[News] Imagining Palestine: Barghouti, Darwish, Kanafani and the language of exile

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210223-imagining-palestine-barghouti-darwish-kanafani-and-the-language-of-exile/
Imagining
Palestine: Barghouti, Darwish, Kanafani and the language of exile
Dr Ramzy Baroud - February 23, 2021
------------------------------

For Palestinians, exile is not simply the physical act of being removed
from their homeland and their inability to return. It is not a casual topic
pertaining to politics and international law, either. Nor is it an ethereal
notion, a sentiment, a poetic verse. It is all of this combined.

The death
<https://www.democracynow.org/2021/2/17/headlines/beloved_palestinian_poet_mourid_barghouti_exiled_from_his_homeland_dies_at_76>
in Amman of Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, an intellectual whose work
has been linked intrinsically to exile, brought back to the surface many
existential questions: are Palestinians destined to be exiled forever? Can
there be a remedy for this perpetual torment? Is justice a tangible,
achievable goal?

Barghouti was born
<https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/writers/mourid-barghouti#:~:text=Mourid%20Barghouti%20was%20born%20on,out%20in%20Beirut%20in%201997.>
in 1944 in Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah. His journey in exile began in
1967, and ended, however temporarily, 30 years later. His memoir *I Saw
Ramallah* — published in 1997 — was an exiled man's attempt to make sense
of his identity, one that was formulated within many different physical
spaces, conflicts and airports. While, in some way, the Palestinian in
Barghouti remained intact, his was a unique identity that can only be
fathomed by those who have experienced, to some degree, the pressing
feelings of *Ghurba* — estrangement and alienation — or *Shataat* —
dislocation and diaspora.

In his memoir, translated
<https://www.ahdafsoueif.com/Books/i_saw_ramallah.htm> into English in 2000
by acclaimed Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif, he wrote: "I tried to put the
displacement between parentheses, to put a last period in a long sentence
of the sadness of history… But I see nothing except commas. I want to sew
the times together. I want to attach one moment to another, to attach
childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all the presents
to all absences, attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have
imagined to what I see now."

Those familiar with the rich and complex Palestinian literature of exile
can relate Barghouti's reference — what one imagines versus what one sees —
to the writing of other intellectuals who have suffered the pain of exile
as well. Ghassan Kanafani
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190714-profile-ghassan-kanafani-1936-1972/>
and Majed Abu Sharar, along with numerous others, wrote about that same
conflict. Their death — or, rather, assassination — in exile brought their
philosophical journeys to an abrupt end.

*READ: Remembering Mahmoud Darwish
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20170411-remembering-mahmoud-darwish/>*

In Mahmoud Darwish's seminal poem
<https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52549/who-am-i-without-exile>, "Who
Am I, Without Exile", the late Palestinian poet asked, knowing that there
can never be a compelling answer, "What will we do without exile?"

It is as if *Ghurba* has been so integral to the collective character of a
nation, that it is now a permanent tattoo on the heart and soul of
Palestinians everywhere. "A stranger on the riverbank, like the river…
water binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway to my
palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing makes me enter the gospels. Not a
thing…," wrote Darwish.

The impossibility of becoming a whole again in the verses of Darwish and
Barghouti were reverberations of Kanafani's own depiction of a Palestine
that was as agonisingly near as it was far.

"What is a homeland?" Kanafani asks
<https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/homeland> in *Returning to Haifa*. "Is it
these two chairs that remained in this room for twenty years? The table?
Peacock feathers? The picture of Jerusalem on the wall? The copper-lock?
The oak tree? The balcony? What is a homeland? … I'm only asking."

But there can be no answers, because when exile exceeds a certain rational
point of waiting for some kind of justice that would facilitate one's
return, it can no longer be articulated, relayed or even fully
comprehended. It is the metaphorical precipice between life and death;
"life" as in the burning desire to be reunited with one's previous self;
and "death" as in knowing that without a homeland one is a perpetual
outcast, physically, politically, legally, intellectually and every other
form.

"In my despair I remember; that there is life after death… But I ask: Oh my
God, is there life before death?" wrote
<https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/14329/auto/0/0/Mourid-Barghouti/I-Have-No-Problem/en/tile#:~:text=I%20have%20no%20problem.,-My%20hands%20are&text=and%20I%20have%20not%20been,their%20graves%20in%20some%20countries.>
Barghouti in his poem "I Have No Problem".

While the crushing weight of exile is not unique to Palestinians, the
Palestinian exile is itself unique. Throughout the entire episode of
Palestinian *Ghurba*, from the early days of the *Nakba* — the destruction
of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 — till today, the world remains divided
between inaction, obliviousness and refusal to even acknowledge the
injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people.

*READ: Renowned Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti dies aged 76
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210215-renowned-palestinian-poet-mourid-barghouti-dies-aged-76/>*

Despite or, perhaps, because of his decades-long exile, Barghouti did not
engage in ineffectual discussions about the rightful owners of Palestine
"because we did not lose Palestine to a debate, we lost it to force."

He wrote <https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/i-saw-ramallah-9780747574705/> in
his memoir: "When we were Palestine, we were not afraid of the Jews. We did
not hate them, we did not make an enemy of them. Europe of the Middle Ages
hated them, but not us. Ferdinand and Isabella hated them, but not us.
Hitler hated them, but not us. But when they took our entire space and
exiled us from it they put both us and themselves outside the law of
equality."

In fact, "hate" rarely factors in the work of Mourid Barghouti — or
Darwish, Kanafani, Abu Sharar and many others, for that matter — because
the pain of exile, so powerful, so omnipresent, required one to re-evaluate
the relationship to the homeland through emotional rapport that can only be
sustained through positive energy, of love, of deep sadness, of longing.

"Palestine is something worthy of a man bearing arms for, dying for," wrote
<https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/homeland> Kanafani. "For us, for you and
me, it's only a search for something buried beneath the dust of memories.
And look what we found beneath that dust. Yet more dust. We were mistaken
when we thought the homeland was only the past."

Millions of Palestinians continue to live in exile, generation after
generation, painstakingly negotiating their individual and collective
identities, neither able to return, nor feeling truly whole. These millions
deserve
<https://www.afsc.org/resource/palestinian-refugees-and-right-return> to
exercise their legitimate Right of Return, to have their voices heard and
to be included.

But even when Palestinians are able to end their physical exile, the
chances are that for generations they will remain attached to it. "I don't
know what I want. Exile is so strong within me, I may bring it to the
land," wrote
<https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/journals/jps/v42i1/f_0027220_22238.pdf>
Darwish.

In Barghouti too, exile was "so strong". Despite the fact that he fought to
end it, it became him. It became us.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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