Tag: Hussein Barghouthi

God is in the details: Among the Almond Trees – A Palestinian Memoir by Hussein Barghouthi

Nothing comes to the surface in solitude except that which is already deep within us. I suddenly became aware of many fears. In front of me was a meadow, ploughed and moonlit, reaching all the way to the wall of the Monastery. And a human being, any human being, is afraid of emptiness. I was afraid to enter the meadow that was exposed from every direction. There were some olive saplings that looked like faint shadows, like ancient monks in their dark habits…

In his mid-forties, with the bittersweet weight of a cancer diagnosis on his heart and mind, Palestinian poet, writer, and philosopher Hussein Barghouthi made the decision to return to the village near Ramallah where he was born after what he describes as thirty years of self-imposed exile. If “bittersweet” seems an unlikely adjective for such a serious circumstance, it is appropriate only because Barghouthi was initially led to believe his symptoms might be indicative of AIDS—a condition he feared he would have most certainly passed on to his wife and young son. So when news that he was, in fact, dealing with cancer came, he greeted it with joy. At least at first. But as someone who had, by his own admission, “perfected ‘beginnings,’” his journey home would be an “imperfect ending.” Among the Almond Trees, his meditation on life, death and rebirth, captures his thoughts and experiences as this ending nears.

Barghouthi’s only other work currently available in English translation is The Blue Light, a weird and wild account of his years as a graduate student in Seattle in the late 80s and early 90s, interspersed with recollections from his childhood and earlier adult years. But with the off-beat urban terrain he frequents, the eccentric, marginalized characters he befriends, and the exploration of mysticism and madness that he pursues, it can best be described, as I noted in my review, as a memoir with hallucinations.  By contrast, Among the Almond Trees, composed around the same time, has a much more contemplative, grounded tone. This is still a work with strong spiritual, mystical and philosophical elements, but here he is focused on memory, family mythology, and the longing to understand himself within the cycles of life and death. All of this is deeply rooted in the land.

Having intentionally kept himself apart from the village of his birth for so many years, Braghouthi’s return inspires him to embrace his ancestral connection this location, with its mountains, valleys and trees. He is seeking to reinforce a spiritual connection to his family history, a line which reaches into the past and will extend into the future. Central to this exploration is Qaddura, an uncle of his family’s, who had adopted his mother when she was orphaned. Qaddura is a near mythical character, an imposing figure, known to have been a robber, who lived, it was said, with his brother in an abandoned Byzantine monastery on the mountain above the village. The stories of Qaddura and Snuffie, the woman who was married to both brothers in succession, run through this meditation, and the Monastery itself, as an actual ruin and as an inner mystical space, is an important image. The other key figure is the almond tree, notably the orchard outside his mother’s house.

This is, then, a lyrical monologue steeped in memory and emotion (including the occasional exclamation mark), woven with the history and folktales of his family and his people, insights drawn from Sufism, Buddhism, Egyptian mysticism and Western literature, and threaded with lines of poetry and song—especially that of Mahmoud Darwish and the Lebanese singer Feiruz. Much of the “action,” such as it is, takes place on moonlit nights, like the account of a nighttime pilgrimage Barghouthi makes to the Monastery during which he reflects not only on the importance of this site in his family lore, but on his childhood memories of the mountain, its promises and legends. Yet there are also the realities of the present day—the settlements ever expanding in the valley, the ongoing second intifada, and the disease spreading through his body that often keeps his moonlit wanderings closer to home:

As for why I am now recalling these tales of the Mountain while walking, as always, among the moonlit almond orchards around our house, barely breathing and facing the spectre of death because of a new swelling in my lungs—that is another matter. Perhaps with these tales I can breathe the air of other places and other times in order to sense another moonlit space inside my being and return to whatever inner monastery there was in my spirit that would grant me the strength of beginnings so as to face the cruelty of endings. For imagination is power.

Subtitled A Palestinian Memoir, Among the Almond Trees is, of course, more than one man’s search to come to terms with his “beginnings” to prepare for what is coming, it is the story of a husband and father thinking beyond his death, no matter how painful the idea may be. As someone with a longstanding interest in Buddhism and Sufism and ideas of reincarnation, Barghouthi looks to his young son Áthar, as a guide, so that he may “return to the dormant child” within, “so as to walk the earth as a child-prophet, if not in this life then in the next one.” He marvels at the enchanted eyes through which a child sees the world, and the ability to ask, as Áthar does, magical questions even when an Israeli warplane is passing overhead. Peace is, he knows, elusive, but when he decides he wants to build a house for his wife and son to live in, below the Mountain, he has come full circle and will be leaving them in the best place he knows of. Rather, he won’t be leaving them at all, he will be resting nearby, among the almond trees

As a poetic text rich with literary and traditional allusions, Among the Almond Trees benefits from (but does not strictly require) a detailed translator’s introduction and extensive footnotes. Ibrahim Muhawi, as a Mahmoud Darwish scholar and a folklorist, is perfectly suited to bring to the reader’s attention some of the finer details of the material Barghouthi is referencing. This is a short work—the text is only about 80 pages long—but filled with so much wisdom and beauty, even with the shadow of cancer looming over it, that it welcomes and rewards rereading on its own and alongside The Blue Light.

Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir by Hussein Barghouthi is translated from the Arabic by Ibrahim Muhawi and published by Seagull Books.

