Commemorating 75 Years of Nakba

This year marks seventy-five years of Palestinians’ ongoing Nakba. Since 1948, when Zionist settler colonialism dispossessed two-thirds of Palestinians of their homeland, fragmentation and dislocation have shaped analyses of Palestinian poetics. The term, “Nakba”—meaning “catastrophe” and originally coined to describe this apocalyptic event—has since come to encompass the ongoing systemic implementation of Palestinian dispossession, captivity, erasure, and death. This articulation of ‘ongoing Nakba’ exposes the function of Israel’s settler colonial regime and, fundamentally, the Palestinian experiences of it. However, perceptions and narrations of Palestine (inexorably fractured by 1948) are not only an outcome of colonial violence. This year, as we commemorate seventy-five years of Palestinian steadfastness in the struggle for liberation and determined celebration of life, I am brought back to the intimacy and vibrancy of two celebrated authors, Mourid Barghouti and Radwa Ashour. 

Prolific poet and author, Mourid Barghouti (1944-2021) and novelist and critic, Radwa Ashour (1946-2014) were married in 1970, forging an exceptional partnership that began when both were students at the University of Cairo. Mourid, who was born in Deir al-Ghassaneh, Palestine, was trapped outside of his homeland for three decades. The 1967 war with Israel—and Israel’s subsequent occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza—had rendered him an exile. Radwa, who was Egyptian, was profoundly impacted by Mourid’s dual-exile: first from Palestine and then, ten years later, from Egypt in 1977. Mourid, who publicly opposed the Egyptian government’s normalization of relations with Israel, was banished and not permitted to return to Egypt for seventeen years. Radwa lived with and through her partner’s precarious status of national homelessness, moving back-and-forth between Egypt and his temporary residences, primarily in Budapest, with their son, Tamim. As we move through yet another Nakba commemoration without Radwa and Mourid, this essay mourns their passing, respectively in November 2014 and February 2021. More importantly, it celebrates their lives and the enduring afterlives of their work. 

Mourid’s poetry and poetic prose frequently compels us to sit just a second longer with the discomfort of loss. To inspect it from every angle. To turn it upside down and inside out. To look up close at its particularities—so close as to become momentarily unfamiliar, estranged from what it was or what we thought it was so that we can see it anew. Remembering the passing of Mourid, too soon after that of Radwa, it seems unthinkable that we might see, in this loss, something new. The pain of loss that Mourid has us examine—unflinchingly although compassionately—is the shadow of love. His long form poem, Muntasaf al-layl (Midnight), is replete with these kinds of shadows, the kind that fill the small hours. Somewhere in the poem’s midpoint he intones,“We miss the dead as much as we miss the living… Nothing equals one more hour with you.”

Rereading this poem—an elegy that is not an elegy—in conversation with Mourid’s 1997 Ra’aytu Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah) and Radwa’s 1999 Atyaf (Specters), I am overcome by the presence of shadows, specters, atyaf. I don’t mean ghosts here—the haunters of desolate space—but rather apparitions, the animated memories of people, living and passed, that we carry with us. And in the spectrality that pulses back and forth between these works I find myself sitting inside what feels like a conversation between Radwa and Mourid. 

It is not surprising or exceptionally insightful that I point out the resonances between these two works. I Saw Ramallah and Specters both detail intimate and quotidian vignettes from Radwa, Mourid, and their son Tamim’s lives together and apart—before, during, and after Mourid’s exile from Egypt and across the series of displacements that shaped his life since 1967. And yet, the way I Saw Ramallah and Specters seem to converse transcends the autobiographical reflections of a married couple. Spectrality constitutes a formative and yet ephemeral space where these two narratives meet in turns, like surf upon the shore.

I Saw Ramallah chronicles Mourid’s return to Palestine after a nearly thirty-year forced absence, from 1967 to 1994. This visit—as neither a citizen nor tourist—was made possible during the Oslo period characterized by an onslaught of capitulations by the Palestinian leadership of which Mourid was openly critical. That his return was facilitated by a process he rightly feared would prove detrimental to Palestinians is one of the many incongruities of Israeli settler-colonialism and occupation laid bare by this writing. “The long Occupation” he states, “has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine.”

This critique resonates with a concern expressed by Ghassan Kanafani in the 1960s that “the relationship uniting Palestinians has become one of exile and displacement rather than revolution.”¹Kanafani, Ghassan. “Al-Muqāwimah Hiya al-Aṣl.” Al-Dirāsāt al-Siyāsiyyah al-Muǧallad al-H̱āmis, Dar Manshurat al-Rimal, 2015. However, where Ghassan Kanfani often mobilized the symbolic image to counter this estrangement, Mourid—having lived through the assassination of this man, his friend, in 1972 and the losses of subsequent decades—grew cautious of the proliferation of symbols in lieu of tangible Palestine, of material justice. He writes, in I Saw Ramallah, “I only started to believe in myself as a poet when I discovered how faded all abstracts and absolutes were.” Mourid encapsulates complex realities, emotions, and experiences with the astounding precision and concision of sensory detail. “Politics,” he writes, “is the family at breakfast. Who is there and who is absent and why. Who misses whom when the coffee is poured into the waiting cups.” Who, he asks, would dare to make Palestine into an abstraction? I Saw Ramallah is as much about Mourid’s journey of fleeting return as it is a contemplation on the act of writing it. That is, how to write Palestine. With what he calls the “justice and genius of the language of the camera,” Mourid formulates a language and form from the particulars—that is, from a refusal to settle for an idea.