I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

In 1996 Barghouti went back to his Palestinian home for the 1rst time since his exile following the Six-Day War in 1967, first in Egypt & then in Hungary, & wrote a poignant & incisive account of the exile's lot in the acclaimed memoir I Saw Ramallah. In 2003 he returned to Ramallah to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim Barghouti, to his Palestinian family. Ironically, within a year Tamim himself had been arrested for taking part in a demonstration against the impending Iraq War & found himself not only in the same Cairo prison from which his father had been expelled from Egypt when Tamim was a baby, but in the very same cell.

I Was Born There, I was Born Here traces Barghouti's own life in recent years & in the past - early life in Palestine, expulsion from Cairo, exile to Budapest, marriage to one of Egypt's leading writers & critics (Radwa Ashour), the birth of his son, Tamim, & then the young man's own expulsion from Cairo.

Ranging freely back & forth in time between the 1990s and the present day, Barghouti weaves into his account of exile poignant evocations of Palestinian history & daily life – the pleasure of coffee arriving at just the right moment, the challenge of a car journey through the Occupied Territories, the meaning of home & the importance of being able to say, standing in a small village in Palestine, ‘I was born here’, rather than saying from exile, ‘I was born there’.

Full of life & humor in the face of a culture of death, this is destined, like its predecessor, to become a classic.

Mourid Barghouti is a Palestinian poet & writer & was born in 1944 in Deir Ghassana near Ramallah. He has published over 10 books of poetry, including Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight). His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997.