FEBRUARY 2004

by Mourid Barghouti (Palestine) - AUTODAFE n°3 - Printemps 2003

“Palestinians are like cancer. There are all sorts of solution to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy.”
Moshe Y’alon, Israeli chief-of-staff


“Eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories.”
Eitan Ben Eliahu, Israeli Air Force commander


“For every victim of ours there must be 1000 Palestinians.”
Michael Kleiner, Israeli Herut Party chairman


“I believe in liquidationists.” (Assassination brigades targeting Palestinian activists)
General Meir Dagan, head of Mossad

“No negotiations.”
George W. Bush, president of the USA

What can a poet do to face such a language as It flies high with the assistance of US-provided Israeli F16s and Apache gun ships and sinks deep to the lowest point of crime? Being the Palestinian against whom this language is directed, and the poet I happen to be, it becomes imaginable how much grueling and intricate it is to become the poet I dream of. For whoever fights monsters, as Nietzsche put it, should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster, “when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you”. I am eager to harp my poem into the ears of the world whereas tragic and hard-hitting history and geography are vociferously drumming the scene around my shoulders. Surrounded by daily humiliation and daily death, I dream of writing a poem about life. Attacked by the apartheid diabolic hate-language of Israeli generals, a language that is reinforced by the anti-Palestinian inciting choir of such empire-builders as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condolezza Rice, Wolfowitz and Perle I crave for writing a poem about love!
The only postmodernism in occupied and now mostly ruined Palestine, is the Israeli Occupation Army, and the most sophisticated state-of-the-art product is the Israeli weaponry! The prolonged Israeli occupation has brought sclerosis to our language. Our poems have been more pulverized than our streets. Yet, the majority of us are aware of the fact that we must resist military meter, simplistic imagery and khaki poems; not an easy task but we have to pursue it with painstaking attention and care. Being the victims, the exiled, the dispossessed who suffer deprivation and displacement and who live under constant threat, curfew, collective punishment, humiliation and re-re-re-occupation, we, the Palestinian poets have to struggle not only against all this existential danger and defenselessness but also against the aesthetic vulnerability of our poetry: Living under the pressure of pain and the pressure of hope, caught in the middle between the nightmare of polluted reality and the dream of writing genuine poetry, we struggle to free our poems from the pressing burden of freedom.


I am 4 years older than the State of Israel.
I was born in 1944 in the mountainous village of Deir Ghassaneh near Ramallah, on the eastern hills of Palestine. In childhood I came to see some Palestinian families and individuals whose accents were in a way different from that of the Barghouties who constitute all the inhabitants of Deir Ghassaneh and seven other neighbouring villages. It was obvious they had arrived from other places. They used to ask for shelter and food. It was then that I heard the word refugees for the first time. I was told that they were expelled out of their homes in hundreds of coastal villages destroyed by the armed Zionist brigades that declared The State of Israel in 1948.
Refugees? I used to ask my father, “Why do we call them refugees when they are Palestinians like us”? Endless answers to endless questions were created by their incomprehensible presence among us. In the same period I heard for the first time the name of Deir Yassin. I saw sleek horror and dreadfulness on the faces of people talking of a massacre perpetuated in that small village near Jerusalem, killing hundreds of Palestinian villagers. The Deir Yassin massacre was repeated on different scales in many other places and that resulted in the massive expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, dispersing them all over the neighbouring countries to create the Jewish State. Israel was declared on the western parts of Palestine lining with the Mediterranean. Two minutes later, Truman, The U.S president recognized the new state.

I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I have become one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassaneh and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967 the news bulletins began to speak of the occupation of the Israeli defence forces of the West Bank. The pollution of language is no more obvious than it is in concocting this term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the River Jordan, the west bank of the River Jordan, not to historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is a geographical location not a country, not a homeland.
The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. The occupation wanted it to be forgotten, to become extinct, to die out. The Israeli leaders, practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it The West Bank or call it Judea and Samaria the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say The Territories! Very brilliant! I am Palestinian but my homeland is The Territories! What’s happening here?
By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history. The Israeli occupation would impose a double, triple, endless re-definition of the Palestinian: Call him the militant, the outlaw, the criminal, the terrorist, the irrelevant, the cancer, the cockroach, the serpent, the virus and the list becomes endless. This cannot be done without the proper tools: materializing the myth as political reality, and dressing military strategies and war tactics in a moral and missionary wording. And it becomes very easy: Be the one who puts the definition. Define! Classify! Demonize! Disinform! Misinform! Simplify! Put the label! Then send the tanks! Kill the enemy! Who will blame you then? Aren’t you in a state of self-defense?
While the common, regular, day-to-day language is a burden to a poet, the political language is smog. It has always been the case; but what the world is witnessing now is a language that kills, a stupid language that yields clever bombs and sends young men and women to the killing fields.

