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

He gently lays you in his ebony trunk

with his dark clothes,

handkerchiefs, combs,

and huge toothbrush,

preparing you for a journey

to a place he knows and you do not.

Yet, with the ending of the rain,

you discover

Death has overlooked you!

In a fit of irresponsibility

he has left you to this life;

you realize it is others who have died.

They have gone

for reasons as obscure

as the sources of the winds,

or they have departed

shrouded in banners

where winds go to sleep.

And though you can’t recall the details

your extravagant joy

now mellowed,

comes back again to you.

Slowly and slyly,

it has kept its charms for you alone,

as if it were a bolt of lightning that,

after seven years’ fermenting in the skies,

descends to strike,

electrifying you

from head to toe

from left to right,

snatching away your scepter.

Though you sought to evade it,

It returns to strike you,

because,

but for the hundred aches and pains

nagging at your window,

like the beggars at the traffic lights,

you were born for joy.

Yes! We were created for joy. We were created to reduce pain and increase pleasure. Isn’t man’s struggle with nature and with tyrants and invaders a sign of that goal? Isn’t our enchantment with love, kindness, justice, harmony, and freedom another?

We had got used to facing whatever we had to, as though the world would never add further hardship to hardship.

But on one of those typical Cairo springs that are not without foreboding, or dust kicked up by the burning khamasin winds, something that had never occurred to any of us was to happen.

When I was deported from Egypt in 1977, I told myself that this would be the last slap in the face I’d take from that regime. I set about trying to reorganize our family life using whatever means were available to me in exile.

I learned to appear ‘strong’ though my fragility was plain to any intelligent eye.

To appear to have no need of others though my need for a prop increased as the years passed.

To appear ‘under control’ like a stove burning quietly.

I asked myself if I’d fallen victim to a schizophrenia that hid the truth about myself from me even before hiding it from the world around me.

Was I now the Mourid I knew or had another Mourid formed inside me, at whose features I did not care to look?

One thing I was sure of: I would have to endure.

I am not a piece of music and I am not a play contemplating men’s destinies on a darkened stage. I am a father, a husband, a man with a cause, a poet, a son, and an uncle. I’m an adult and I’m supposed to provide answers and not just questions. I got used to my expulsion from Egypt and made it old news. I walked the roads of the world turning that page and trying with all my might to forget it. Life, though, taught me that you have to be free in order to choose, or be confused, or decide, or demolish, or build, or forgive, or apologize, or accept, or refuse; likewise — and here’s the rub — you have to be free in order to forget.

The world didn’t let me be free so that I could forget.

When I imagined that I’d forgotten or that I’d learned to coexist with my forgetfulness, the Egyptian police took it upon themselves to remind me that this was a delusion.

Tamim left Cairo for Boston on 20 August 2001. Just twenty-one days later, on 11 September 2001, the Twin Towers were blown up. He was obliged to live in an atmosphere of persecution directed against Arabs and Muslims in the United States instead of experiencing its social, scientific, cultural, and literary environment. What helped him, however, was the political openness of Boston and of New England in general. It is a fact that must be acknowledged that he was not subjected to harassment during the entire period of his residence there and that it was, for him, a normal period, with a certain measure of tension that should not be exaggerated, during which he was able to pursue his studies, teach his students, and read for the comprehensive exam that would precede the research and writing phases of his dissertation.

He took the comprehensive exam, passed, and returned to Cairo to do his research. He would take his laptop in the mornings and go to the library of the American University in Cairo, located a few steps from our house in Shari‘ al-Falaki, and there he would spend most of his time, racing to obtain the greatest academic benefit in the shortest possible time.

This was early in 2003 and America’s around-the-clock preparations for the invasion of Iraq were speeding up.

It seemed certain that Bush would launch his attack on Iraq within two or three days.

Egyptian opposition activists had agreed via the Internet and cell phones to go to Tahrir Square in the heart of the capital at noon on whatever day the offensive started in order to demonstrate against the war.

The U.S. and British embassies are located not far from Tahrir Square, as is the American University.

At the American University, on the morning of Thursday, 20 March, a small number of students were trying to come up with a way to let the others know that the shelling of Baghdad had in fact begun during the early hours of the morning, so as to get them out to demonstrate without waiting for the agreed-upon time.

They decided to set off the fire alarm.

Students and teachers rushed out of their classrooms to see what was going on. News of the war spread. They set off spontaneously for Tahrir Square and occupied it before the government could put its fortifications in place. A little later, the Cairo University students and waves of local citizens poured in. The government had lost control of the situation.

The Egyptian government spends millions of pounds to protect this particular square and only very rarely in recent history have the students of Cairo University been able to get to it, because the security forces close the university’s gates on demonstrators and imprison them inside the campus, making it impossible for them to get out.

The government found that the square had fallen early, and to a threat from an unexpected direction. The students of the American University are mostly children of the ruling class or of the social elite that has the means to pay its fees, and in the estimation of the security apparatus nothing is to be feared from such people. The state went crazy.

Tamim returned from the demonstrations at night and said he expected to be arrested. He spent the night at another house and nothing untoward happened.

He returned the following day.

We became less cautious and he slept at home.

At dawn, five Egyptian security officials forced their way into our house.

Through the partly opened door, the figure of a man in civilian clothes could be seen.

“We want Tamim al-Barghouti and we want to search the house.”

“Who are you?”

“State Security.”

“Where’s your permit?”

“Open the door immediately.”

“I want to see the written permit. This is kidnapping.”

When the first man heard us insist on seeing the permit, he took a step to the right, bringing into our field of vision the man standing directly behind him — a soldier wearing gleaming black body armor that gave him the appearance of a two-meter-tall metal bar and who looked as though he were about to set off for the battle front. His index finger was on the trigger of his weapon. He said nothing. He jerked his body one step to the left and another of his colleagues appeared behind him — a huge leaden twin, who didn’t speak either and whose hand, like his companion’s, was ready for anything.