Tag: Ibrahim Muhawi

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.

Lament for a lost land: Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish

A place is not only a geographical area; it’s also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood. The tears flowed freely from my fingers as the bus passed quickly by. Upon our return, the sadness of my childhood came back. This dream standing before me, why didn’t I just wrap it around myself even once so I could say I have felt the joy that kills? The soldiers were guarding the dream, but I will enter it when they sleep.

2017-02-09-15-32-49Journal of an Ordinary Grief, the first of three major works of prose spanning the career of late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), is a work of intense, heartbreaking loss and pain. Yet this collection of autobiographical essays is more than simple memoir. He chronicles his family’s history, meditates on the meaning of homeland, and focuses on the horror visited upon Arabs in the occupied territories. He talks about being under house arrest, his confrontations with Israeli interrogators, and his time in prison. He talks of the life of the refugee and the exile. As the translator, Ibrahim Muhawi, points out in his Foreword, Darwish makes it clear that Palestine is his cause. He equates his self with his country; the pronouns he uses—I or you—can represent his own personal experience or those of his people. Here the poetic is merged with the political, and the memoir becomes a requiem for a nation, up close and immediate: “In Journal, as in all of Darwish, we are placed in the middle of an encounter between writing and history where writing gives shape to the homeland.”

He approaches the telling, as a poet, with a lyrical force that levels one powerful image after another. The opening piece, “The Moon Did Not Fall into the Well,” sets out as a dialogue, presumably between a father and son:

—What are you doing, father?

—I’m searching for my heart, which fell away that night.

—Do you think you’ll find it here?

—Where else am I going to find it? I bend to the ground and pick it up piece by piece just as the women of the fellahin pick olives in October, one olive at a time.

In the end we realize that this is the poet’s younger self interrogating his older self. The latter speaks of his family, driven into exile in 1948, only to return to find themselves exiles in their own land. Childlike curiosity meets the sorrow born of experience and loss, wisdom and despair.

Attention to the quality and shape of the sentence informs Darwish’s poetic prose. He frequently, and efficiently, employs a dramatic dialogue in a number of his essays. The title piece is largely composed of a series of “conversations”—commonly ironic in tone—that cast light on the political dynamics of racial discrimination and oppression. The impact is strikingly effective:

—Where are you from, brother?

—From Gaza.

—What did you do?

—I threw a grenade at the conqueror’s car, but I blew myself up instead.

—And . . .

—They arrested me and charged me with attempted suicide.

—You confessed, of course.

—Not exactly. I told them the attempted suicide didn’t succeed. So they liberated me out of mercy and sentenced me to life.

—But you were intending to kill, not to commit suicide?

—It seems you don’t know Gaza. Distance there is an imaginary thing.

—I don’t understand.

—It seems you don’t know Gaza. Where are you from?

—From Haifa.

—And what did you do?

—I threw a poem at the conquerors’ car, and it blew them up.

—And . . .

—They arrested me and charged me with mass murder.

And so it goes. Thus the reader/listener is brought into the heart of the political struggle. Later on in this piece, the narrator addresses his audience directly to illustrate the losses of basic freedoms he has experienced: You want to travel to Greece? You want to rent an apartment? You want to visit your mother on a feast day? Other voices enter and play devil’s advocate. There is bitterness and defiance running through the sections of this essay, but the language carries a frightening beauty: “They place you under arrest when you are committing a dream.”

The poetic spirit and sensibility with which Darwish explores the fate of Palestine, and what it means to live, as he does, as an exile in Israel, pushes this memoir closer to the heart, generating more emotional energy than a more conventional first-person narrative essay format would typically allow. As such, the reading experience becomes more intense as one moves through the essays. And, of course, this work is sadly as relevant today, as it was when it was first published in 1973—speaking not only to the roots of the ongoing tensions between Israel and Palestine, but to broader concerns facing Arab refugees forced out of divided and troubled homelands throughout the Middle East, and of those who dare to speak out who risk detention, or worse, in many states:

You write to your imaginary lover: “I wish you despair for you, my love, that you may excel for the desperate are creative. Don’t wait for me. Don’t wait for anyone. Wait for the thought; don’t wait for the thinker. Wait for the poem; don’t wait for the poet. Wait for the revolution; don’t wait for the revolutionary. The thinker may be wrong, the poet may lie, and the revolutionary may get tired. This is the despair I mean.”

By making individual experience universal, and personifying historical tragedy and loss, Mahmoud Darwish—though his poetry and his prose—stands witness to the fate of his people under occupation. “The homeland,” he claims, “is always at its most beautiful when it is on the other side of the barbed wire fence.” He grieves, and his grief is anything but ordinary.

Journal of an Ordinary Grief, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, is published by Archipelago Books.