Palestine’s Poetry Icon Mourid Barghouti Passes away
Leading Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti dies aged 77.
“I succeeded in getting my graduation certificate, but I could not find a wall to hang it on it. “
In the novel “I saw Ramallah,”the late Mourid Al-Barghouti writes about returning after thirty years to Palestine, which he left to study in Cairo, then the war flared up in 1967, and the result was declared “exile”.
Mourid Al-Barghouti was born in the village of Deir Ghassana near the city of Ramallah, Palestine, on July 8, 1944, and received his education at Ramallah Secondary School, and in 1963 he traveled to Egypt to attend Cairo University, where he studied English, and graduated in 1967.
“No absent will return completely, nothing will be restored as it is”
“I saw Ramallah” not only representing the memoirs of Mourid Barghouti, but also “one of the best existential accounts of the displacement of Palestinians,” as described by the late thinker Edward Said.
Barghouti published his first collection of poems with Dar Al-Awda in Beirut in 1972, entitled “The Flood and Reconfiguration “.
In 1977 he was imprisoned in Egypt and deported following the visit of the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Israel, and he was prevented from returning for 17 years. “the sidewalk poems” was the first collection he published after he was “expelled” from Egypt in 1980.
In one of the interviews, Barghouti said, “On this journey of life, I tried with all my strength to preserve my right to make my opinion public and known, to keep my critical mind and to preserve the appropriate distance between the author and the Sultan in every country I lived in, including distance from the Palestinian Sultan, no matter how expensive that was, and no matter what are the losses as my friends think it is, and I don’t see them as such. The independence of the writer and his critical voice are his remaining honor after wiping the dust on the glass of history.”
In this context, he also described the “Oslo Agreement” for the Palestinian people as a “corpse in the house” that should have been taken out and buried, and that was long overdue.
“Open the doors for the lady to enter.”
Mourid Al-Barghouti is the husband of the Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, who passed away at the end of 2014, and she is a famous Egyptian writer whose works have been translated into several languages, including English, Italian and Spanish, especially the “Granada Trilogy” that includes 3 novels: “Granada” 1994 and “Mary and the Departure” 1995, and Spectra 1999.
The two writers brought together a love story that lasted 45 years, and upon her death, Barghouti gave a lamentation at a memorial service held at Cairo University that brought them together for the first time and said:
“Open the doors for the lady to enter”
Who is preoccupied with his grief over the loss of his beloved, distracts him from his beloved. Now I ask my grief to go to the nearest gate and leave, as calm as I like, or roaring as he pleases, but without drawing attention. I do not like his hunger or his reluctance, I almost hate him precisely for this reason, as if it was a sadness that did not have confidence, as if he had enough, he disappears, as if we did not share with him his seat, his pillow, his handkerchief, and the texture of his shoes on the glass of our watches.
Alienation.. The thing that happens to others!
In Jordan Al-Barghouti lived his last days, until his son, the poet Tamim Al-Barghouti, announced on his Facebook page the death of his father, and in his writings we always find what embodies everything that he passed through until his death. Where he said:
Alienation is like death, one always feels that the death is the thing that’s been happening to others, since that summer I became that stranger I always thought it would never be me.
About his works
– His poems were translated into several languages and his book “I saw Ramallah” in 1997 won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Literature. It was published in English with a translation of Ahdaf Soueif and an introduction by Edward Said, then it was translated into several languages.
– He wrote 12 collections of poetry, the book “I saw Ramallah,” and the novel “I was born there, I was born here” in 2009.
– Mourid Barghouti won Palestine award of Poetry in 2000.
