Excerpt from Midnight

1

Midnight & Other Poems

2

Mourid Barghouti

Midnight
&

Other Poems

Translated by Radwa Ashour

Introduced by Guy Mannes-Abbott
Preface by Ruth Padel

2008

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Published by Arc Publications
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road
Todmorden, Lancs OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Mourid Barghouti, 2008
Translation copyright © Radwa Ashour, 2008
Introduction copyright © Guy Mannes-Abbott, 2008

Preface copyright © Ruth Padel, 2008

Printed at Biddles Ltd.,
King’s Lynn, Norfolk

ISBN 987 1904614 68 5 (pbk)
ISBN 978 1906570 08 8 (hbk)

Acknowledgements

Muntasaf al-Layl, (‘Midnight’) was first published in Arabic in 2005 by
Riad El Rayyes Books, Beirut, Lebanon. Excerpts from ‘Midnight’ have
appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and Modern Poetry in
Translation in the UK and in Al-Ahram Weekly, Cairo, Egypt. Thanks
are due to the Aldeburgh Poetry Trust for publishing A Small Sun
from which some of the poems in Part 2 of this volume are taken, and
to Margaret Obank of Banipal magazine who first published seven
of the poems which appear in Part 2.

The author wishes to thank Jennifer O’Neal for the time and effort
she generously put into reading and re-reading the first drafts of
‘Midnight’ and for her invaluable suggestions, and Sharif El Mousa,
Michael Laskey and Dean Parkin for their helpful remarks on the
translation. He is deeply grateful to Bill Swainson for his genuine
friendship and immeasurable help in introducing this book to Arc
Publications.

The publishers would like to thank Radwa Ashour for all her
help and advice in the preparation of this volume and, along with
the author, acknowledge with gratitude their indebtedness to Bill
Swainson.

Grateful thanks are also due to Zuhair Abu Shayeb for his cover
design.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or duplicated in any form without prior permission
from the publishers.

The publishers acknowledge financial
assistance from Arts Council England, Yorkshire

Arc Publications International Poets

Translation Series Ed4itor: Jean Boase-Beier

Contents

Preface - Ruth Padel / 7
Introduction - Guy Mannes-Abbott / 9

Part One
Midnight / 30

Part Two: Other Poems
Interpretations / 172
It’s Also Fine / 174
Old Age / 176

Sleeping Woman / 180
In the Neighbouring Room / 182

The Three Cypress Trees / 188
Sand Kingdom / 190
Normal Journey / 194

A Night Unlike Others / 196
How Are You? / 202

I have No Problem / 206
Eagerness / 210

Third World / 212
The Stab / 214
Prison / 216

The Drowned Ship / 218
Counsel / 220

The Merciful / 222
The Giraffe’s Head / 224
Give Me Your Boots / 226

Narcissus’ Hat / 232
The Pillow / 234
Silence / 236

Biographical Notes / 238

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preface

When a poem doesn’t work, it’s usually because you’re
not being clear and tough enough with yourself. Mourid
Barghouti is clear, tough and – as his new book of poems
demonstrates – beautifully disciplined in his sparing,
sophisticated use of tragedy and loss. I use his memoir, I
Saw Ramallah, in teaching poetry. It is one of the wisest
of poets’ memoirs, a study in surviving loss and in the
human reality behind world politics: “Politics is the family
at breakfast. Who is there, who is absent and why.” It is also
an important testimony in what it is to live a writing life
and be exactingly truthful in your work, even in the most
extreme conditions: when you have been exiled from your
native land. “They call us naziheen, the displaced ones,”
he says. “From the summer of ’67 I became that displaced
stranger whom I had always thought was someone else.”

His new long poem, ‘Midnight’, universalizes the
predica-ment of the poet who has had to call his ‘room the
world’ and survives ‘only by mere chance’.

This poet-narrator is every human being, “like the
beggars at the traffic lights / … born for joy.” Irresponsibly,
Death has allowed him to live while “others… have died”.
Born “in the homestead of the Orient, / surrounded by
miracles and ballads / and hillsides wet with dew”,
Barghouti’s poet-narrator stands “hidden, / like electricity
in two clouds”, to interrogate the Occident: the Western
culture from Galileo onwards which has culminated in
“sudden stains upon the windows of the ambulance”;
and in the teeth of that bulldozer which “hooked” his
grandfather’s coat and wiped away the home cherished
by his grandparents and their grandparents.

From this “window” on the world, the poet remembers

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“white bells touched with the gold of morning, / or was it the
blossoms / in the orange and lemon orchard…?” The olive-
studded hillsides are “traversed by dynasties / like combs
through tangled hair, / which neither crown nor talisman, nor
light nor darkness / could protect”. Hills that were “sacred to
those who, for centuries, / repeated their incantations / as they
dusted off parchments…”.

