Category Archives: Mourid Barghouti

by | 15 September 2012 · 15:33

Barghouti, Mourid. MIDNIGHT AND OTHER POEMS. 2008. Arc Publications. UK

“We have to be precise. Creative writing is a critical process” Except for his memoir, most of this poet´s works are not published in English. This is a first – a gift to English–only readers – a major collection of Barghouti´s poetry (it also prints the Arabic original on the opposite pages.) Midnight, 142 pages long, is a story in a poem of a prisoner, the story of loss, displacement and loneliness. The poem of one who seems to have only poetry left. What makes it poetry is the leanness of language, the precision that rejects Read more [...]

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by | · 15:27

Barghouti, Mourid. I Saw Ramallah Translated from the Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif. 2000. Anchor Books, Random House. USA and Canada.

In his introduction to this beautiful memoir the late Edward Said says: what gives this book an unmistakeable stamp of profound authenticity is its life-affirming poetic texture . This is no surprise as Barghouti is indeed a poet of great sensitivity, he is the author of nine books of poetry; few of his poems are translated into English. For us in the English-speaking minority world, the idea that there is a body of Palestinian literature is probably as remote and unbelievable as the idea that there is a land and history of a country called Read more [...]

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by | · 15:25

Barghouti, Mourid. I Was Born There, I Was Born Here. 2011. Bloomsbury Publishing. London, UK

Silence said:/truth needs no eloquence./After the death of the horseman,/ the homeward-bound horse/says everything/ without saying anything. The exile longs for home, longs to say, “I was born here.” Twice the exiled Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti has been able to return to his homeland and say that instead of “I was born there”. Exiles live constantly between these realities; and for Barghouti in his second volume of memoirs he is able to put ´emotions into history´; a true sense of identity is all about emotions. He can Read more [...]

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