New book by Palestinian poet and writer Mourid Barghouti

Reading this review from the UK Independent of  the new book by Palestinian poet and writer  Mourid Barghouti titled  I Was Born Here. The book has a  introduction by one of my favourite writers John Berger.

The review in the Independent describes the book this way:

"I Was Born... is that collection of "questions", voiced in the place and beyond, from many angles of vision or time and delivered in Barghouti's inimitable style. John Berger's introduction speaks of what happened and continues to happen in Palestine as "unclassifiable" - a term that also fits both volumes. Here Barghouti resumes in the late 1990s, flitting across the subsequent decade, delivering characteristic mini-essays, deep family memories, accounts of employment in Ramallah, visits with Tamim to Jerusalem and Deir Ghassanah, alongside crystalised visions of horror and happiness.

"Essays" focus on Jerusalem and Iraq, on coffee and the loss of Palestine: they rival Mahmoud Darwish's work on the subjects. They also cover Arafat and fatherhood, corruption and "the wall of the Silent Transfer", as well as celebrating anecdotal histories. More personal than his first volume, freighted with individual and collective return, here are the minutiae of the immediate consequences. It's an honest confrontation with Israeli violence and impunity, an unflinching description of the Palestinian Authority's compromising failures, and a plea for joy"

John Berger's Introduction to the book is here:

Come Closer  
Introduction by John Berger

This book, with its fury and tenderness, its close observation and cosmic metaphors, is wild. Reading it, you follow graphically the experience of the Palestinian people during the last sixty years, and, at the same time, you partake of some of the most ancient recourses of the human imagination when faced with collective suffering and humiliation.

It has been written by the distinguished poet Mourid Barghouti, who is also the father of an honoured poet, Tamim Barghouti. It’s a book that begs for an answer to the question: why write poetry? And, in begging, it gives its own lacerating, literal and sometimes lyrical answer.

I’ve read no other book in which poetry is so interleaved with the problems and shit (such as identity cards) of daily life, or in which a working poet—either the father or son—is felt to be so close to those for whom their poetry speaks. It comes from the heart of an endless tragedy where jokes are one of the principal means of survival. It redefines in such conditions what is “normal”.

It’s also fine to die in our beds
on a clean pillow
and among our friends.

It’s fine to die, once,
our hands crossed on our chests
empty and pale
with no scratches, no chains, no banners,
no petitions.

It’s fine to have an undusty death,
no holes in our shirts,
and no evidence in our ribs.

It’s fine to die
with a white pillow, not the pavement, under our cheeks....

What has happened and is happening to the land of Palestine and its people is unclassifiable. None of the historical terms such as colonization, annexation, invasion or elimination are precise enough. The word ‘Occupation’, which is generally used, has been given a new vast meaning and this book spells out that meaning and the extension of what it means.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the book itself is unclassifiable. It’s a book of heartrending stories, a book about poetics, a personal memoir, the history of a family, a journal of confessions, an uncompromising political tract attacking the state of Israel, the corruption of the so-called Palestinian Authority, and the self-serving dictatorships of the surrounding Arab countries. It is also a book of love—love for all those who, although powerless, somehow continue to live with dignity. With courage, too. Yet dignity offers not only an example, but also a shelter. These pages demonstrate how it does so.

The reader is brought face to face (like people come close together in a very small shelter) with what is happening in Palestine today (every day), which is inseparable from what happened yesterday and what people fear will happen tomorrow. The media never refer to what you discover here. Place names such as Jenin, al-Khalil, Rafah, Hebron and Qalandya become dense with experience.

This, however, is only part of what the book offers. There is something else. Mourid Barghouti’s form of narrative insists that lived moments when they are momentous contain something that can be considered eternal, and that such moments, however brief and trivial they may appear to a third eye, join together and form a necklace called a lifetime. Living as we do in a consumerist culture, which recognizes only the latest and the instantaneous, we badly need this reminder. Thank you, Mourid.

"The point is not to surrender"- the poetry of Nazim Hikmet

My first encounter with the poetry of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet was in John Berger's book of essays Hold Everything Dear. One of the essays in Berger's book is a dedication to Hikmet and his poetry.

Hikmet (1902-1963) was a Turkish communist, poet, poet, playwright, novelist and political activist who spent most of his adult life in prison or exile for his political beliefs. His poetry is characterized by a wonderful generosity of spirit and a powerful sense of human solidarity. You can read more about Hikmet on this website.

Hiroshima Child
By Nazin Hikmet

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead

I'm only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play

yON LIVING

I

Living is no laughing matter :

you must live with great seriousness

like a squirrel, for example -

I mean without looking for something beyond and above

I mean living must be your whole occupation

III

This earth will grow cold, a star among stars

and one of the smallest

a gilded mote on blue velvet-

I mean this, our great earth.