His lost heritage is the whole world’s loss, every human
being’s loss from “the beggars at the crossroads” to “the balcony
of the moon”.

But there is no rant or blame, just a memory of the orange
orchard “when, suddenly / the scent of flowers made me feel
dizzy” and his grandfather caught him in his arms and scolded
him for fainting.

Boy, what a disgrace!
He said to me, as if he had said to me:
Boy, you will learn how to love a woman
and, like Abdel Wahab, you will write poetry.
Who’s Abdel Wahab, Grandpa?
Why, he’s the village madman,
he did nothing but write poetry
and poetry is all he left.

The long-lost grandfather opens his hand – “amputated / many
years ago” – in forgiveness. There is life after the rubble, says this
beautifully-disciplined long and distilling poem, “after all the
rubble has finally been cleared”. ‘Midnight’ is an affirmation of
life in the face of total loss. “Life is hidden somewhere, / I know,
/ somewhere not far from here.”

Ruth Padel, London 2008

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introduction

Brink-man: Mourid Barghouti at Midnight

I’ve heard Mourid read his poetry many times since it began
to appear in English. He reads without introduction or quip
and the work is received in stunned silence. Audiences realise
they’re hearing work of lasting rarity on first encounter. Work
that wrestles with the particular and universal in unique ways.
The poems have an openness which encloses great depths,
their lines draw landscapes in your palm, catch the skin with
universal truths.

Barghouti is also the author of a classic memoir of exile, I Saw
Ramallah, in which he describes writing itself as a displacement.
As this doubly-displaced writer, he had published five collections
of poetry by his mid-30s. The fifth, Poems of the Pavement
published in 1980, marked an important shift.

“This is the real start of my voice,” he once told me, before
explaining the context with figurative argumentation. “So, okay:
you occupy the autostrat with your poetry, your bombastic tone,
but give me the pavement! Poems of the pavement? I am not
in the mainstream – I need the pavement. You take the street
– you’ve already taken it, it isn’t mine. I’ll be confined to this.
I’m happy with this” – happy enough to produce six further
poetry collections, a 700-page Collected Works, a memoir and
the book-length poem ‘Midnight’, first published just after his
sixtieth birthday in 2005.

The selection of shorter poems in this volume, like a further
precious pocketful that exist in English, are highly distinctive
and peculiarly consistent. I don’t read Arabic and so once asked
if I could judge his work from them. He told me: “They are
representative of my experience since 1980.

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This is typical of the way that I write; the form changes, but
the economic language, the density of the poems, the
importance of the trivial, small things, simple vocabulary,
the slowness of perceptions. I don’t give signals directly;
this is characteristic. I’ll give you an example: the poems
translated here were written in 1978, published in 1980
and I’m reading them today – with my latest poems from
‘Midnight’.”

“I gather flowers on the brink of subsistence,” wrote
Walter Benjamin from Ibiza in 1933. It was the beginning
of years he spent as a refugee which ended on the Spanish
border in 1940, when he took his own life rather than be
returned to occupied France. This image of gathering
flowers on this particular kind of brink illustrates Mourid
Barghouti and his work perfectly.

“From the summer of 1967, I became that displaced
stranger whom I had always thought was someone else,” he
has written. This stranger “lives essentially in that hidden,
silent spot within himself. He is careful of his mystery”
and no longer possesses a place. Barghouti’s indirect, yet
profoundly exact, poetry articulates this mysterious quiet.
It’s poetry from after the nakba, the ‘catastrophe’ of 1948
when the vast majority of Palestinians were driven from
homes and land, and ancestral villages were erased.

“I live in a time, in the components of my psyche, in a
sensitivity that is special to me” he continued; “the one
whose will is broken lives in his own internal rhythm.”
These rhythms are the flowers recovered by the brink-man.

One of the first things Mourid Barghouti said to me
about his work was that he uses very simple, everyday
things in his

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poems; a table, a chair.
“I write in concrete, physical language. The words

translate easily,” he said on the first of my many strolls
with him. “My translators told me they are the same in
each language. This is why it works.” While this is true in
itself, it’s only part of the story.

At a later meeting, talking through cigarette smoke in a
noisy hotel bar, he knocked on the table between us: “This
is poetry. Language is here – in the street, in the mud, in
the shop, in the kitchen, in the market, the discussions, in
everyday life. And you can make poetry out of this.”

Barghouti was born in 1944 in a village called Deir
Ghassanah, near Ramallah on the West Bank of the river
Jordan in Palestine. It’s one of a cluster of villages called
Bani Zaid, home to the prominent Barghouti clan. The
Barghoutis are political figures, landowners and poets, as
well as villagers. Despite the Barghoutis’ perceived status,
Mourid eagerly traces his name to the word for ‘flea’ in
Arabic.