Can Verbicide lead to genocide? Oversimplification was always one of the factors behind the failure of poetry and prose and, indeed, of any discourse, but when it is the dominant characteristic of the discourse of the policy-makers it ends in many forms of fanaticism and fundamentalism. Coupled with invincible superiority and a sense of sanctity, simplification might be, as history teaches us, a recipe for fascism. That’s why the rhetoric of them/we or either with us or with evil is not just an irresponsible jargon but an act of war.
The terrorist attack on New York was despicable and condemned by all the nations of the world. As a Palestinian victim of Israeli occupation, and as a poet, I immediately identified myself with the victims inside the two towers and sympathized with each soul lost that day. Now, more than one year after, I ask myself why has September 11 gone down in history without mentioning the year 2001? They say Nine Eleven and that’s it. Professional analysts can find an appropriate answer of course, but it seems to me that George W. Bush and his advisors in the current American Administration wanted this date to look ahistorical and apolitical in order to bring to a halt and eventually destroy any sense of the continuity of history, its interrelatedness and interconnectedness; thus paving the way for a sly and sneaky theory that prefers to see Nine Eleven as the beginning of history!
This wily oversimplification implies that the action and the reaction must be summed up as absolute Evil versus absolute Good. Nothing more. Nothing less. This would allow the White House to block any historical or political analysis, and to preclude and disqualify any slight linkage with any issue on this earth and to end the conception of neutrality in war, and to ignore the international law and to practically destroy the UN role, if not the UN itself, thus threatening the world order altogether. Do the American people and the people of the rest of the world have the right to think and analyze and examine this perfidious language? Yes, theoretically, they have. But this administration does not like, and will not allow, too much analysis. Through manipulating language the administration wants to bend the belief-systems of the peoples of the earth. And the administration wants to organize the results of thinking and control the future of ideas!


And what about writing and writers in our times? What can I do with my poetry and my own language here and now, in my part of the world? What happens to a poet in a cataclysmic society, where people live under semi-eternal emergency, and their life is destabilized and exposed to daily horror and endless suffering? For decades, Palestine has been pushed to the edge of history, the edge of hope and the edge of despair, present and absent, reachable and unreachable, fearful and afraid and ragged into zones A and B and C. etc. This Palestine is my identity, this Palestine is the absence of my identity; my imposed memory and my imposed oblivion, my telephone notebook that is almost half-filled with the telephone-numbers of my absent friends and neighbours and relatives whom I will not be able to call again forever, but, for reasons not clear to my heart, I won’t remove their names and numbers from my notebook. Nature, old age, illness or traffic accidents, are not the most common causes of Palestinian death.
Death has made us his family. Death has earned a residence permit among us. It haunts us day and night and looks into our faces wherever we go. Death lives normally among us in a country that requires everyone of its citizens, the old man’s cane, the old woman’s shawl and the baby’s milk-bottle to remember everything all the time and to forget every thing all the time and, what is more cruel and inhuman, to be heroes all the time.
And miserable is a country that needs all kinds of heroism from all her citizens. This is the brink of life, or life at the brink. You want to end the occupation of your homeland. You resist. And the occupation gets more brutal. Your dream of normal life is postponed and you feel that everything is temporary. And when you learn to live in this transitory eternity you will know what it means to be a Palestinian! Prolonged occupation prevents you from managing your affairs in your own way. It interferes in every aspect of life and death; it interferes with longing and anger and desire and walking in the street. It interferes with going anywhere and coming back, with going to the market, the emergency hospital, the school, the beach, the bedroom or a distant capital.
In a cataclysmic society all priorities become hindered and mixed up, including the cultural priorities, but there must be always, even in the center of the tempest that sweeps nations in a given period of history, a group of creative men and women who are willing to explore the intriguing ability of art to preserve its qualities and of language to resist its own destruction. In one of his early articles, the distinguished American poet W.S.Merwin wrote:

"Where injustice prevails (and where does it not?) a poet … has no choice but to name the wrong as truthfully as he can, and to try to indicate the claims of justice in terms of the victims he lives among."

