Mourid Barghouti Research Articles

Mourid Barghouti: The Blessings of Exile

Although the reputation of poet Mourid Barghouti (b. 1944) in the west rests on two personal memoirs, this article suggests that Barghouti's poetry deserves equal recognition. The long poem in Midnight and Other Poems (2005), the subject of this article, wrestles with the options of the modern exile. Suffused with memory, I argue that Midnight opens a creative window out of multiple historical sites and personal encounters that interrogates the notions of modernity and progress, victory and loss, and nationalism and patriotism. Out of political dilemmas emerge a beauty in words of resistance and defiance, “guns of mutiny” with deep ethical responsibility toward humanity. From within spiritual orphanage and alienation, Barghouti constructs clear, concrete poetry, an aesthetic that articulates the Palestinian memory, crossing borders of history, geography, and literary traditions. Midnight's tender poetic images reposition the Palestinian exile alongside other unique voices worldwide within memory studies.

Between Exile and Elegy, Palestine and Egypt: Mourid Barghouti’s Poetry and Memoirs

This article reads the migration of poetry and memoirs by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti (Murīd al-Barghūthī) in the context of Egypt’s January 25, 2011 Revolution. At the start of 2012, the Cairo-based Barghouti dedicated excerpts from his 2005 booklength poem Muntaṣaf al-layl (Midnight) to the Taḥrīr martyrs. The poem’s own migration, interwoven with the exilic geography of Barghouti’s life and work, plots the intersection of exile with a new form of elegy in the contemporary Arabic literary scene. This new form of elegy, I argue, develops a revolutionary poetics by advancing images of heroism, martyrdom, and life. The poet’s memoirs I Saw Ramallah and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here illustrate the intertwined poetics of exile and elegy, tracing a transnational network of affiliations.

The Dramatic Irony in the Poetry of Mourid Barghouti

The Dramatic Irony in the Poetry of Mourid Barghouti

Mourid Barghouti’s “multiple displacements”: exile and the national checkpoint in Palestinian literature

The article seeks to demonstrate a post-Saidian theory of Palestinian exile via a close reading of Mourid Barghouti’s memoirs I Saw Ramallah (1997; trans. 2000) and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2009; trans. 2011). After outlining Anna Bernard’s objections to Said, it then traces Barghouti’s development of a more fluid, encompassing notion of exile that resists idealization while remaining faithful to the core postcolonial issues of colonial history and the Nakba. By carefully attending to Barghouti’s experiences at Allenby Bridge, it argues that the national checkpoint is a pivotal site where the dynamic of post-Saidian exile is defined. These experiences suggest temporal and generational modes of exile that, supplementing Patrick Williams’s delineation of the various “modes of dispossession experienced by Palestinians”, are central to a wider theorization. I conclude that post-Saidian exile comprises an important new direction for a postcolonial studies attuned to Palestine’s colonial history.

Writing Palestinian Exile: The Politics of Displacement in the Narratives of Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, Raja Shehadeh and Fawaz Turki

This article explores experiences and notions of exile and return as attempts at the reconstruction of identity and nation in Palestinian literature: Raja Shehadeh's Strangers in the House (2002), Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (1997), Fawaz Turki's Exile's Return (1994), and Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness (1986). The exilic experience represents an act of ejection and dispossession, feelings of displacement and poignancy and a capacity for survival and resistance. While return represents the recapture of being Palestinian, and of Palestine. The interweaving of history, politics and religion in the creation of Palestinian exile is met with the interweaving of things literary, political and spiritual, in the reconstruction and re-affirmation of identity and geography. This literature is an attempt at re-narration, re-constitution and continuity: the collective quilting together of experiences of exile and dispossession in an effort to re-possess not just an identity, but a nation, forming Palestinian return.

Washing words: The politics of water in Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah

Water has been acknowledged as a key area of dispute in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In particular, water stress in the occupied territories of the West Bank has been exacerbated by Israel’s colonization of water resources via the Oslo II agreements and, latterly, the erection of a separation wall that articulates a hydropolitical agenda. This article argues that Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, a memoir of Barghouti’s return to the West Bank after thirty years in exile, offers a sustained engagement with the environmental politics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, most particular the politics of water. Via his reflections on metaphor and metonymy in particular, Barghouti responds to the central question posed in the memoir — “Does a poet live in space or time?” — with the presentation of a distinctively liquid vision of life in exile and in the occupied territories. As such, I Saw Ramallah presents an instance of what Rob Nixon calls the “decentring of environmentalism” in which postcolonial insights offer a corrective to bioregional approaches that neglect politics.

Utopian Cosmopolitanism and the Conscious Pariah: Harare, Ramallah, Cairo

This article entertains the possibility that new, locally-embedded cosmopolitanisms, critical of the violence inflicted by various forms of colonialism and globalization, are not just a matter of locus, or location, or topos, but also a question of the utopian. I begin with some autobiographically based observations related to a certain barely-documented social formation I witnessed as a young woman in colonial Rhodesia, and develop the scope of analysis by relating the notion of utopian solidarity among pariahs to cultural imaginings of three differently cosmopolitan cities. It will be proposed that what is at stake in defining utopian cosmopolitanism is a certain cultural metaphori city (a term that will be gradually explicated), encapsulated here in the process of tracing submerged similarities in the cultural histories of Harare, Ramallah and Cairo, and engaging with the work of Dambudzo Marechera, Mourid Barghouti, Alaa Al Aswany and Ahdaf Soueif.

The Public Intellectual as Exile: Representing the Self in Mourid Barghouti’s <em>I Saw Ramallah</em>

The Public Intellectual as Exile: Representing the Self in Mourid Barghouti’s <em>I Saw Ramallah</em>

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

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