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Interview: Mourid Barghouti

I learn from trees." The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti gestures around his mother's terraced garden in the hilly Jordanian capital, Amman. "Just as many fruits drop before they're ripe, when I write a poem I treat it with healthy cruelty, deleting images to take care of the right ones."Barghouti has published 12 poetry books in Arabic since the early 1970s, as well as a 700-page Collected Works (1997). He has read in overflowing amphitheatres and in refugee camps. Midnight and Other Poems, his first major collection in English translation, is out this month from Arc.It was his memoir, I Saw Ramallah, published by Bloomsbury in 2004 in a translation by Ahdaf Soueif, that first won him a readership in English. The late Edward Said saw it as "one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement". Reflecting on crossing the bridge from Jordan to his West Bank birthplace in 1996 after 30 years' exile - a visit under Israeli control that he refused to call a return - he described a condition of permanent uprootedness. A student in Cairo when the 1967 Arab-Israeli war broke out, he was prevented, like many others, from returning to the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He was later exiled from Jordan for 20 years, Egypt for 18 years, and Lebanon for 15 years. Yet all writing, for him, is a displacement, a striving to escape from the "dominant used language" and the "chains of the tribe - its approval and taboos".Barghouti lives in Cairo with his Egyptian wife, Radwa Ashour, a novelist and professor of literature. He visits his mother, Sakina, aged 88, in Amman, where she moved in 1970 to make contact possible with her four sons, only the youngest of whom was allowed home. But that year coincided with Black September and the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan. Until martial law, imposed in Jordan after the 1967 war, ended in 1989, Barghouti, who has worked for Radio Palestine and as a PLO cultural attaché, was unable to renew his passport. At the Palfest literary festival that toured the West Bank in May, he read only in his home town, for which he has a permit. He was, as a Palestinian with a Jordanian passport, barred entry into Jerusalem, or any part of the occupied territories outside Ramallah, without a separate permit.Used to the "dual pressure", as he sees it, of Israeli occupation and the oscillating hostility of neighbouring Arab dictatorships, he says he lives "on my memories". His sense of statelessness deepened after the Oslo accords of 1993 created the Palestinian Authority, which he scorns. A close friend of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died in August, Barghouti had mixed feelings at his funeral in Ramallah. "People of all ages came carrying flowers, with lines of poetry on T-shirts, in tears and sadness: this was fascinating." Yet he resents what he sees as the Palestinian Authority's attempt to "monopolise Mahmoud. They didn't invite any writers to the ceremony. The guards pushed away everybody who tried to come to the grave".Driving now by Darwish's shuttered apartment in Amman, Barghouti says he never erases the dead from his address book. His memoir is punctuated by deaths, of the Palestinian writer Gassan Kanafani, assassinated by an Israeli car bomb in Beirut in 1972, the cartoonist Naj al Ali, killed in London in 1987, and his elder brother Mounif, who died in the Gare du Nord in Paris in unexplained circumstances. Politics, he writes in a poem, "is the family at breakfast. Who is there. Who is absent and why". Loss informs his long poem "Midnight", first published in Beirut in 2005, and translated into English by Ashour, who sees it as the "mature culmination" of a poetic career. As its protagonist stares on New Year's Eve through an open window, the falling pages of a calendar bring a "chaos of memories, ghosts, relatives, wars, defeats, lusts, desires", Barghouti says, "and he's left with this attack of time on his heart and mind and solitary body. It's about the lonely facing of realities and disappointments". The poem contains a scene from Abu Ghraib. "I find I always imagine myself in the place of the victim," he says. "When the twin towers were hit, I felt I was thrown from windows, running from the fire - I lived it. In Abu Ghraib I was the hooded prisoner with electrodes on his fingers." His poems have alluded to the massacre in the Sabra-Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, and the shooting of the child Mohammed al-Durrah by Israeli troops in 2000 as his father tried to shield him. "I was the father and son at the same time - with the victims, the weak side, the lost cause, where there's no way out. The poem is my only power to identify with them." Yet he also savours "life's ability to