Mourid the Flea, the second of four brothers, moved
with his family to Ramallah during his school years before
enrolling in the University of Cairo in 1963. He is, he says,
“four years older than the State of Israel” which, finally and
fully, rendered him and most of his family stateless only
in 1967, when it occupied parts of Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
“Every Palestinian who was outside his village or place, for
tourism, for education, for medication, for any reason, was
considered as Not-Palestinian” and forbidden to return.

Since 1967, Mourid, al-Barghouti, has been forced from
temporary homes in various countries. Stranded for many
years in Budapest, he was finally allowed home to Cairo,

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and his small family, in 1995, and home to Deir Ghassanah
in 1996. Beyond that “for twenty years I was not able to
go back to Jordan, for seventeen years I was not able to
go back to Cairo and, after the Israelis invaded Lebanon
in 1982, until 2004, I was not able to go back to Lebanon.”

Today, in 2008, Mourid Barghouti, the Palestinian,
remains stateless. It’s this knowledge that adds depth to
the poem, in some ways his most accessible work, he’s read
everywhere I’ve heard him read. It’s a poem written from
the pavement and several degrees of exile, called ‘Desire’:

His leather belt
hangs on the wall,
the pair of shoes he left behind has turned brittle,
his white summer shirts
still sleep on their shelf,
his scattered papers
tell her that he will be gone a long time
but she is there still waiting
and his leather belt
is still hanging there
and each time the day ends
she reaches out to touch a naked waist
and leans back against the wall.

In his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize in 1987,
J. M. Coetzee described the literature of South Africa in
the apartheid years, including his own, as a “literature
in bondage… unnaturally preoccupied with power and
the torsions of power, unable to move from elementary
relations of contestation, domination and subjugation to
the vast and complex human world that lies beyond them.”
It is an art “entrapped by finitudes”, in terrible contrast to
the unbounded invention of a Don Quixote.

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In I Saw Ramallah, Barghouti writes that “displacements
are always multiple” meaning that, once uprooted, there
is no return.

“Writing is a displacement, a displacement from the
normal social contract. A displacement from the habitual,
the pattern, and the ready form. A displacement from the
common roads of love and the common roads of enmity.
A displacement from the believing nature of the political
party. A displacement from the idea of unconditional
support. The poet strives to escape from the dominant,
used language, to a language that speaks itself for the first
time. He strives to escape from the chains of the tribe, from
its approvals and its taboos. If he succeeds in escaping and
becomes free, he becomes a stranger at the same time. It is
as though the poet
is a stranger in the same degree as he is free.”

This is one reason why Coetzee’s notion of a literature
in bondage is a limited one. Others are evident in the
sublimely brilliant writing of the first chapter, ‘The Bridge’
of Barg-houti’s memoir. He crosses the wooden bridge
over the river Jordan in a multiple of guises: “A visitor?
A refugee? A citizen? A guest? I do not know.” It’s a
multiplication, a fracturing, a brilliantly angular, as well
as creakily located crossing, return, arrival and approach
“towards the land of the poem”.

He continues; “People like direct poetry only in times of
injustice, times of communal silence. Times when they are
unable to speak or act. Poetry that whispers and suggests
can only be felt by free men.”

Mourid Barghouti’s time is defined by a unique injustice,
yet he writes poetry of near-silent suggestiveness with all
the potency of a freedom to come.

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‘Midnight’ is a poem about a man in a room with
an open window through which visions, stories and
memories pour in, refusing him any rest. It’s not just any
midnight either, but the very cusp of New Year. It’s also
not an English midnight. In Arabic, Mourid tells me, the
word means ‘half-night’ – a mixture of day and night – a
more pregnantly ambiguous notion than that of a pivot or
starting point. Published in Arabic as the year 2004 turned
to 2005, a little over half appeared in English a year later.

Rooms with windows like this recur in I Saw Ramallah.
On his long awaited ‘return’ to Ramallah, Barghouti stays
in the home of a family friend. His room has a window that
opens onto the familiar sight of olive groves not seen for
exactly thirty years and an alien Israeli settlement on top
of the hill. An insistent rush of memories and questions
deprive him of sleep on his last night there.

Mourid frequently resorts to metaphorical windows to
describe his work and, more importantly, how he intends
it to work.

“I don’t ask you to feel this way or that way, or to direct
the emotions of the reader. I just open a window” – he wafts
his hand; “this is the scene. Look at it… okay, have a nice
time, I leave you.” His hand sits up pertly.

