Exiled from Egypt in 1977 for political reasons, prevented from returning to the West Bank for thirty years, Mourid Barghouti finally crossed the bridge from Jordan to Ramallah in 1996 and wrote Ra'aytu Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah, 1997). The memoir, translated by Ahdaf Soueif and introduced by Edward Said, is one of the central documents of Palestinian return literature.
Recurring themes
the Palestinian return
the lyric memoir
exile in Cairo
the long sentence of displacement
Selected works
- 1972The Flood and the Reformulation
- 1980Poems of the Pavement
- 1997I Saw Ramallah
- 2009I Was Born There, I Was Born Here