I Saw Ramallah
Mourid Barghouti
A poet crosses the Allenby Bridge home after thirty years of exile — the most beloved Palestinian memoir of return.
In 1996, after the Oslo Accords made it possible, the poet Mourid Barghouti returned to Ramallah for the first time since 1967, when — away at university in Cairo — he had been barred from coming home. I Saw Ramallah is the account of that crossing: the bridge, the changed town, the village of Deir Ghassanah, the dead buried in his absence, and the discovery that return does not end exile. “The stranger can never return to what he left,” he finds; displacement continues inside the homeland.
Part memoir, part prose poem, the book won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1997 and was translated into English by Ahdaf Soueif with a foreword by Edward Said, who called it one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement. It remains the essential literary testimony of the Palestinian diaspora.
About the author
Mourid Barghouti (1944–2021) was born in Deir Ghassanah near Ramallah. One of the leading Palestinian poets of his generation, he lived most of his life in exile, teaching in Cairo and Budapest, and published numerous collections and a second memoir, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here.
Details
- Published in Arabic as Ra’aytu Ram Allah, 1997
- English translation by Ahdaf Soueif; foreword by Edward W. Said
- Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature