Mourid Barghouti - I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

This time I withdraw without regret. It amazes me that Israel doesn’t abandon its attacks and random killings. It’s as though it doesn’t want to facilitate the success of the Namiq party in the Authority’s activities. It strikes the ‘moderates’ with the same viciousness as the ‘hardliners’ and doesn’t let either camp achieve anything that it could offer the people as a justification for continuing to rule in their name.

During this period, I made the decision to organize my work so that it didn’t take the pleasure out of my whole day. I took the evenings for myself, and weekend mornings the same. On those mornings I would go out to the Upside Down café in front of Ramallah Park and have my coffee and breakfast before setting the program for my day.

It was a cloudy morning in February. The sky, which was the color of white grapes, was low, and the fine rain had the demeanor of a placid guest. My gaze shifted from the piece of paper in front of me on the table to the three towering cypresses at the entrance to Ramallah Park and back. Every time I set myself to work on something, it would escape me and gradually fade away and I’d be once more like someone kidnapped by fairies, gazing at the cypresses as though something was puzzling me.

That’s how it usually is: when your eyes delete all the objects in your field of vision and leave only one, that object arrests their entire attention, and that object, which is now the only thing you can see, is your next passion or your next poem.

Suddenly,

That music that never emanates from any visible source engulfed me.

So it’s a poem.

It’s poetry.

I ask the waiter for blank paper and a cup of coffee and to lower the volume of Umm Kulthoum’s voice a little, which he does.

I take out my pen and start writing:

Transparent and frail,

like the slumber of woodcutters,

serene, portending things to come,

the morning drizzle does not conceal

these three cypresses on the slope.

Their details belie their sameness,

their radiance confirms it.

I said:

I wouldn’t dare to keep looking at them,

there is a beauty that takes away our daring,

there are times when courage fades away.

The clouds rolling high above

change the form of the cypresses.

The birds flying toward alternative skies

change the resonance of the cypresses.

The tiled line behind them

fixes the greenness of the cypresses

and there are trees whose only fruit is greenness.

Yesterday, in my sudden cheerfulness,

I saw their immortality.

Today, in my sudden sorrow,

I saw the axe.

I went to Amman once every one or two months.

I’d spend Thursday evening and Friday with my mother. She’d see me and I’d see her and we’d be reassured. I’d return to Ramallah before noon on Saturday and be in my office on Sunday morning.

Those months spent between Ramallah and Amman were months of poems, or beginnings of poems. I lived in a state of love with the autumnal and wintry weather in the hills and valleys of Ramallah and with the two gardens of the house in Amman. I adore the winter and the rain and the trees and I adore the light of the world at eleven o’clock in the morning under the fine rain, with the song “Give Him My Greetings” and Luciano Pavarotti, and I adore having the draft of a new poem on my desk in front of me and adding or erasing lines.

I am one who loves the sound of rain on something hard. When thunder and lightening come with the rain, I feel a need to do something. I go out onto the street without an umbrella, I jump and cry out and yell like a fool, and I return to the warmth of my room, bringing with me an intoxication that my body can’t contain and I don’t know what to do with.

One winter the snow fell thickly, so Muhammad, my brother ‘Alaa’s son, and I went out to play in it. I was surprised to find him yelling, running, and turning circles with evident joy. He hadn’t seen snow since he was a child because he’d been living in the Gulf with his parents and had only recently come to join the University of Jordan in Amman. I was surprised to hear him ask me as he leapt and laughed — or perhaps he was really asking himself—“Uncle Mourid, what are you supposed to do when you’re happy?”

I looked at him in astonishment. He added, “Seriously. I’m happy and don’t know what to do about it.”

The path to my white office in my mother’s house in Amman is lined with lavender, ivy, rosemary, bird-of-paradise flowers, geraniums, jasmine, and one short palm tree — a raised garden on whose left a flight of steps leads to my garden at a lower level. The sound of shoes coming down the steps alerts me to visitors, the thought of some making me overjoyed, of others miserable. The burden of keeping away visitors I don’t wish to see has fallen on my mother.

“He’s writing.”

I put the mighty-bodied Pavarotti into the tape recorder and let the ecstasy he brings play tug of war with me, my world, and the rest of the world, toppling us head over heels into pleasure, the three of us rolling around on the ground of secrets and in the seductiveness of poetry. Not my family, nor my readers, nor the street, nor the windows surrounding the house, nor anyone in the whole city knows what Pavarotti does to this white room. His firm voice is a bronze hand that pushes me to write and legs on which I run in a daze from which I wake when I crash into a tree that is naked of all but birds, a tree with a voice and huge wings on either side. The voice of the tree seduces me into listening to my voice, which is hidden at a depth of which I am aware only when I make it a written voice, a voice that throws me into its forest and leaves me to find my way among the shadows and lights and unexpected beasts that lurk among them. I see a naked gazelle I see a lofty tree I see broken spears I see panthers yowling at their mates I see a single jasmine flower on black satin. I see a red that is hot to the touch I see holes in the earth waiting for their tenants to be borne to them with terrifying solemnity.

Here I feel joy, sadness, and fear. I hate my loneliness and I love it and long to leave and long to stay, so I do not truly leave and do not truly stay and am become more than my body.

I begin my day at five in the morning with a tour of the trees and rose bushes in the garden, shears in hand — not to harm them but to grant them the life they need to bloom. If we don’t cut the roses from the branches, the bush will stop doing the only job it does well — the rose.

I return to the bath tub and its soapy hills, after adding lavender or bay or rosemary leaves and sometimes sprigs of the pepper plant, mint, pelargonium, or sage, and sometimes all of them together. I follow this with a very hot shower followed by a very cold one, as I have done for years beyond numbering, even if snow blankets the world outdoors.

After this, I go upstairs to join my mother for our morning coffee and listen to the plan for her day. Usually she starts with her standard question, “What shall I cook for you today?” I answer straight away with the name of some dish and she feels a sense of great repose. The thing a mother least wants to hear in answer to that question is “Whatever you like” or “It doesn’t matter” or “Anything” and I’ve learned to name the day’s dish for her quickly and without hesitation. After the morning chat, I take my leave of her, return to my office downstairs, and sit down to reconnoitre the possibility of writing.

I may write two lines or two pages or the sheets of paper may stay white and unblemished. Poetry is like love, like the world, like the unknown destiny of man — rough or smooth, and sometimes rough and smooth together, and the rough talks to the smooth in the poem the way the drums talk to the flutes in the orchestra. In this way the poem conceals what it wants in order to reveal it more clearly.