I share with him this view, and also his pointing to the danger facing such a poet of putting his irreplaceable singularity in jeopardy and of having his gift itself deformed into a loudspeaker. Israel took from us the land of the poem and left us with the poem of the land. But our poem’s horizon expanded far beyond this confined duality to embrace the universal, the human, as well as the intimate and personal. Most of the Palestinian writers are aware of this fact: For a fanatic it is always useful to simplify; for a poet it is categorically suicidal. The suffering of a nation should not be used as a pretext to justify the mediocre, the clichéd and the thumb-worn, in any form of artistic expression. It is not acceptable that because we are on the tragic edge of history to reduce the painting into a poster, the lyric into a military anthem, the play into preaching, the novel into straight ideology, or the poem into slogan.
I have always disagreed with that popular concept of the so-called patriotic poetry where the individual self and national self are always good and perfectly right, and where the poet and his or her country, leadership, party, faith, traditions, political affiliation, war and peace etc. are blindly cuddled and endorsed. “Writing” as I earlier put it “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 common roads of enmity. A displacement from the believing nature of the political party, from the idea of unconditional support, from your family, your community, and your leadership. The poet strives to escape from the dominant used language. He strives to escape from the chains of the collective and the tribal approvals and taboos. If he succeeds in escaping and becomes free, he becomes a stranger. It is as though the poet is a stranger in the same degree as he is free. His soul throngs with these displacements and cannot be cured by anything, even the homeland. He clings to his own way of receiving the world and his own way of transmitting it. It is unavoidable that he should be taken lightly by those who hold the ready recipes; those who live by the normal and the known; those who say he is moody, changeable and unreliable and so on through all adjectives stacked like pickles on their shelves; those who do not know anxiety, who deal with life with unseemly ease.”
Complacent poetry is a contradiction in terms. Poetry is a critical attitude to this world where strong muscles and the arrogance of force occupy our center stage, and war has become the first option in the handling of world affairs. In recent years we have witnessed mushrooming small wars and repeated military attacks in so many regions of our planet. The term peace process is in itself misleading; and is another proof of hypocritical manipulation of language and a euphemism for prolonged suffering and absent justice. A unilaterally decided justice is total injustice. And when a peace process is designed and supervised by a biased superpower to retain hegemony and dominance it will be nothing but a green light for aggression, a license to kill and an invitation to war.


Poisoned language cannot work without the key role played by poisoned media. Billions of dollars are spent to convince us of the necessity of war! Through colourful programs and vivid talk shows and predestined press conferences, the giant TV stations usher us to war, educate us into war, and urge us not only to accept it but also to applaud it! What is the role of intellectuals in all this? Aren’t those media men and women creative writers, thinkers, theorists, academics and artists who opt to be used as war butlers and servants of hell? The importance of the brave intellectual minority in each and every society cannot be underestimated. And in this khaki age that we live in they are mostly needed. In the battle for language, silence is definitely not the answer and connivance is crime.


