Palestine : I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

 
I Was Born There, I Was Born Here
By Mourid Barghouti
Paperback
Published 08-Nov-2012

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"I want to deal with my unimportant feelings that the world will never hear," writes the exiled Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti in this moving companion piece to his memoir I Saw Ramallah. Gathered here are tales of personal sadness, but also of humour and love. One of the high points is the writer taking his son to see a room in a house in his home village of Deir Ghassanah and being able to say : "I was born here." Barghouti has to wait a long time for this moment because, as he observes, one of the chief weapons of the Israeli occupation is making people wait : at borders and checkpoints, or for electricity and water to come back on, and, ultimately, for the "waking nightmare" of the occupation to end. There is a disquiet at the heart of this book, not just because of the humiliation of living under occupation ("I ask myself how many times do I have to feel powerless to protect the ones I love"), but through a wider concern that nobody is prepared to "grasp the truth of Israel’s dilemma" : the Palestinians are not going away. "Do they suppose they can kill us all ?"