Mourid Barghouti

It is only natural that his years of exile have had a marked impact on his poetry, and that this is audible in the poems he has written for refugees in camps. “You can't expect”, he says, “people with military boots on their necks, facing checkpoints and closures, to understand your sticking to your aesthetic rules. But my experience says you can read visionary poetry even in a refugee camp.”

Mourid Barghouti has an aversion to rhetoric and fine words. His collection Poems of the Pavement (1980) was written, according to him, “with a camera − visual, concrete, no abstract nouns”. His dislike of rhetoric is also visible in the collection Midnight and Other Poems (2008). Despite the despair that he articulates in these poems, this collection contains no propaganda and no polemics – only touching elegies, biting irony and gallows humour.

The following lines Barghouti wrote for myself as if he wanted once more to confirm his aversion to rhetoric.

Silence said:
truth needs no eloquence.
After the death of the horseman,
the homeward-bound horse
says everything
without saying anything.

In 1998 he revisited Ramallah with his son. Weerzien met Ramallah (Revisiting Ramallah; Bulaaq, 2002) is the Dutch title of the book in which he describes this visit. He now lives once more in Cairo.

(Quotations taken from The Guardian, 13 December 2008) [Mourid Barghouti is to appear at the Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam in June 2009. This text has been written for that occasion.]

Select bibliography
 
Collected Works (1997); I Saw Ramallah (2003); A Small Sun (2003); Muntasaf al-Layl (2005); Medianoche (2006); Midnight and Other poems (2008).