provide us with ecstasy and laughter." His office in the house his mother built in Shmeissani, in affluent west Amman, looks out on to a laden grapevine that she brought as a cutting from Ramallah. Inhaling a handful of leaves from a lemon tree transports him to the land of his childhood. He was born in 1944 in the mountainous village of Deir Ghassanah, west of the River Jordan in Palestine. The cluster of villages was dominated by the Barghouti clan (the name he delights in means flea) of politicians, poets and landowners. His father worked the land, then joined the Jordanian army. Aged four when the state of Israel was declared, Barghouti learned of the Palestinian nakbah, or catastrophe, as non-Barghoutis with different dialects appeared in his village. "I was told they were refugees. The story unfolded of the destruction of villages, and the policy of ethnic cleansing that drove them away." Hearing of a massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948 was "the nakbah for me as a child - stories of those killed in cold blood that were disseminated all over Palestine. They were meant to be, to encourage people to flee". The second of four brothers, he moved with his family to Ramallah, aged seven. At school he admired the Iraqi modernist poet of the late 40s Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, who "broke the classical Arabic poem that had survived for 15 centuries unchanged, during the surge of Arab liberation movements against British and French occupation". He studied English at Cairo university in the 60s, when Gamal Abdel Nasser was the "only Arab leader who treated culture seriously, making tickets cheap to theatre, opera. It was a golden age". After Nasser's death in 1970, under Anwar Sadat "the first thing that collapsed was cultural life. We're still living the same under [President Hosni] Mubarak". West Bank Palestinians "did not feel the nakbah as the people who lived it did; 1967 took shape as our nakbah". Graduating as the Arab defeat in the six-day war led to military occupation, he spent three years teaching in a technical college in Kuwait before returning to Cairo to marry Ashour, whom he had met at university. He volunteered for Radio Palestine, reading news bulletins in his sonorous voice. Unlike his workmates, he refused to join Yasser Arafat's Fatah. "I kept my independence; I've never joined any political party, and never will. My colleagues are ministers now in Ramallah. I defended the liberation of Palestine, but I never defended forged elections. Arafat [who died in 2004] was not a democratic leader."Sadat closed down the radio station in 1975, and the broadcasters decamped to Beirut as civil war was breaking out. Under bombardment in the Lebanese capital, "we had the strange feeling that we were fighting the wrong war." Then, "when the Syrians sent their army into Lebanon, Sadat, who was quarrelling with the Syrians, reopened the station in Cairo. When he made peace with Israel [on the eve of the Camp David accords of 1978], he closed it again. As Palestinians, we're played like chess pieces."Deported from Cairo in 1977 "in handcuffs, with only the clothes I was wearing", he left his wife and five-month-old son Tamim behind. He went to Beirut, but was edged out. "I was a critical voice." So he spent 13 years in communist Budapest, representing the PLO at the World Federation of Democratic Youth. His wife and son visited twice a year, but they resolved that Tamim would have an Arabic education; he is now a successful poet and film-maker. For Barghouti, Budapest was a "beautiful city, drenched in art", but it "took me from the Arab literary scene. It was a great loss". He published four collections, and poems in Darwish's journal Al-Karmel, but his style changed with his desolate experience. With Poems of the Pavement (1980), "written in one breath, like a fever", he learned to "write with a camera - visual, concrete, no abstract nouns. The beauty of a poem is to cool down the language, because the flamboyant, bombastic tone of language is for governments, generals, political parties. A poet has to do the opposite. A slogan lives only for a minute". He adds: "You don't have the right to tell the reader how to feel, to say 'love me, understand my cause, hate my enemies'. Show him a scene and leave him to respond; this is democratic. I invite you to a window, a gallery, and leave you." He grappled with "the dilemma of Palestinian writers, that we're expected to address the needs of people denied self-expression under occupation, to express their pain. But this is a trap: you have to strike a balance, not sacrificing the aesthetics for your readership. I hate the terms 'resistance poetry' or 'exile poetry'. We're not one-theme poets. A moment of joy or misery is juxtaposed by its opposite. There's no one face; I see both. I question myself all the time; if