This manoeuvre of selective offering is crucial. It relates
to an extraordinary precision in his poetry, the light
touch of capturing things in a glance or snapshot. It also
rehearses the singularity of his faith in the concrete. In his
memoir Mourid writes that he only became a poet when he
discovered how “faded all abstracts and absolutes were…
when I discovered the justice and genius of the language of
the camera, which presents its view in an amazing whisper,

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however noisy this view was in fact or in history.” He’s
describing the way that the Occupation was “changing
us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of
Palestine.” Barghouti’s is a poetry of refusal and resistance
as well as of pregnant ambiguity.

In ‘The Pillow’, from The Logic of Beings, Barghouti
takes an object that is easily ignored but intimately present
in all our lives and gets it to talk. It tells us truths that only
it can know about “the grandeur of unnoticed little things
/ … the loser’s dignity, / the winner’s loneliness / and the
stupid coldness one feels / when a wish has been granted.”

Mourid talked to me about the Iraqi poet, Badr Shakir al-
Sayyab, whose work he came across in a beloved bookstore
in Ramallah as a boy. “I have loved poetry since I was very
young but had never associated myself or found any of
the poems in the school curriculum directly relevant to
me. Then I came across this book and felt: ‘this is a person
with whom I can associate’ – not only because of the form
but because there was no literary diction in his poetry. He
was a normal person trying to say something about this
life in which we are living. And I started to imitate him in
my first collection or two, which is natural.”

Al-Sayyab is credited with being the first of the
modernists in Arabic poetry, writing throughout a short
life which ended in 1964 when he was 38 .

Barghouti’s first collection, The Deluge and the
Recreation, was published in Beirut in 1972, as he and
his wife Radwa Ashour (now novelist and Professor of
Literature) were on

15

their way to settle in Cairo after a short period in Kuwait
with Mourid’s uncle. In the early 1970s, as a poet and radio
journalist in a milieu of artists and intellectuals, he became
increasingly engaged. With the Arab world in disarray,
President Sadat stamped on dissent in Egypt while moving
towards a unilateral ‘peace’ with Israel. Mourid, and many
others, could never accept his attitude to a blatantly unjust
status quo. No doubt he said as much on Radio Palestine.
No doubt this, and paranoid notions about opposition, led
to the first closure of the Voice of Palestine in 1975.

He and his colleagues settled in Beirut, then a city of
dissidents and ‘rogue poets’ in the midst of civil war,
and re-established the radio station. For several crucial
months they remained hemmed into a downtown area
under constant bombardment before being invited back to
Cairo by Sadat. On 17 November 1977, with his son Tamim
only five months old, he was arrested and deported. Sadat
was about to give a speech in Jerusalem which recognised
Israel’s newly-established ‘facts on the ground’. This
gesture of ‘peace’ brought a longed-for embrace from
America and jettisoned the Palestinians to Menachem
Begin’s ‘Iron Fist’ policy of ongoing Occupation. Mourid
was deported to the only Arab country that would take
Palestinians without a visa: Iraq. He escaped to Beirut but
found himself so isolated there that he had to accept an
exile in Budapest.

It’s from these years, places and experiences that his
real voice, the dissident ‘pavement’ voice, emerges. The
titles of [as yet] untranslated collections tell their own
story. After the grandiose ‘opener’, The Deluge and the
Recreation, came A Palestinian Under the Sun in 1974, the
title of which refers to a famous novel by Ghassan Kanafani,
a Palestinian writer,

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friend and inspiration who was assassinated in Beirut
in 1972. In 1977 came A Song to Armed Poverty, and a
year later Earth Reveals Its Secrets, a more characteristic
expression. By 1980, when Poems of the Pavement
appeared in Beirut, Mourid was long gone, distanced by
several degrees of exile in Budapest.

“I’ve seen war when it is… silly,” he laughs and
continues slowly and thoughtfully. “I saw causes being
manipulated… I saw rhetoric substituting for language
and communication… I saw false heroism…. I saw the
bodyguard become as important as the person he guards.
I wrote a poem called ‘The Bodyguards’ describing them
as kings – it was smuggled all over the place.”

It is Mourid’s distaste for hollow heroics, along with
the songs and poems to endless ‘victories’ of this period,
that forged his unique voice, founded as it is on a refusal to
simplify anything, founded upon an elemental dissidence
–temperamental and aesthetic – and informed by his sense
that, in all of this, “the step toward my country” never
arrives.

This is what he means when he describes himself as
being positioned against, or at an angle to, the mainstream,
the autostrat, filled with “the stars of the street”. In marked
contrast, Barghouti seeks a poetic language that “defies the
fake and flamboyant. I am trying to defy the conventional
language by which this unconventional world is described.”

Silence.

Silence said:
truth needs no eloquence.
After the death of the horseman,
the homeward-bound horse

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says everything
without saying anything.

