africa and East Timor, Northern Ireland and Palestine. The success of attempts to redress personal and societal fractures in such places has been mixed, but there have been some significant homecomings. The Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, has now published a powerful and moving chronicle of return in I Saw Ramallah. Prefaced by the late Edward Said and translated by the Egyptian novelist, Adhaf Soueif, I Saw Ramallah is the record of one man’s journey back to Palestine.
Barghouti begins his account on the ‘prohibited wooden planks’ of the Allenby Bridge, which crosses the Jordan River to the West Bank. We learn that he last crossed this bridge 30 years ago, on his way back to Cairo University to take his final exams. Around this time, the 1967 six-day war broke out and he became part of the naziheen, ‘the displaced ones’, a stranger and outsider living in distant and fraught relationship to various places of exile. With the so-called ‘peace process’ making it possible for him to visit the occupied territories, Barghouti must now face the fraught and intense feelings that he has also come to feel towards Palestine.
Exile and displacement do not form a coherent and continuous narrative: we have instead ‘scenes from an untidy life, a memory that bangs backward and forward like a shuttle’. As Barghouti crosses the border, memories and ghosts begin to crowd him: his dead brother, Manouf, who spent a day waiting on this bridge three years ago, but was eventually refused and turned back; the Palestinian novelist, Ghassan Kanafani, whose powerful voice was halted by a bomb; the still raw pain felt at the London grave of his friend, the political cartoonist Naji Al-Ali. Barghouti wants to recall those now absent and reconnect them as part of his return home. Clearly though, bereavement and mourning shadow the hopeful anticipation of his homecoming.
Edward Said argued for seeing Palestinian and Israeli histories and geographies as linked and intertwined. Barghouti wonders about the family of the Israeli soldier on the bridge: Did they come from Dachau? Were they from Brooklyn? Or were they dissident Russian émigrés? He contemplates these histories, but he contemplates also how their settlement and presence is based on the removal and denial of the Palestinians. He looks into the young soldier’s face for some sign