you oversimplify, you'd better quit." Zuhair Abu Shayeb, a poet and editor at the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing in Amman, says Barghouti "abandoned the heroic tone and slogans that plague modern Arabic poetry. His is a poetry of coughs and headaches - the daily pains of the individual". Poems of the Pavement influenced other Arab poets, "but I didn't live in the region to collect the fruit. It took me seven years to publish another collection". Moving to Jordan in 1990 was the "most prolific period of my life". In 1995 when his name was taken off an Egyptian blacklist, he returned to Cairo, where the couple faced a difficult transition. "United with your family after a long exile, you have the illusion that the first embrace will be the solution," Barghouti says. "You have to train yourself to readjust without romantic or immature expectations." He also had to defuse his son's anger at the Egyptian authorities. "I said 'there's no Palestinian family that hasn't paid a price - losing someone, being jailed, houses demolished. If our price is just separation, it's endurable. Let's not exaggerate'." Yet his son is denied Egyptian citizenship, or freedom to work there, since mothers cannot bestow that right if their husbands are Palestinian. According to Ashour, "Tamim lives the Palestinian experience in these details." In Jafra, a Palestinian-run cultural café in downtown Amman, Barghouti says the contribution of Palestinians has been great in Jordan, where they are the majority. But while their position there is better than in Lebanon, where jobs are restricted, "those who are Jordanian citizens prefer to keep silent to keep that status. They have a strong economic presence, and a weak political presence." Political life "has been killed in the Arab countries. They're police states and you don't feel they're independent; Palestinians are part of the security files." Occupation creates a "transitory eternity", he believes, in which normal life is postponed: there is "no coexistence with a tank". The Oslo agreements were not, in his view, "the work of leaders but of people led and dictated to by the Israeli authorities and western powers. Every serious problem - sovereignty, refugees, [the status of] Jerusalem - was postponed. They divided a cake which is imaginary". As for the divide between the Fatah leadership in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza (blockaded by Israel): "I'm against both. The corruption of Fatah is irreparable, and the naivety of Hamas as politicians is irreparable - Gaza is a closed can; Israel has the fuel, the water, the electricity, the food, the milk supply, the sewage plans. They're quarrelling about dust, a mirage. The only government is Israel."He recounts one "very painful experience". In 1999 he took a job under the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, as director of a World Bank-financed programme to create a database of archaeological and cultural sites. Three years' funds had already been swallowed up, and he was "brought in as an honest person. I accepted because I'm always accusing myself of turning my head away when I see anything ugly". He tracked the leakage to forged bills, but says the culprits were "defended by their bosses". He resigned. On whether there is a dilemma in exposing the failures of an authority under occupation, he says: "The Palestinian people are not a beautiful landscape. They're a people who make mistakes, including corruption." When he sought to oust the culprits, "they tried to find out what my price was. I found my office refurbished with leather chairs. I went crazy. It hastened my decision to resign. I said: 'listen, I have nobody who supports me in your government. I have only this' - I raised my pen. 'I will write you all one day.'" He has done so in a sequel to I Saw Ramallah, a memoir that will be published in Arabic in March. It records a trip to the West Bank in 1998 with his son, seeing it for the first time. "It's to make every trivial detail into a chronicle of history. Everything starts from the individual - the body's pleasures and pains. If you don't see that, you misunderstand history." While you can whisper a poem in a free society, Barghouti has said, people want loud, direct poetry in times of injustice. Yet he has built an eager audience. "You can't expect people with military boots on their necks, facing checkpoints and closures, to understand your sticking to your aesthetic rules," he says. "But my experience says you can read visionary poetry even in a refugee camp. I say 'try it - take this adventure'." For him, "when the poem's written and it's beautiful, I can endure anything." Barghouti on Barghouti"Silence said:truth needs no eloquence.After the death of the horseman,the homeward-bound horsesays everythingwithout saying anything."? 