“When I went to Budapest it took me seven years to
produce a book, because I could not become reconciled
to the move.”

This book is called Endless Estrangement and nothing
from
it is translated.

After this in 1992 or 1993 came Rannat al Ebrah – “ebrah
means ‘needle’, rannat means ‘ringing’: ‘the ringing of
the needle’. My poetry had reached a point that is almost
silence, by which I mean I had reached an economy inside
the poem, using the minimum of what we might call
linguistic ‘weapons’. Closer to silence, it’s Rannat al Ebrah.”

Frequently I hear Mourid asked to repeat how he
ended up where and when, and in particular how he
found his way to Budapest. In his memoir he wrote: “I
hate a fraudulent yearning…” and he could not be more
honourably precise about his own exile, in relation to
others, minimising its specialness, constantly guarding
against exception, refusing presumptuous pleading.

So he abbreviates responses, skipping parts to get the
answer out. It is as if, in their sympathy, no-one realises that
it’s a map scorched with pain, as if they have not pondered
the absence of advertisement. Yet the world has barely
noticed the facts of this uniquely chronic dispossession, so
he has to respond; it is a duty to tell. Each time, the rate of
compression is slightly different. Often I hear interruptions
for more detail. It remains a confusing story.

It took many hours over some days before I asked about

18

Budapest directly, forcing him to revisit real desolation. It
is in Budapest, though, that a newly-refined voice develops,
consolidates and, though close to silence, is practised
and heard. I asked if he’d been sent directly there, which
led him to explain, with faltering reluctance, the story of
deportation to Baghdad and being returned to Beirut.

“Then there was a real problem. I was on the left of
my leadership, radically against the Arab regimes when
Arafat’s policy was to be on good terms with all the Arab
regimes.” He slowly describes the consequences of this
isolation, trying, as ever, to explain fully, to prepare me
rather than engage my sympathy – knowing how bizarre
it must sound decades later. It is a bald restatement of the
refugee’s senseless estate. Eventually, Mourid describes
meeting an old friend in the street who, seeing his
desperation, suggests the sanctuary of a modest posting
in Budapest.

“With the negligence of my situation, I welcomed the
idea. I was fed up with being in the same place as the entire
Palestinian leadership, the whole lot of them. Wherever
they were, I got away. When they went to Tunis after the
invasion – when Sharon entered Lebanon – I refused to
enter Tunis!”

This is the only moment when his voice strikes a false
note, one tinged with bravado.

Again there is a long pause.
“I don’t know. I’m a critical person, my vision is a critical
vision – towards everything. It’s difficult for me to be told
how to think, what to do, who to help. I can’t work to that.
I’m really an independent person. This is an observation,
not …”.
He tails off again, the memory clearly unpleasant. In fact

19

he seems actually disturbed by revisiting it. This is
particularly striking to me, a witness to his extraordinary
implacability elsewhere, to his allergy to expressions
of sympathy or alarm at new injustices. It’s a story of
destitution, a complete abandonment, an unromantic
solitude. I recall a line in his memoir: “the wish to count
the faults of the victim has woken in me once again… we
too have our faults.”

This is the “story of accepting Budapest” where he was
to become a member of the Bureau of the World Federation
of Democratic Youth, and where he worked as a kind of
cultural attaché with PLO representatives. It was 1977-1978,
ten years after the apparently endlessly repeating defeat
of 1967.

I was the one who changed the subject.

Mourid was forced to spend a decade and a half in
Budapest, “leaping through the ages toward particulars:
/ the address of a house, a roof… / a friend’s knock at the
door”. Finally, in 1996, he stood “on the dust of this land”
on the far side of the bridge, able to write “my country
carries me.” As he crosses, assaulted by memories of those
funerals he could not attend, those friends murdered in
exile, of large and small memories, his head full of song,
the scene is

“as prosaic as a bill of reckoning.
The wooden planks creak beneath my feet.”

He’s carrying a manuscript which is to become The
Logic of Beings – poems from this and another collection
called A
Mad Night are scattered through I Saw Ramallah. The Logic
of Beings was published from Amman, where his mother
lives and where he met with Radwa and Tamim during the
summers of his peculiar exile. He describes the poems in

20

Logic as haikus, in which he tries to make inanimate objects
speak. It’s an extension of the creaking wood underneath
the chorus of resistance songs, it’s the dust of reality that
life propels him towards. It’s something else too: the most
singular quality of this Palestinian poet.

“I once said that a poet should have some hot water
and liquid soap and a sponge to wash words like we do
greasy dishes. So I would like every abstract noun to be
broken down into what it means in concrete terms in the
real world. The freshness of a word does not come from
its being poetic, it comes from being precise. We have to
be precise. Creative writing is a critical process.”

