Crossing the bridge of memory
A journey of loss, estrangement and return, of hope and mourning.
I grew up in Lebanon, less than a kilometre away from a Palestinian refugee camp — one of many that were set up across the country to accommodate hundreds of thousands of refugees who were forced into exile in 1948. These camps were supposed to be temporary.
More than 70 years later, tents — which were once pitched across the country — have been replaced with concrete walls and roofs which, in turn, have gradually morphed into a dense and shockingly dire urban space. Generations have since been born into this state, somehow belonging to un-belonging — this flesh of the Palestinian diaspora, a blistering wound of exile.
As a Lebanese who has stood at the border and witnessed the Israelis building settlements on occupied territories, wondering how Palestinians’ homes and lands can be so close yet so unreachable, Mourid Barghouti’s memoir consolidated my perspective on displacement. It also evoked a strangely conflicting set of emotions: joy intermingled with an overwhelming feeling of loss.
I Saw Ramallah (1997) is Barghouti’s personal testament to the cruelty of exile, of living on the periphery of belonging as it synchronously knocks on the door of the Palestinian collective in the diaspora.
This postcolonial work is a riveting rendering of the Palestinian predicament as it presents an experiential account of displacement as a direct and tragic result of the Israeli occupation that caused the mass exodus of Palestinians in 1948, or what is otherwise referred to today as the Nakba.
An Account of Palestinian Displacement
After 30 years in exile, moving from one city to another, and setting roots nowhere, the poet Mourid Barghouti finally returns home in 1967 for the first time since the Israeli occupation of Palestine. As he crosses a bridge from Jordan to Ramallah, he is struck by the changes the city has undergone. His mind drifts to the past as he tries to absorb everything around him but struggles to reconcile this “idea of Palestine” with the one from his memories.
In the book’s foreword, Edward Said praises the book as “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement”. Barghouti’s memoir provides an experiential narrative on living outside of borders and existing in fragments of time as he tries to “put the displacement between parenthesis, to put a last period in a long sentence of the sadness of history, personal and public history.” Reading this autobiography is not reading one man’s story, it is an insight into the Palestinian actuality.
Crossing the bridge of memory
The narrative begins on a bridge over the Jordan River as Barghouti prepares to cross over to the West Bank, nothing short of symbolic of the point of return, of entering one’s memories as if teleporting into a timeline of historical events. In this scene, Barghouti is the traveler who cannot interfere with the timeline or geography, or stay for that matter, as the situation is impermanent, and he remains somewhat displaced in spite of his presence in the setting.
Barghouti lets us in on his thoughts as he feels compelled to contemplate his own existence, and to shed light on the ambiguity of his condition like many other displaced Palestinians when he raises these questions:
“Here I am walking toward the land of the poem. a visitor? A refugee? A citizen? A guest? I do not know. Is this a political moment? Or an emotional one? Or social? A practical moment? A surreal one? A moment of the body? Or of the mind?”
I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti
This excerpt appears to be a commentary on the conditions of the displaced, who, in relation to their homeland, are overcome with the feeling of loss. Barghouti wrote about this land for decades. She was the subject of his poetry, but now, as she concretized before his eyes, he was struck by a sense of foreignness (perhaps, because of the impermanence of his visit) which intermingled with the disconcerting, albeit familiar, feeling of not having a definitive status.
Painting an Emotional Landscape
In I Saw Ramallah, Barghouti paints a sentimental landscape of his homeland, comparing the Palestine of his memories with the present one as an “idea of Palestine” — one that cannot be materialised in the shadow of the Israeli occupation.
For instance, his emotional reaction to the chopping of the fig tree, which no longer had an apparent function, shows that Palestinians have been holding on to the symbols of Palestine because they have been forced to leave her. The fig tree was a remnant of the past, the Palestine of writer’s childhood, before it was robbed from him.
However, Barghouti believes the homeland should constitute more than a bunch of symbols in its people’s memory. It is not merely an abstraction or a metaphor as it can be experienced with the senses. “It stretches before me,” the Palestinian author writes “as touchable as a scorpion, a bird, a well; visible as a field of chalk, as the prints of shoes.”
He argues that the Israeli occupation relies on the reduction of Palestine into symbolism, which can fade with time and subsequently dissipate from the mass recollection, as more and more settlements are built on the very soil that is metaphorized in the Palestinian collective memory.
On writing
“Writing is estrangement,” writes Barghouti. Aware of his own work’s vulnerability, he compares writing to the state of being far from home.
Is I Saw Ramallah a tragic telling of the story of Palestine? Probably not. Though he weaves the threads of sorrow throughout the memoir, Barghouti contends that the tragic circumstances of the Palestinian reality does not necessarily result in exclusively tragic writing.
The writing isn’t tragic per se, but he ingeniously merges the poetic and the political in his narrative.
It is this precise convergence of politics and sentiment through first-person narration that makes the book so enthralling. Barghouti is a skilled storyteller, a refugee “hungry for his own borders” who finds shelter in the land of poetry, and a citizen of his memories. I Saw Ramallah is his attempt to build a bridge between the past and present.