The wisdom of madness: The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi

Blue is a colour with multiple manifestations and meanings in various contexts and traditions—the light of the sinful self for the Sufis, the colour of creative energy in Tibetan Buddhism, the destructive enemy of the God of Wisdom for Zoroastrian Persians. Blue is also said to be an antidote to sexual excitation and it is said to calm the nerves. That may explain some of the hold that the colour has on Hussein, the narrator of The Blue Light and a man beset by questions about his own sanity, but the roots of his attraction run much deeper:

For me, blue is the color of estrangement, the unknown, and of the childhood sky. And there is, also, blueness to all my ill wishes. When I learned to play the piano, I composed a short magical piece, played it for a while, day after day, without knowing the secret of my love for it, until one day I read a book by a Black musician who claimed that each note has a specific color to it. And each composition, too. One of Mozart’s sonatas arouses in the listener green or blue or . . . anyway, I looked around for the color of that magical note of mine and was astonished to find that it was blue.

This posthumously published novel by Palestinian poet, writer and essayist, Hussein Barghouthi (1954 – 2002) walks along that troubled path between fiction and autobiography, arriving at what might best be described as a memoir with hallucinations. It is a delirious account of a man desperate to make sense of himself and his unusual way of thinking. Or, as Mahmoud Darwish says, on the blurb on the back cover: “[a] peculiar mix of confession and contemplation, hallucination and mythology, reality and the unrevealed. A mix of personal stories and mystic leaps, of madness that claims wisdom, and wisdom that only madness can transubstantiate.”

The Blue Light is inspired by Barghouthi’s time in Seattle, Washington where he pursued graduate studies in Comparative Literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As someone who had long felt different from others, he finds himself, in this foreign land, frequenting three establishments—Grand Illusion Cinema, Last Exit Café and Blue Moon Tavern—attracted by their names and by the company of the mad, eccentric and disenfranchised characters he finds there:

Strange how a place seems like a ruse, sometimes. I found myself wandering these three joints looking for myself, not among books, I was sick of books, but among the shady and the crazy, the homosexuals and the punks, where maps are clearer, more precise, and more exciting, or where at least I, as one of them, didn’t have to talk to anyone. For a whole nine months I talked to no one. I knew no one.

Terrified of madness and hiding his fears beneath a mask of sanity, Hussein does begin to engage with some of the offbeat, often homeless, regulars and even falls, briefly and cynically, into the bizarre world of the Church of Dianetics, but his search for his real identity changes course dramatically when he meets Bari, a Turkish-American Sufi from Konya. Introduced through a mutual friend, he is dynamic and given to loud laughter, strange stories and odd mannerisms. From their first encounter, Bari’s intensity and sea deep voice, “free as a roar,” reminds Hussein of an early experience of  his near drowning that birthed a recurring dream of being chased by a giant wave from a beach in Beruit to his childhood mountains in Ramallah. Among other memories, the Sufi’s laughter woke up the sea.

But Bari is elusive. He responds indifferently to Hussein’s questions and speaks little about his past. The two men often play chess at Last Exit Café, an environment where most of the patrons are mentally ill and he is thought to be just another “space case.” Yet Hussein becomes convinced that his madness “was something more than the usual madness.” He is drawn into Bari’s world even if, or perhaps because, it seems inaccessible. The secret he thinks is one of language, reasoning that: “Words meant something entirely different for him than they did for me.” So, he dedicates himself to deciphering Bari’s meanings and falls into a strange project to create a dictionary. For example, one day Hussein is confronted by the Sufi who says: “Man, your blue bird came to me last night. Stop him.” Caught off guard, Hussein fashions a response that appears to satisfy him, but the question remains—what does blue mean to Bari? What about his odd chants and expressions?

After much reading and exploration, an endeavour tinged with as much madness as those of anyone else around him, Hussein discovers what he believes is a key, a phrase he’d heard from the Sufi before. Waiting until the right moment presents itself at the end of a chess game he exclaims: “Return the blue light naked to its house.” The arrow strikes its target. Bari demands to know what he wants. Hussein holds his own, and in response confesses that he is afraid of losing his mind. The door is opened, Bari invites him in.

Thus begins a closer relationship. One damaged soul to another, Hussein seeks answers from the enigmatic, often volatile, Turkish American through what unfolds very much like a game of riddles that forces Hussein into a closer examination of his own past and a dissection of the history of his own fear of madness. Memory, mythology and cultural heritage merge as he engages with and responds to Bari’s mystic pronouncements. His Palestinian identity and experiences living under occupation have only heightened the estrangement and alienation he cannot escape, no matter where he has lived. In Seattle, this Sufi who proudly claims to belong nowhere, may finally trigger Hussein to loosen the tangled threads of thoughts threatening the clarity of his mind. Consider an early discussion about physical bodies and the mental bodies—spirits—that can visit one over great distance, during life or after death. This reminds Hussein of the culture of the dead in Palestine where death is so readily at hand. The ghosts or mental bodies of the dead are frequent household guests:

These spirits visit me long after their bones had turned to eyeliner dust in a land where the dead dominate the living, the past governs the future. That’s the authority of memory in a region whose depth is measured not by centuries but by millennia. Memory is a dangerous thing, a laboratory of ghosts. Didn’t Ishtar, a few thousand years ago, in the epic of Gilgamesh, didn’t she threaten to “open the gates to the underworld” and let the dead share their meals with the living? We can’t live with this kind of deep memory and can’t live without memory either, so what’s the solution?

The community of outcasts and assorted spiritual personalities, Bari included, that Barghouthi brings to life in The Blue Light, a rich, sometimes wild, creation of fiction and memoir, is a brilliant backdrop against which he, through his narrator, is able to navigate a personal crisis of identity within the cultural and historical crisises of his people. In a foreign country, with a foreign language, and a sage with a vocabulary of mysterious provocations and commands, he inches toward self-understanding. Along the way, there’s a plenitude of wisdom and insight for anyone travelling alongside him.

The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi is translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah and published by Seagull Books.