This dirty, dusty, applied work of intervention,
engagement and poetry-making labour has a clear
inspiration. In contrast with the men – “Arab leaders, tribal
‘kings’, rhetorical revolutionaries, ‘victorious’ freedom
fighters, ‘poets of the revolution’, the proclaimers of Arab
‘Unity’”, he celebrates the constancy and sheer day-to-day
industry of the women – “our mothers”. Women, mothers,
like his own mother Sakina – heroine of the memoir – who
stayed, continued, created and sustained life: “a revolution
realised every day, without fuss and without theorising.”

Mourid describes to me an untranslated poem, also
called ‘Rannat al Ebrah’, in which he uses “the real needle,
as the women are embroidering the Palestinian peasant’s
dress. Every Palestinian women wears a dress that is
embroidered, here and in the arms, right to the bottom. It’s
all embroidered, it’s very expensive, but – I mean – they
do it.

So in order to praise the role of women in the successive
intifadas, I just wrote about this dress. How, under the
very soft light of a traditional lamp, step by step, night
after night,

21

women are doing something, something which is finished
beautifully. And in the poem, I said that I would be led by
this needle and the direction it chooses towards beauty.”

He pauses to relish the thought, his head buried in the
memory.

“So give me orders, you are the guide, you are the
signal…”

This is the revolution of the everyday, an enduring
hand-made resistance which sounds exactly like his notion
of the work involved in poetry. It’s the same applied effort
and it disallows abstract, rhetorical calls, easily turned
phrases or crude nomination.

Mourid has a voice carved from stone. Deep, definite, it
moves forward with sparing certainty. It is the perfect voice
for his poems, albeit one partly formed by chain smoking.
It also suits his handsome dignity, his survivor’s durability
and purposive calm as well as his lewd chuckle, occasional
blunt language, and obvious enjoyment of laughter. He
uses it to inveigh against lazy adjectives and everyday
imagery which – he laughs heartily – “fall into your cup
of coffee” like flies.

Form, however, is crucial to him: “Form is not chains
because the freedom of a writer – as I see it – is his or her
freedom to choose their own chains. They create chains of
their making and they abide by them, but they do not obey
borrowed chains.”

Barghouti’s chosen formal restrictions, together with
this refusal to drink the fly-strewn coffee, link to idealist
notions of a work of art being an “isolated, self-contained
work” – to quote a young Walter Benjamin. This is also
what is conjured up by the brink-man’s flowers; they
represent this kind of recovery of difficult precision from
an impoverishment in our requirements of language. It is
both a rescuing of the

22

difficult and the difficulty of such a rescue.
These are the responses to Coetzee’s problem and

Barghouti exceeds it in two ways. In some ways the
choice of chains is the most radical in Mourid’s case, a
simple refusal of the prison-writing that Coetzee fears.
Then, there’s a perfect example of what I mean, on a small
scale, in a poem which exemplifies Barghouti’s refusal to
nominate, to wave banners, to confine the particular within
its particularity. It’s the longish poem ‘A Night Unlike
Others’ [see p. 196] published in 2002, but written, I suspect,
in late 2000 or early 2001.

Poetry, Giorgio Agamben argues, is defined by “the
possibility of enjambement… the opposition of a metrical
limit to a syntactical limit. […] Enjambement reveals a
mismatch, a disconnection… such that poetry lives, only
in their inner disagreement.” Poetry’s open-endedness –
“this sublime hesitation between meaning and sound” – is
its core. Anything else is prose.

‘A Night Like Others’ is poetry of this kind. Knowing
more, adding explicatory prose, only reveals the precision
of its work as poetry. So, what ‘more’ can we know from
the poem as it presents itself to us? We know more from
knowing its date, more if we focus on the two flags, though
every nation has a frontier and every one has been, or is,
contested. We know more if we take up, with care, the
words school-
bag, bullet holes and shelling. We know something by the
word Mohammed, though it’s important to understand
exactly what. However, despite being the most declamatory
of Barghouti’s poems in translation, there is no accusation
or nomination, nothing that must be withdrawn under
certain circumstances, no contentiousness nor, even here,

23

any stage directions. Its author guarantees no tears for his
poem.

Yet this is a poem written in the wake of the deliberate
shooting of Mohammed al-Durra, who cowered in terror
with his father under Israeli attack, an attack captured
on film that went global in September 2000. Statistically
common as an event, this was, in fact, a rare recording of
the gratuitous killing of a child by Israeli Defence Forces.
A war crime right in front of all our faces. Then Israel re-
invaded illegally occupied territories as the second intifada
took off. Mohammed al-Durra became an icon of injustice,
a symbol, an idea, wrapped in flourishes of rhetoric – the
kind that Mourid refuses.

