I Saw Ramallah

In 1966, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, then twenty-two, left his country to return to university in Cairo. A year later came the Six Day War and Barghouti, like many Palestinians living abroad, was denied entry into his homeland. Thirty years later, he was finally allowed to visit Ramallah, the city he had grown up in. A rickety wooden bridge over a dried-up river connects the West Bank to Jordan. It is the very same bridge Barghouti had crossed little knowing that he would not be able to return. I Saw Ramallah, his extraordinarily beautiful account of homecoming, begins at this crossing, filled with its ironies and heartaches. In half bemusement, half joy, Barghouti journeys through Ramallah, keenly aware that the city he had left barely resembles the present-day city scarred by the Occupation - and he discovers in this displacement, that the events of 1967 have made him permanently homeless.

A fierce and moving memoir on returning to Palestine, the meaning of exile and homeland, and the habitual place and status of a person, from the late Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti.

Barred from his homeland after 1967’s Six-Day War, Barghouti spent thirty years in exile: shuttling between the world’s cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest.

As he returns to Ramallah for the first time since the Israeli occupation, crossing a wooden bridge over the Jordan River, Barghouti is unable to recognise the city of his youth. He discovers how the joy of return and reunion is accompanied by a feeling of insurmountable loss.

A tour de force of memory, reflection and resilience, I Saw Ramallah is deeply humane and is essential to any balanced understanding of today’s Middle East.

‘Spare and precise.’ Isabella Hammad

‘Extraordinary and humbling.’ Catherine Taylor, Irish Times 

‘A brilliant, beautiful book.’ Kamila Shamsie 

‘Intensely lyrical. Much of this beautifully written and evocative book is a lamentation on the conditions of exile.’ Guardian 

‘Barghouti manages to be temperate, fair-minded, resilient and uniquely sad. This is an impressive addition to the literature of exile.’ Tom Paulin, Independent 

‘Moving and thoughtful … compelling Barghouti s description of his return to Ramallah is impassioned.’ Metro 

‘As powerful, moving and vital as it was twenty years ago.’ Andrew McMillan 

‘Controlled, reflective, factual, unemotional, eloquent … superbly and sensitively translated.’ Times Literary Supplement 

‘A beautiful, vital book.’ Ella Risbridger