This earth will grow cold one day.

not like a block of ice

or a dead cloud even

but like an empty walnut it will roll along

in pitch-black space.

You must grieve for this right now

-you have to feel this sorrow now-

for the world must be loved this much

if you're going to say "I lived"......

by Nazim Hikmet

John Berger: a writer of beauty, grace and power

"Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma. The G8's dogma is that the making of profit has to be mankind's guiding principle before which everything else from the traditional past or aspiring future must be sacrificed as illusion"
John Berger (from an article in The Guardian)

There are few better writers than John Berger. He writes beautifully and with such economy of words. I am re-reading his 2007 book of essays Hold Everything Dear; Dispatches on Survival and Resistance and his 2009 piece A Place Weeping in which he writes about the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The latter is a powerful and moving piece of writing.

I wrote an earlier piece on Berger's article (here) and other pieces on my love of Darwish's poetry.

John Berger on Gaza and Mahmoud Darwish

In a piece titled A Place Weeping, John Berger (one of the most beautiful writers I know) writes of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish* and the suffering in Gaza during the 2009 Israeli invasion. Berger writes movingly of visiting Darwish's grave and tells us that Darwish (who died in 2008) wanted to be buried in Galilee where he was born, and where his mother still lives. The Israelis forbade it.

Writing of the Israeli siege of 2008-9 Berger writes:

" The massacre will soon be followed be pestilence: most lodgings have neither water nor electricity, the hospitals lack doctors, medicines and generators. The massacre follows a blockade and siege.

More and more voices across the world are raised in protest. But the governments of the rich with their world media and their proud possession of nuclear weapons, reassure Israel that a blind eye will be cast on what its defence forces are perpetrating"

The blind eye continues to be cast by the Western powers. Of that there is no better example than the sustained demolition of the Goldstone Report (here) by Israel and its American and western allies (In two previous posts about the Report here and here I pondered what the response of the Israel and US would be to the Report).

The Goldstone report (by South African jurist Richard Goldstone) showed that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes in the lead-up to and during Israel’s invasion of Gaza IN 2008-9. The Report found that Israel deliberately attacked civilian targets, and did not take sufficient action to minimize civilian loss of life. The report condemned Hamas for its rocket attacks into Israel, which the report said were designed to create terror.

The US Congress voted to condemn the Report and prevent it being considered by the UN and many European countries condemned the report as biased.

As Berger writes, Darwish may no longer be with us, but his words are still audible.

Lebanon, Chris Anderson, August 2006

The Girl / The Scream

Mahmoud Darwish

There is a girl on a sea shore
And the girl has a family
And the family has a house
And the house has two windows and a door.
And at sea there's a warship playing a game
of targeting those taking a stroll on the shore.
Four five seven drop to the sand.
The girl is spared by a sleeve of mist
a certain celestial sleeve came to rescue her.
She calls out: Dad, my Dad, let's go home, this sea is not for us.
And the father does not reply.
He lies there in an agony of absence, wrapped in his shadow in an agony of absence.
Blood in her palms blood in the clouds,
Her scream flies away with her far from the sea shore and higher.
She screams in the night of a wilderness
The echo has no echo
And the girl becomes the eternal scream of a breaking news event made obsolete by the planes return
to bomb a house with two windows and a door.

Translation: Tania Nasir and John Berger

*Mahmoud Darwish is regarded as the greatest living Palestinian poet. He is the author of more than thirty books of poems, and the founder and editor of the literary journal al-Karmel. Darwish died . His website is here.

Friday's Random thoughts*:

"The rhetoric of today's political leaders serves neither construction nor conservation. Its aim is to dismantle. Dismantle what has been inherited from the past, socially, economically and ethically, and in particular, all the associations, regulations and mechanisms expressing solidarity......................... Consequently the process of dismantling has to be disguised and hidden. And today this is the political leader's first task. Their own role of course is also being dismantled. But they have already chosen to exercise enjoy and exploit their albeit diminished powers, rather than confront any global truth. It is this which explains their pragmatism combined with their staggering lack of realism. As also their unprecedented shiftiness as politicians.

Their task is to prevaricate whilst the broker's deal is arranged elsewhere.

Return now to the typical address of political leaders in the times we're living. Whenever they face contestation they have to hide what is happening by erecting a wall of opaque words... A verbal wall to hide what is happening"

John Berger, 2006

John Berger is a renowned artist, novelist, painter, essayist, filmmaker and critic.

* Friday's random thoughts is a weekly attempt to use the words and thoughts of others to illuminate aspects of contemporary life here in Australia and Western Australia.