Midnight

Though you sought to avoid it, it returns to strike you, because, but for the hundred aches and pains nagging at your window, like the beggars at the traffic lights, you were born for joy.

(excerpt)

About this poem

Muntasaf al-Layl — “Midnight,” or literally “half-night” in Arabic — was written between January 2002 and July 2004 and first published in Arabic by Riad El-Rayyes (Beirut, 2005). A single continuous text of over a hundred pages, it follows one man in his room at the turn of the year as visions of his private world and of Palestine under occupation come to him through the window. Radwa Ashour’s English translation appeared as Midnight and Other Poems (Arc Publications, 2008), a bilingual edition with a preface by Ruth Padel.

The poem holds bereavement and an “instinctive capacity for joy” in a single breath. Its recurring insistence that “you were born for joy” (Arabic: خلقت للبهجة) became one of Barghouti’s most quoted lines, and the poem closes with a “message of doubt” addressed to the victorious: “How much victory do you need to be victorious?”

Sources

• Midnight and Other Poems — Arc Publications (bilingual edition, translated by Radwa Ashour)
• مريد البرغوثي .. حياة بألوانها ونفس شعري طويل — Elaph (2005 review quoting the Arabic text)