Mourid Barghouti (1944-2021). Poet of Palestine. Of exile. In exile for the better part of his life. Mourid, who wrote:

You could say exile was Mourid’s second home. Ramallah. Cairo. Budapest. Beirut. Amman, where he is buried.

In 1967, when Israel attacked Palestine, Mourid was a student in Cairo, and there he remained, for the first of his many displacements. His subsequent links with resistance and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) soon made him persona non grata in Egypt, and so he was exiled again, this time to Budapest, where he represented the PLO for twenty years.

Separation is a theme that runs through Mourid’s poetry and his memoirs, a condition he knew intimately. He was not allowed to visit Cairo where his Egyptian wife, the writer Radwa Ashour, lived and worked; and much later, when they were reunited in the 1990s, after seventeen years, and he was able to return to Ramallah after the Oslo Accords, she could never travel with him to Palestine because she refused to apply for a visa from Israel.

“I am not a piece of music”, wrote Mourid, “and I am not a play contemplating men’s destinies on a darkened stage. I am a father, a husband, a man with a cause, a poet, a son, and an uncle. I’m an adult and I’m supposed to provide answers and not just questions. I got used to my expulsion from Egypt and made it old news. I walked the roads of the world turning that page and trying with all my might to forget it. Life, though, taught me that you have to be free in order to choose, or be confused, or decide, or demolish, or build, or forgive, or apologise, or accept, or refuse; likewise — and here’s the rub — you have to be free in order to forget. The world didn’t let me be free so that I could forget.”

In 2009, I met Mourid in Beirut, in the home of a mutual friend, the Lebanese publisher, Hasna Mekdashi, and the conversation turned naturally to politics — in Lebanon, in Egypt, in Palestine, an evergreen wound. Mourid refused to call it the West Bank: “That can never be the name of a country,” he said. 

That evening Mourid was, in turn, bitter and passionate about Palestine, about how the craven politics of the UK and US had systematically destroyed every secular, political option in the Middle East for over sixty years, beginning in 1947 with the creation of Israel, followed by the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, right up to all their misadventures in the 20th century. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, Palestine — one long history of meddlesome and disastrous politicking, leaving a region scarred and devastated by years and years of violence. And the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, masquerading as moderates — “The moderate are the real hell,” he said, “because they provide no opposition and no alternative” — left him full of a kind of ferocious despair for that country and their life in it.

And so he retreated into his poetry, which is never bitter, but always compelling and compassionate, a sustained and philosophical reflection on loss and separation.

When he read his poems in public, Mourid’s audiences would number in the thousands. In Cairo, in Beirut, in Amman and Ramallah. He was lyrical, witty, biting, reflective, his poetry the medium through which he unknotted the tangled skein of exile. In India in 2016, at the invitation of the feminist press, Women Unlimited, he said, “To be a Palestinian means a lot of lost meanings.” Lost homeland. Lost geography. Lost history. Lost identity. But not lost hope or lost voice. When you write a poem, he said, you don’t know who will read it, but poems travel, and they will still be read and heard long after the poet is gone.

Mourid writes: