The political reasons for the separation are alluded to in I Saw Ramallah, as are the circumstances of his exile from the West Bank as well, of course, as his return thirty years later. It is by Mound Barghouti, a well-known poet who, as he says here and there in the book, is married to Radwa Ashour, the distinguished Egyptian academic and novelist the two were students of English literature together at Cairo University in the 1960s, and for a period of seventeen years during their marriage lived apart from each other, he as PLO representative in Budapest, she and their son Tamim in Cairo, where she is professor of English at Ain Shams University. "The displaced person becomes a stranger to his memories and so he tries to cling to them." His deft mind and words show how, for many Palestinians, politics have swallowed up the personal.This compact, intensely lyrical narrative of a return from protracted exile abroad to Ramallah on the West Bank in the summer of 1996 is one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we now have.
Using a poet's eye for detail and language (the book is beautifully translated), Barghouti, who now lives in Cairo, intersperses the story of his homecoming with his history of journeys across the Arab world. But this is as much a personal journey as a political one. The truth of Palestinian faults "does not absolve the enemy of his original crime." Indeed, the anger he feels at Israelis on both the left and the right helps explain why the Oslo peace process failed and why peace seems as elusive as ever. The changes he blames partly on the weakness of his own people, but mostly on the Israelis. The people living in Ramallah and its physical geography have changed in ways that make Barghouti feel as displaced at home as he does abroad.
As one might expect, his return to see his birthplace and his family is fraught with problems, as he attempts to reconnect with relatives and friends. Barghouti was in Cairo at the university when Israel won the Six-Day War and didn't return home until 1996, when the now-defunct Oslo Accords allowed him to go back. That's the message in this impressionistic memoir by a Palestinian poet returning to the West Bank after 30 years of exile.
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