( Middle East Monitor ) – For Palestinians, exile is not simply the physical act of being removed from their homeland and their inability to return. It is not a casual topic pertaining to politics and international law, either. Nor is it an ethereal notion, a sentiment, a poetic verse. It is all of this combined.
The death in Amman of Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, an intellectual whose work has been linked intrinsically to exile, brought back to the surface many existential questions: are Palestinians destined to be exiled forever? Can there be a remedy for this perpetual torment? Is justice a tangible, achievable goal?
Barghouti was
In his memoir, translated into English in 2000 by acclaimed Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif, he wrote: “I tried to put the displacement between parentheses, to put a last period in a long sentence of the sadness of history… But I see nothing except commas. I want to sew the times together. I want to attach one moment to another, to attach childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all the presents to all absences, attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now.”
Those familiar with the rich and complex Palestinian literature of exile can relate Barghouti’s reference — what one imagines versus what one sees — to the writing of other intellectuals who have suffered the pain of exile as well. Ghassan Kanafani and Majed Abu Sharar, along with numerous others, wrote about that same conflict. Their death — or, rather, assassination — in exile brought their philosophical journeys to an abrupt end.
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In Mahmoud Darwish’s seminal poem, “Who Am I, Without Exile”, the late Palestinian poet asked, knowing that there can never be a compelling answer, “What will we do without exile?”
It is as if Ghurba has been so integral to the collective character of a nation, that it is now a permanent tattoo on the heart and soul of Palestinians everywhere. “A stranger on the riverbank, like the river… water binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing makes me enter the gospels. Not a thing…,” wrote Darwish.
The impossibility of becoming a whole again in the verses of Darwish and Barghouti were reverberations of Kanafani’s own depiction of a Palestine that was as agonisingly near as it was far.
“What is a homeland?” Kanafani asks in Returning to Haifa. “Is it these two chairs that remained in this room for twenty years? The table? Peacock feathers? The picture of Jerusalem on the wall? The copper-lock? The oak tree? The balcony? What is a homeland? … I’m only asking.”
But there can be no answers, because when exile exceeds a certain rational point of waiting for some kind of justice that would facilitate one’s return, it can no longer be articulated, relayed or even fully comprehended. It is the metaphorical precipice between life and death; “life” as in the burning desire to be reunited with one’s previous self; and “death” as in knowing that without a homeland one is a perpetual outcast, physically, politically, legally, intellectually and every other form.
“In my despair I remember; that there is life after death… But I ask: Oh my God, is there life before death?”
While the crushing weight of exile is not unique to Palestinians, the Palestinian exile is itself unique. Throughout the entire episode of Palestinian Ghurba, from the early days of the Nakba — the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 — till today, the world remains divided between inaction, obliviousness and refusal to even acknowledge the injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people.
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Despite or, perhaps, because of his decades-long exile, Barghouti did not engage in ineffectual discussions about the rightful owners of Palestine “because we did not lose Palestine to a debate, we lost it to force.”
He wrote in his memoir: “When we were Palestine, we were not afraid of the Jews. We did not hate them, we did not make an enemy of them. Europe of the Middle Ages hated them, but not us. Ferdinand and Isabella hated them, but not us. Hitler hated them, but not us. But when they took our entire space and exiled us from it they put both us and themselves outside the law of equality.”
In fact, “hate” rarely factors in the work of Mourid Barghouti — or Darwish, Kanafani, Abu Sharar and many others, for that matter — because the pain of exile, so powerful, so omnipresent, required one to re-evaluate the relationship to the homeland through emotional rapport that can only be sustained through positive energy, of love, of deep sadness, of longing.
“Palestine is something worthy of a man bearing arms for, dying for,” wrote Kanafani. “For us, for you and me, it’s only a search for something buried beneath the dust of memories. And look what we found beneath that dust. Yet more dust. We were mistaken when we thought the homeland was only the past.”
Millions of Palestinians continue to live in exile, generation after generation, painstakingly negotiating their individual and collective identities, neither able to return, nor feeling truly whole. These millions deserve to exercise their legitimate Right of Return, to have their voices heard and to be included.
But even when Palestinians are able to end their physical exile, the chances are that for generations they will remain attached to it. “I don’t know what I want. Exile is so strong within me, I may bring it to the land,” wrote Darwish.
In Barghouti too, exile was “so strong”. Despite the fact that he fought to end it, it became him. It became us.
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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:
Mahmoud Darwish reads “Tibaq / Antithesis” – Homage to Edward Said
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