The Power of Poetry to Travel: An Interview with Mourid Barghouti

Abstract

A car pulls up and the driver comes out, revealing the tall, graceful figure of one of Palestine's most important and well-known poets, Mourid Barghouti, the author of twelve books of poetry and two excellent memoirs, I Saw Ramallah (2003) and the sequel I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2011). Barghouti's words, even if only routine greetings, are very carefully and elegantly spoken as he makes his way into the guest room and chooses the exact spot that would be his home for the next two and a half hours of this interview. The poet lights a cigarette and makes a polite request that coffee be his constant companion, but please make it alqam [bitter], he says. The conversation which follows travels from thoughts on poetry, religion, revolution, and Palestine to his son, the popular poet and scholar Tamim and Mourid Barghouti's late wife and Tamim's mother, the novelist and academic Radwa Ashour.Tahrir Hamdi The British poet W. H. Auden in his tribute to the Irish poet(TH): W. B. Yeats says makes nothing happen, but he probably meant, not immediately, because after all, a poem is not a political slogan. In your long poem, Midnight, you say:The importance of the brave intellectual minority in each and every society cannot be underestimated. And in this khaki age that we live in they are most needed. In the battle for language, silence is definitely not the answer and connivance is a crime.What can poetry do in our context? What can poetry make happen or not happen? Can poets create countries? I am saying this in the context of what has been said about the Irish poet W. B. Yeats-that he invented a country and called it Ireland.Mourid Barghouti I'll start by endorsing Auden's statement. Poetry(MB): can make nothing happen. Sometimes you feel that there is the following illusion-an audience expects that a poet writes a poem on Saturday and then the country is liberated on Sunday, or the dictator is overthrown the next day. A poem cannot liberate a street from its occupiers, cannot remove a dictator, no poetry, no poem, no poet can do that ... poetry does not work [in] this way. Poetry works slowly, on the front of the beautiful, the right, the imagination, and it works like a slow-release medicine that you take for your body; poetry works like a slow-release medicine for the mind and the soul of the receiver. It doesn't have an immediate effect, but it stays there and then it travels. Edward Said speaks about travelling theory. Poetry also travels. The word travels from one person to another, from one country to another, from one language to another, from one generation to another. That's why we could find a Tunisian teenager in a secluded room writing some lines and then he dies before he is twenty-five and then one hundred years later, the Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Bourgeba Street in Tunisia are rocking with his If the people one day will to live/then destiny must respond. The line travelled through ages, through geography, through minds, through the pages.TH: So the poem survives ...MB: The poem survives, that's why we are still reading poems that have been written thousands of years ago.TH: But it can't have an immediate effect.MB: No, no ... I want to make a difference between music and military music. Military music is not music. Military music can do immediate things, can organize the steps of the boots of the soldiers, can send some enthusiasm only at the minute the conductor is leading the band. After that everybody goes to his kitchen, everyday business ... your poem, to deserve its name, should not affect only this audience, at this minute; it should have the power to influence another audience in another age, in another place, with another background. For instance, when Yeats wrote Easter 1916 in Ireland-a terrible beauty is born, I can feel it when an act of great heroism is done in any other country, in Palestine, Ireland, Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, so I mean, if you achieve the demands of the aesthetics of writing, then the work can survive, can acquire these two conditions of being influential outside its sphere and outside its generation, its time, time and place. …