'Silence' translated by Radwa Ashour from Midnight and Other Poems, published by ArcMany times I have been asked the question: to whom do you write? Or is there any imagined reader in your mind? I think that a poet goes to the empty page to listen to his inner tune but that tune itself is composed through years and centuries by a universal orchestra. That is why we publish the poem to be read by unknown others. When I started the opening two lines of this very short poem, I realised I was talking to myself, not to my readers, as if to solidify my hatred of rhetoric and eloquence and my love for simplicity and concrete language. As a Palestinian with a negated history and a threatened geography, craving world attention and understanding, I was hesitant to have the poem published. But I decided to publish it because I needed to be its reader. I was trying to convince Mourid Barghouti that pain, even the Palestinian pain, does not mean shouting loudly.PoetryIsrael and the Palestinian territoriesMiddle Eastguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Gallery: A Century of Presidents

: Photo: Bain News Service/Courtesy Library of CongressRepublican William Howard Taft (the portly gentleman at center) receives his ballot in November 1908. Taft won that election but lost his re-election bid in 1912. He is widely remembered (or remembered widely) today as the heaviest president (peaking near 350 pounds ? girth of a nation, some have called it). He was also the first president to throw out the ceremonial first ball of the baseball season, in 1910. From 1921 to 1930, Taft served as chief justice of the United States, the only president ever to do so. For that reason alone, he must be counted among the nation's most successful ex-presidents. : Photo: Courtesy Library of CongressDemocrat Thomas Woodrow Wilson (yes, that was his name) poses in the seat of power in the Oval Office in 1913, the year he was sworn in. Wilson had been president of Princeton University before moving on (but not necessarily up) to governor of New Jersey. Although he had two full terms as president of the United States, he really didn't serve the end of the second term, having suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919. The 25th Amendment to the Constitution (covering presidential disability) wasn't ratified until 1967, so Wilson's wife and doctors effectively ran the White House for many months. : Photo: National Photo Company/Courtesy Library of CongressPresident Wilson (left) rides with the incoming Republican president, Warren G. Harding, in the back seat at Harding's inauguration, March 4, 1921. Sen. Philander Knox (now, there's a name) and Rep. Joseph Cannon, both Republicans, ride in front. Harding was the first sitting U.S. senator elected to the presidency. He has a reputation as a White House philanderer. His death in San Francisco in 1923, supposedly by accidental food poisoning, is now thought by some to be no accident at all. : Photo: National Photo Company/Courtesy Library of CongressRepublican John Calvin Coolidge (yep, his name) tips a ceremonial Smoki Indian hat on the grounds of the White House, Oct. 22, 1924. When Harding died, Coolidge succeeded to the presidency and was sworn in by his father, a notary public, in the middle of the night at their family home in Vermont. Coolidge was elected in his own right to a second term in November 1924. Notoriously taciturn, he earned the nickname "Silent Cal." It's said that he once learned that a guest at a banquet had bet a friend that the president wouldn't say three words all night. Coolidge learned of the bet and kept his mouth zipped until he was leaving the dinner. He then walked up to the gent who'd scoffed at tales of the president's laconic habits, leaned over and said, "You lose." : Photo: National Photo Company/Courtesy Library of CongressRepublican Herbert Hoover (center, just to the right of first lady Lou Henry Hoover) and the presidential party stand for the national anthem on baseball's opening day, April 17, 1929. It was a few weeks after Hoover's inauguration and six months before the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression. Hoover, like Taft, had an extraordinary career following his presidency. He organized post-World War II food relief in Europe (as he had done after World War I), and heading the "Hoover Commission" on the reorganization of the executive branch. Hoover was the last Republican president elected on a ticket that did not include a Nixon or a Bush. : Photo: Courtesy Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and MuseumDemocrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, a distant cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt, campaigns for vice president of the United States, in his hometown of Hyde Park, New York, Aug. 9, 1920. FDR lost that race and was stricken by polio the following year, but