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English edition
Jan
2003
183 pp.
Paperback
12.5X20 cm
$15.95
LE 100.00
ISBN
978 977 424 755 2
For sale only in the Middle East
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I Saw Ramallah
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Mourid Barghouti
Translated by
Ahdaf Soueif
Foreword by
Edward W. Said
“One of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we now have.”—Edward Said
The first narrative work of the well-known Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti is an autobiographical memoir about the ironies of homecoming. The bridge that Barghouti crosses as a young man leaving his country in 1966 to pursue university studies in Cairo is the same bridge that he uses to cross back in 1996 after thirty long years in the Diaspora.
I Saw Ramallah is about home and homelessness. The harrowing experience of a Palestinian, denied the most elementary human rights in his occupied country and in exile alike, is transformed into a humanist work. Palestine has been appropriated, dispossessed, renamed, changed beyond recognition by the usurpers, yet from the heap of broken images and shattered homes, Barghouti repossesses his homeland.
Awarded the 1997 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.
Mourid Barghouti was born in the West Bank in 1944, and graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University in 1967. His poems have been published in Beirut, Amman, and Cairo since 1972, and his Collected Works were published in Cairo in 1997. He lives in Cairo.
Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England. She is the bestselling author of In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Edward W. Said, an internationally renowned literary and cultural critic, is university professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books, including Culture and Imperialism and Orientalism.
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Reviews
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‘’Joins elements of autobiography to sophisticated narrative techniques with remarkable power.’’ —Abdel Moneim Tallima
‘’He depicts the topography of his homeland and the richness of its folklore. His recollections are expressed with intimacy, but without sentimentality; with emotion, but without bitterness.’’ —Ferial Ghazoul
“The theme is not merely the physical violence of occupation, but rather occupation’s ability to rob the Palestinian of his simplest and even banal connections to self and place. . . . The translation by Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif is more than convincing: it is elegant and, at times, astonishing.”—Aljadid
“I Saw Ramallah is the story of paradoxes, and of complicated truths, told with a truthfulness, sincerity and humour that is not lost or sentimentalised in Ahdaf Soueif’s translation”—Al Ahram Weekly
“The most eloquent statement in English of what it is like to be Palestinian today. . . . no other book so well explains the background of recent events in Palestine/Israel.”—Times Literary Supplement
“I Saw Ramallah’s importance is that, while many speak about the ‘refugee problem,’ the refugees themselves remain largely silent and unheard. Barghouti shatters this silence with his forceful, lyrical, evocative narrative.”—Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
“A magnificent addition to world literature. Its evocative images touch, move, and inspire. It should be read not only by Palestinians and other Arabs, but also by others, especially Israelis and Americans.”—Middle East Studies Association Bulletin
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I Was Born There, I Was Born Here
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