In the time of crisis people gradually learn to accept the relative and imperfect. In a prison, or a detention camp, experience tells us, prisoners dream of such small miracles as having a bath, a haircut, a letter, a visit, or a pen; on the operation table the patient dreams of a drop of water after awakening from anesthesia; the paralyzed dreams of the slightest motion and the drowned looks for a straw. Is this the age of small dreams? As a Palestinian, with negated history and negated geography, with an occupied will and an occupied homeland, I do understand very much, why the oppressed, in general, do not soar up in the eternal gazes but they delve deep in the earth in search of the living roots, potential shrubs and trees. Didn’t Martin Luther King sum up the aspirations of successive generations of African-American poets in a simple vision of black and white kids boarding the same school bus? Didn’t he pay his life for that down-to-earth dream? Dreams become most tragic and dangerous when they are simple. Many of my poems are built up on dreaming of little things, tiny little things that might seem insignificant. There were times when the poetic imagination worked to escape reality and I claim that the poetic imagination now works to confront it.
Through poetic imagination I construct my own perception of lived experience; a new version of reality, different from the original. And may be because of its difference, it enters into a problematic converse and oppositional dialogue with the every-day reality. Language is the key word. Language is a shared element between the world of the market place and that of poetry. The dissimilar language of Poetry is our suggestion of a different language for this world. It is our attempt to restore to each word its specificity and resist the process of collective vulgarization and to establish new relations among words to create a fresh perception of things. Poetry, I believe, is stepping out of the orchestra to play solo with the single instrument of language. That is why the poetic imagination becomes an act of resistance par excellence. It is a declaration of mutiny on board of this world’s ship whose course we are never allowed to direct.
The amazing paradox is that while political powers resort to exuberance, zeal, hyperbole and the soaring language of romantic flight, poets resort to physical language, surgical precision, understatement and economy of expression. The poetical is not poetry anymore. In a sense, the poetry of today, or a significant part of it, is the poet’s repudiation of the language of the market place and the repulsive agreed-upon-deal and its version of reality. The poets keep renewing their language, contrary to all attempts of the status quo to fix its language as a means of guaranteeing its survival. Poets turn into a break with and a verdict against this collective collusion of the existing certainties and their official representatives, as much as an expression of our incapacity to revoke it. This failure might explain the sadness of poetry in this world.
In my poetry I resort to the concrete rather than the abstract, to the eye’s perception rather than to mind contemplation. The poet’s eye can see the two faces of the coin simultaneously. It sees:

The confident person’s confusion/
The nun’s desire/
The preacher’s obscenity/…
The grandeur of the trivialities/
The loser’s dignity/
The winner’s loneliness/
And that stupid coldness one feels
When a wish is granted.


One of its charming miracles is that through its form, Poetry can resist the content of authoritarian discourse. By resorting to understatement, surgical precision, concrete and physical language, a poet contends against abstraction, generalization, hyperbole, and the heroic language of hotheaded generals and bogus lovers alike. Palestinian poets often found themselves caught in the middle between two pressures: one from their audience pressing for clear and direct handling of the collective themes and preoccupations, and another from within, pressing for the singular, the personal and the genuinely private. Striking the proper balance between the two has always been the unmistakable sign of creativity and excellence.
It is natural for a poet to be preoccupied with the private and the public, but those who want him to entirely limit himself to the former will be pushing him to psychiatric clinic poetry; and those who want him to limit himself to the latter will confer to him the duties of news-correspondents.


While the specter of war is haunting the world we are witnessing now what may be called an international apartheid language; a language that labels and defines, and divides values and virtues, and segregates nations in two categories of good and evil.
For all decent human beings, lovers of life, beauty, peace, integrity, fairness and justice, truth seekers, friends of nature and artists, the twenty first century has started in a catastrophic way. The Individual terrorism and state terrorism, fundamentalism and fanaticism prevail on both sides of the divide. The language and the intentions and the deeds of terrorists and preachers of globalism, the neo-imperialists and the war-tailors alike, are endangering human life and making our planet a less safe place. However, poetry remains one of the astonishing forms in our hands to resist obscurantism and silence. And since we cannot wash the polluted words of hatred the same way we wash greasy dishes with soap and hot water, we, the poets of the world, continue to write our poems to restore the respect of meaning and to give meaning to our existence. Aware of the fact that we will always be a minority, and that success is not at all guaranteed, we cannot connive with those who do not blink when they preach a war that might take away millions of innocent lives for the sake of their self-tailored ultimate justice.

November 2002

,..................Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti was born 1944 in Deir Ghassaneh near Ramallah, he has published 12 books of poetry. His collected works were published in one volume (1997) He read his poetry in most of the Arab countries and in many European capitals. He was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry (2000). And the “Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for his autobiographical narrative I Saw Ramallah, published in English by the AUC Press, with an introduction by Edward Said, (1997) and translated to several languages; its paper back edition will be published by Random House, Anchor Books, New York, May (2003)