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

One of them (Amal, the cheerful, laughing, easy-to-get-along-with, good-hearted one, who lives in the Gulf) answers me, “Please, Mourid. You don’t believe in these things but we do. Please please don’t interfere.”

I leave the room bemused.

Two days later Uncle ‘Ata will depart this life, everyone will move out of the hospital to see to the funeral arrangements, and the Barghouti Family League will open its doors to receive mourners.

My nieces went to university, traveled, worked as teachers, and mixed with society. What led them to make this shift in their lives, in unison, as a group, and all in the same direction?

In this age of satellite television, the book is no longer for many a source of knowledge. The satellite channels have been taken over by preachers, missionaries, and professional fatwa-makers, and television has become the locus of truth. This is not enough, however, to explain the phenomenon. What is certain is that this social upheaval has become general in all Arab countries. No less strange is what happened to Radwa in a hospital in Cairo.

She needed a very simple surgical procedure, the kind they call a ‘one-day operation.’ The doctor suggested that she do it at the private hospital with which he worked.

She was starting to come round from the anesthetic as she left the operating room.

The nurse was pushing her cart down the corridor toward the room. Close to the threshold, Radwa gave a small cough.

Suddenly, her face started to swell.

Tamim and I could see her face swelling in front of our eyes. The doctor had left, so we called him back. When he arrived, the swelling had increased so much that her eyelids were pressed shut and her face had turned into a smooth round ball twice its normal size, making Radwa a completely different person. It was terrifying because she was at risk of asphyxiation and her lips were pressed tightly together. The doctor noticed our fear and tried to reassure us and we had to appear reassured in front of her so as to lessen her fear. The doctor gave her the necessary medicine and the swelling ceased and then started gradually to subside. The traces were completely gone within a few days of our bringing her home.

This unexpected complication meant that we had to stay at the hospital for four days. That was enough for me to discover that we were in a mosque, not a hospital. I open the door to the room to look for a nurse to help in an emergency and find dozens praying in the corridor. Unable to go anywhere, I am forced to go back inside the room and wait for the prayer to end. After a day or two, I discover that the worshipers are not only of the hospital’s doctors and workers but include guards from the nearby buildings, shop owners, traffic policemen from the surrounding area, some bus drivers belonging to the German School close to the hospital, and visitors and family members of patients. They drop everything for the prayer, and next to them their shoes are gathered, along with all the muck of the streets and roads outside that has stuck to them. I wonder, do the people in this corridor do this in order to demonstrate their ‘faith’ to one another? Is that why they don’t pray in their own homes?

Given the situation, we should have been thinking exclusively about Radwa’s well-being but the hospital had been transformed into a mosque, its doors blocked by bodies and mats, making it difficult to reach help in an emergency. The impossibility of asking for any emergency medical or nursing assistance from the hospital staff added further to our fears and worries. I still recall this provocative and intrusive situation with great perplexity and anger at what has become of our society.

Pains of social desiccation and times of barely opened, or almost closed, eyelids — and there is no enemy of the living creature more dangerous than desiccation, be it desiccation of the body, of the mind, of an idea, of a tree, of desire. I am speaking of the accumulation of ‘historical pain’ in our country — a pain that chases away peace of mind, logic, responsibility, tranquility, imagination, truth … and poetry.

They say that constant pain acts as an incentive to writing but I don’t believe such nonsense. Pain sometimes acts as an impediment to writing. I consider myself a poet in decline, near the end of his run, and admire those who publish forty or fifty collections of verse on the grounds that their suffering is never-ending. Historical pain is a burden on the poem because its constant presence means that it’s chronic, and all that is chronic, from inflammation of lungs to inflammation of rhymes, is boring. Palestinian pain due to the Occupation and Arab pain due to dictatorship have reached a point that disables poetry. What they call ‘nationalist’ poetry generally depends on rhetoric and eloquence. Eloquence may shake history but it doesn’t protect geography.

Real pain doesn’t need our rhetoric. In my collection Mantiq alka’inat (The Logic of Beings), I wrote the following very short poem to affirm this, to myself above all:

Truth needs no eloquence.

After the death of the horseman,

the homebound horse

says everything

without saying anything.

We have been living with ‘chronic pain’ and ‘chronic resistance’ for more than a century. The poets of the world wrote resistance poetry for a year or two and then went back to the poetry of ordinary life. How many years must people resist and how many years must their poets write resistance poetry? The French Resistance lasted for no more than four or five years, after which Aragon, éluard, and the others returned to their experimentalism and the aesthetic playfulness that suited their temperaments. There aren’t many cases of a people resisting for a whole century, and from the time that the fingernails of the Zionist movement started rapping on our windows until now, when they have pulled our homeland down around our ears, we’ve seen everything a poet or prose writer can imagine, to the point of satiety and vexation — every kind of death, every kind of patience, every kind of trying, and every kind of leader (except for one who can deliver, for whom we are still waiting, though that wait too has brought us to the brink of boredom). We’ve seen both despair and hope so often that we no longer know exactly what either of them is. We’ve seen pessimism, we’ve seen optimism, we’ve seen pessoptimism, and we’ve seen a whole line of United States presidents, so what is there left for us to see?

We’ve seen the seller of colored beads, the seller of poisons, the seller of dreams, the seller of delusions, the one who sells his party and the one who sells himself; the coward who flees the field and the brave man from whom the field flees; the tender and the cruel, the honest man and the liar, the sage and the idiot. We’ve seen those who can distinguish fifty kinds of wine and those who wipe their noses on their sleeves, so what is left for us to see?

We’ve seen smart bombs and stupid bombs, cluster bombs and phosphorus bombs, fragmentation grenades, tanks, armored cars, bulldozers, secret agents, and silencers, so what is left for us see?

We’ve seen the detention camps of twenty Arab states, so what is left for us to see?

I haven’t written a poem for three years because I don’t want to put a helmet on my poem’s head. I don’t want to work as a war correspondent. I don’t want to work as a fireman. I don’t want to work as an ambulance. I don’t want my verse to get used to living in graves. In the poem “Midnight” is the following passage:

Here is Death,

wearing padlocks as pendants,

his well-trained hounds at his heels;

his eternal belt

stuffed full of addresses.