2009 books

31) Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 1996
In 1966 Mourid Barghouti, then a student, left his home in Palestine to return to university in Cairo. Then came the Six Day War, and like many Palestinians abroad he was then denied entry into Palestine while it became the Occupied Territories under Israel. Thirty years later he was finally allowed back, but in those intervening years he had made a name for himself as a poet of some renown. There is a major element of sadness running through this autobiography, tempered with occasional flashes of a typically Arabic, sardonic humour that prevents his readers from sensing any deeper feelings of despair. He's often guarded about the decades of problems he's had while being an officially stateless person, the details of which he never bores us with, preferring pragmatism to put across a sense of life going on regardless, but behind everything there is always this sense of displacement which he conveys with great subtlety. As one might expect Barghouti is endlessly quotable, by which I mean not just the odd sentence here and there, but whole paragraphs. Even though it's a little over a decade old this memoir already has 'timeless' written all over it.