I asked him about it, knowing that there had been a
memorial edition of an occasional publication in Cairo,
renamed Durra, to which writers – including Mourid –
contributed. Something touched him about my question,
perhaps the fact that I asked it, or that my overdue son was
born just after it happened. The point, quickly established,
was that yes, it was Mohammed al-Durra in one sense, but
in another “Mohammed is not a name, even!”

There are many Mohammeds, I suggest.
“Yes.”
He then described his participation in a kind of
memorial tour of north African capitals with the father of
this particular
Mohammed, whose long face we all saw yanked into
animal terror. There were posters everywhere, he said
everyone was
saying this, chanting that. “Okay, I went on the tour, but I
never read this poem!”
He said this with pride, proud of a characteristic,
principled clarity.

24

So we have a poem about a grotesque crime, which
was a trigger for the slide back into hell for Palestinians: a
historically significant moment. The poem does not name,
nor does it blame. Even agreeing to a memorial tour in
support of the family, the poem that does not name is
not read! This, in a heightened way, exemplifies Mourid
Barghouti’s work.

Here he has chosen his chains, even if the walls of the
prison remain misty.

The truth, or a truth: this event is self-contained and
incontestable.

The particular here, unnamed, has graduated to the
universal.

If this is literature in bondage, the bindings are our little
humanity, the prison our planetary bauble.

Paul Celan wrote despite an internal injunction against
poetry after the shoah [the catastrophe of the European
Jewish genocide]. His poems broke down the language of
a world that had become unrepresentable. Inverted images
of the world become the only means of rendering such a
state of being. He once wrote of “Spring, when birds fly
up to meet their tree”, a line whose levity, economy and
self-containment tells us everything. It’s a line I’d often
thought that Mourid Barghouti might have written and, in
‘Midnight’, he has.

‘Midnight’ was written between January 2002 and July
2004 as a cumulative series of segments and angular portraits
of a man whose prison walls talk. The poem is the product
of a world gone mad, thrown headlong into a nightmare of
mythological barbarity. Nothing is as it should be, or even

25

as it appears, any more. For Palestinians, the early 1990
agreements in Oslo offered limited hopes but contained
explicit commitments to them. By the millennium,
settlements on the occupied ‘West Bank’ had flourished,
every promise was broken and their own leadership
fatally compromised. Used to chronic injustice, and having
survived acute injustices, Palestinians were now thrown
into another round of both contiguously, crimes against
humanity of an unimaginable order.

Against all of this, Mourid insists upon an instinctive
capacity for joy, but the poem makes for bleak and
distressing reading. Mourid may have chosen the chains,
but at times you feel the man is trapped forever in a
uniquely relentless hell. Certainly this is poetry of human
extremity, the world’s madness concentrated in the
Palestinians existential torment, further gathered into the
ferocious gusts of unending nocturnal distress. A day like
no other in human history, just another day in an endless
night. Mourid told me that “the disappointment is endless
now. No promises – promises of independence, freedom,
movement, autonomy, way of life, sovereignty – they are
all destroyed.”

In ‘Midnight’, the narrator asks: “Why is it that
whenever I see a man who has been murdered / I mistake
him for a person lost in thought?” We see “embroidered
dresses / stooping over gravestones.” Here Mourid writes
of “hills that follow each other like rhymes / hills that
you shield, instead of being shielded by them.” Here the
difficult, necessary flowers come from airborne trees. The
world is upside down, inside out, indifferent to a barely-
conceivable injustice, the endlessly repeated attempts to
separate a land from its people.

If this is a literature of finitudes, of bondage, or of
‘prison-

26

writing’, then I embrace it along with Coetzee, Celan,
Benjamin – and Kafka too, of course. These poets of
thwarted humanity, who invent against all odds, equal –
for me, surpass – the freewheeling invention of Cervantes
because they represent the rarest, most vital pulses of our
experience.

In fact, as I’ve argued, Barghouti’s poetry exceeds
these bonds in small, subtle, significant ways. Its
judgements – personal, artistic, political, ethical – involve
an extraordinary aesthetic precision. It’s all there in the
work, a work of unimpeachable creative responsibility and
ethical clarity. Of course, it is a writing ‘against’, but it’s also
writing as play, writing as human definition. This taut and
often tortured writing emerges from the deepest realms of
our humanity. It is a writing from many angles, directions and
drives, and delivers great depth.

In ‘Midnight’, Mourid Barghouti paints us the end of the
world. But there is a profound shift here too. He writes; “I will
not send a spaceship / to discover life on planet Mars. / I will
try to discover life here / on this earth.” He draws the poem to a
close with a “message of doubt” for “the victorious”:

Enemies,
victory has become your daily routine
like your morning toast.
Why, then, this hysteria?
Why do I not see you dancing?
How much victory do you need to be victorious?

