A fierce and moving memoir on returning to Palestine, the meaning of exile and homeland, and the habitual place and status of a person, from Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti.
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Summary
A fierce and moving memoir on returning to Palestine, the meaning of exile and homeland, and the habitual place and status of a person, from Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti.
Description
In 1966, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, then twenty-two, left his country to return to university in Cairo.
A year later came the Six Day War and Barghouti, like many Palestinians living abroad, was denied entry into his homeland.
Thirty years later, he was finally allowed to visit Ramallah, the city he had grown up in. A rickety wooden bridge over a dried-up river connects the West Bank to Jordan. It is the very same bridge Barghouti had crossed little knowing that he would not be able to return.
I Saw Ramallah, his extraordinarily beautiful account of homecoming, begins at this crossing, filled with its ironies and heartaches. In half bemusement, half joy, Barghouti journeys through Ramallah, keenly aware that the city he had left barely resembles the present-day city scarred by the Occupation - and he discovers in this displacement, that the events of 1967 have made him permanently homeless.
Critic Reviews
'As powerful, moving and vital as it was twenty years ago.' Andrew McMillan
'A beautiful, vital book.' Ella Risbridger
'A brilliant, beautiful book.' Kamila Shamsie
'Barghouti manages to be temperate, fair-minded, resilient and uniquely sad. This is an impressive addition to the literature of exile.' --Independent
'Moving and thoughtful ... compelling Barghouti s description of his return to Ramallah is impassioned.' --Metro
About the Author
Mourid Barghouti was born in the West Bank in 1944 and graduated from Cairo University in 1967. His poems have been published in Beirut, Amman, and Cairo, and his collected works were published in Beirut in 1997.
Ahdaf Soueif is the author of two novels, In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999; a story collection, I Think of You; and an essay collection, Mezzaterra: Notes from the Common Ground. She lives in Cairo, where she was born.
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