I Was Born There, I Was Born Here
Mourid Barghouti [Murīd Barghūthī], Humphrey Davies (translation), John Berger (foreword)Ranging freely back & forth in time between the 1990s & the present day, Barghouti weaves into his account of exile poignant evocations of Palestinian history & daily life – the pleasure of coffee arriving at just the right moment, the challenge of a car journey through the Occupied Territories, the meaning of home & the importance of being able to say, standing in a small village in Palestine, ‘I was born here’, rather than saying from exile, ‘I was bornthere’.
Full of life & humour in the face of a culture of death, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here is destined, like its predecessor, to become a classic.Mourid Barghouti is a Palestinian poet & writer. He has published 12 books of poetry, the last of which is
Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight). His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997. In 2000 he was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry. His autobiographical narrative Ra'ytu Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah), won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature (1997) & was translated into several languages. He lives in Cairo.