recovered sufficiently to win election to the governorship of New York in 1928. Roosevelt is the only person elected to the presidency more than twice, winning the elections of 1932, '36, '40 and '44. He died in office April 12, 1945, just before the successful conclusion of World War II. : Photo: Sammie FeebackFormer President Harry S. Truman comes out of the voting booth after casting his ballot in Independence, Missouri, April 10, 1956. Democratic Vice President Truman had succeeded FDR in 1945. He was elected in his own right in 1948, overcoming defections by both the left (Progressive) and right (Dixiecrat) wings of his own party and defying expectations of victory by Republican Thomas E. Dewey.: Photo: U.S. Army/Courtesy ?Library of CongressSupreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower talks to American paratroopers in England just before D-Day in 1944. Republican Eisenhower was a popular war hero who swept into office in the GOP landslide of 1952, and he was re-elected in 1956. Ike followed Generals Washington, Jackson, W.H. Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, A. Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur and B. Harrison in the presidency. Nonetheless, he warned in a farewell address to the nation in 1961: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." : Photograph: Cecil Stoughton, White House/Courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumA young girl is lifted above the crowd to shake hands with Democratic President John F. Kennedy, Sept. 25, 1963, in Billings, Montana, during the president's "conservation tour" of Western states. JFK would be shot and killed two months later while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. Kennedy thus became the eighth U.S. president to die in office, the seventh consecutive president who'd been elected in a year ending in zero to die in office, and the fourth U.S. president to be assassinated. Kennedy was the last sitting U.S. senator to be elected president. With Sen. John McCain running against Sen. Barack Obama, that 48-year losing streak is likely to end today. : Photograph: Cecil Stoughton, White House/Courtesy Library of CongressU.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes administers the oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One at Love Field, Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963. Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, widowed just two hours before, stands at the new president's side. Johnson won election in his own right in 1964, but was forced out of the Democratic nomination race in 1968 by challengers to his conduct of the unpopular war in Southeast Asia. : Photo: Courtesy Architect of the Capitol and Library of CongressRepublican Richard M. Nixon delivers his inaugural address on the east portico of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 20, 1969. Nixon served as Eisenhower's vice president from 1953 to 1961. He was defeated for president in 1960 and for governor of California in 1962, but rose from the political ashes to be elected president in 1968 and re-elected in 1972. His conduct in the Watergate scandal forced him to resign in disgrace and under threat of impeachment in August 1974. He is the only president of the United States to resign. Ashes to ashes. : Photo: David Hume Kennerly/White House/Courtesy Gerald R. Ford LibraryMusicians Billy Preston and George Harrison pose with President Gerald Ford in the Oval Office, Dec. 13, 1974. Republican Ford reached the presidency through an extraordinary double fault. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in October 1973 in a bribery and tax scandal. Ford became the first person appointed to the vice presidency under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967. When Nixon resigned the presidency less than a year later, Ford became the first U.S. president who had not been elected to the presidency or vice presidency. He ran for election to a second term in 1976 and lost. : Photo: Courtesy the Carter CenterEgyptian President Anwar Sadat (left), U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin make a three-way handshake during the White House signing of the Middle East peace accord in March 1979. Democrat Carter was elected in 1976, but his re-election bid in 1980 was derailed by an energy crisis, the Iranian hostage crisis and the campaigning ability of Ronald Reagan. Nonetheless, he followed in the footsteps of Presidents Taft and Hoover ? and John Quincy Adams before them ? in remaining a major political force after leaving the White House. : Photo: Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential FoundationProfessional golfer Raymond Floyd gives President Ronald Reagan putting lessons in the Oval Office, June 24, 1986. Republican Reagan was a Hollywood actor of some repute who was elected governor of California in 1966 and 1970. He won the presidency in 1980 and 1984. His acting skills, which were considerable for a politician, and his ability to sell an idea, led his admirers to dub him, "The Great Communicator." : Photo: Courtesy Architect of the Capitol and Library of CongressChief Justice William Rehnquist (back to camera) administers the oath of office to George Herbert Walker Bush on the west front of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 20, 1989. First lady Barbara Bush is holding the Bible, and Vice President Dan Quayle stands just behind her. Republican Bush, Reagan's vice president for two terms, was elected in 1988 but defeated for re-election in 1992. : Photo: White HousePresident Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton dance at the inaugural ball, Jan. 20, 1993. Democrat Clinton was elected in 1992 and 1996, but impeached by the House of Representatives in 1998 over his testimony regarding a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Senate acquitted Clinton, and he completed his term in office, only the second president in U.S. history to be impeached. : Photo: White HousePresident George W. Bush stands on the ashes of the destroyed World Trade Center towers, Sept. 14, 2001. Republican Bush was elected in narrow, disputed contests in both 2000 and 2004. Bush is the son of George H.W. Bush. Presidents William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison were related, as were Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. But not since John Adams and John Quincy Adams, near the dawn of the republic, had a father and son both occupied the highest office in the land. Bush is slated to complete his second term Jan. 20. With President Clinton before him, it will be the first time since 1825 that two consecutive presidents (James Madison and James Monroe) have served two complete terms in office.

Oct. 17, 1973: Angry Arabs Turn Off the Oil Spigot

1973: The Arab oil-producing states impose an embargo against nations supporting Israel in the Fourth Arab-Israeli War, also known as the October War or Yom Kippur War. The effect upon petroleum-consuming countries was immediate, profound and long-lasting. The oil embargo, and the cut in production that accompanied it, doubled the price of crude and reduced overall supply. That forced gas prices to skyrocket at the pump and led to rationing and the imposition of price controls in the United States and Western Europe. Long gas station lines and frustrated motorists became iconic images of the early 1970s. It also awakened the West to just how dependent it was on Middle Eastern oil, and how fragile that lifeline really was. The decision to use oil as a weapon was made prior to the opening of hostilities. Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Saudi Arabia's King Faisal met a month and a half before Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. They agreed to play their trump card — in many ways, their only card — when the expected support for Israel materialized, which it quickly did. The Yom Kippur War, which began with a surprise attack Oct. 6 (timed to coincide with the Jewish Day of Atonement), went badly for the Arabs. After initial gains, the Syrians were driven from the Golan Heights, and an entire Egyptian army was cut off in the Sinai Peninsula. The offensive fell apart, the United Nations and United States brokered separate ceasefires, and it was all over by Oct. 26. But the embargo continued. Because of the embargo, Arab oil producers were able to wrest control of their vital commodity from the Western oil companies that had been exploiting them for years. When some members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, notably the Saudis, followed up the embargo by nationalizing their oil companies, the westward flow of petrodollars reversed itself and the drunk-on-money Middle East cartel that we know today began to emerge. In the West, and especially in the United States, the embargo and the "oil shock" that accompanied it brought about profound changes. In November, President Nixon signed the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act, which — among other things — instituted rationing and price controls. A few months later, the United States embarked on Project Independence, an early and failed attempt to make the country energy independent. As a result, offshore oil drilling became a priority in a way it never had been before. Later, when the embargo ended and the flow of oil resumed, these correctives were either cut back or abandoned. But the psychological damage was complete: Oil-gluttonous Americans have remained paranoid about their supply ever since. Finally, on March 17, 1974, Arab oil ministers (with the exception of Libya) lifted their embargo against the United States. But the playing field was forever changed. Source: Various