Every time I read those lines, I recall Mourid talking of the
hope he has encountered on the ‘West Bank’, the lessons learnt
from 1948, 1967, 1987 and 2000: “It’s really amazing, little acts
of resistance. They demolish the house, and they

27

cut down the trees and people stay where they are, in the rubble!
But in their place, a temporary house is raised, the neighbours
bring some help and family life is resumed in some way or
another.”

It would be wrong to describe ‘Midnight’ as a poem of hope.
It is not, not even hope against hope. Mourid gives his narrator,
whose life is one of obituaries and checkpoints, the properly
Shakespearian lines “Age: zero. / Life: tomorrow / and tomorrow
and tomorrow!”

However, I see in this endlessly denied and deferred existence
potential for new life. Amidst desolation in the shadows of
stolen hills, there is a refusal of defeat and a resistance to closure
constitutive of poetry. ‘Midnight’ is also a message of doubt to
the victorious, something with revolutionary – by which I mean
real life, actual and historical – potency. Mourid Barghouti’s
poetry is a writing against all conceivable odds: brinkmanship
of the highest aesthetic order.

Guy Mannes-Abbott, London 2008

28

Part 1

midnight
29

That’s all you can do:
dump it in the dustbin,
the whole calendar,
return its present to the past,
as if the past twelve months
had departed with the final bell,
leaving their joys
to you alone,
and their aches and pains to oblivion.



But every night,
starting tonight,
you will hear voices in the dark
and the rustle of leaves from your window:
May, March, August, February, June,
January, September, October, April,
the sound of the steps you want
and of the steps you do not want,
the cooing of delights,
and the droning of disasters.



Here is Death,
wearing padlocks as pendants,
his well-trained hounds at his heels;
his eternal belt
stuffed full of addresses.

30



31

He gently lays you in his ebony trunk
with his dark clothes,
handkerchiefs, combs, and a 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’ brewing in the skies,
descends to strike, electrifying you
from head to toe, from left to right,
snatching away your sceptre.

32


33

Though you sought to avoid 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.



Those assembled in the forum,
put off by your boisterous voice
and the sternness of your features,
fail to realize that a garden that quivers with dew
could kill you;

that the child smiling at you in the train
could nail you to the fortress of your body,
courageous and cowardly and, like a paralysed man,
craving a dance;

that the breeze on a sultry day could make you feel grateful,
as though you’d won the lottery!

You feel ashamed
that you forgot to thank that bottle of good wine
(whoever thought to ask: what return does a bottle of good wine
get for the elation it gives us?).

Your affection begins with your first steps,

34


35

with the yearning of your feet;
your laughter originates in your eyes,
your anger with your desire
to forgive.

To your cruelty, you say:
get to the back of the line,
get to the very back of it.
Ask me for permission to come in,
ask me seven times before you dare to enter!

Silence and fury befit you,
resolve befits you.
It befits you to fly between two seagulls
as if you were a bridge
spanning the banks of joy and sorrow,
that speaks not of its burdens because,
but for the nagging of a hundred aches and pains,
you were born for joy.



At the climax of it all,
here is the hem of her black dress,
brushing past your sleeping face:
your mother’s endless mourning,
desolate and silent,
pacing the corridors of your home.



36




37

From the window you see
hills of olive trees
bereft of their
ancient peace of mind;
olive groves,
sacred to those who, for centuries,
repeated their incantations
as they dusted off parchments, little treasures and goat
skin.
You see hills of stars and sacrificial rams,
crosses and resurrections,
and waves of the sea that no longer remember
where the waves of people came from.
You see hills traversed by dynasties,
like combs through tangled hair,
hills which neither crown nor talisman,
nor light nor darkness,
could protect.



From the window
you see in the sky
a thunderous hulk of metal
with complacent wings and an unerring aim,
circling as it hunts for its next target
(could it be the woman in mourning?).
It pursues her
beneath the threatened domes,
it pins her against her bedroom wall

38


39

(where the picture of her absent son
fixes his last smile in black and white),
it hunts for her
beneath her clean white bed sheets,
and in between her clothes’ lines.
It hounds her into streets
whose bruises are still warm.
It seeks out her blood
today;
it will seek it out again tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow.



You see hills that follow each other like rhymes,
hills that you shield, instead of being shielded by them.
From the slopes thus threatened,
you hear the songs of lovers:
the earliest
now forgotten in ancient books
and the latest,
in front of whose closed lids
you now stand, silent.



Why is it that whenever I see a man who has been
murdered
I mistake him for a person lost in thought?

Here you are, collapsed on the earth

40



41