Mourid Barghouti

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Mourid Barghouti (Arabic: مريد برغوتي‎) (born August 7, 1944, in Deir Ghassana on the West Bank) is a Palestinian poet and writer.

Barghouti grew up in Ramallah, as one of four brothers. In the mid-1960's, Barghouti went to study at Cairo University in Cairo, Egypt. He was just finishing his last year in college when the Six-Day War of 1967 started. By the end of the war, Israel had captured Gaza and the West Bank, and Barghouti, like many Palestinians living abroad, was prevented from returning to his home on the West Bank.

After the war Barghouti first went to work as a teacher at the Industrial College in Kuwait. At the same time, the author began to pursue his interest in literature and poetry, and his writings were soon published in the journals al-Adab, Mawaqif and al-Khatib. In 1970, he became acquainted with the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, who at that time was also working in Kuwait.

Later that year, Barghouti married the Egyptian writer and academic Radwa Ashour. The two had met years earlier, when they were both students of the English Department at Cairo University. They have one child, a son, Tamim, born in 1977 in Egypt.

The couple left Kuwait for Egypt less than a year after marrying. In 1972, Barghouti published his first book of poetry, with the help of the publisher Dar al-Awdeh in Beirut, Lebanon.

In the autumn of 1977, Barghouti was deported from Egypt on the eve of Anwar Sadat's historic visit to Israel. The accusations which led to his deportation later turned out to be fabrications. Barghouti and his wife spent most of the next 17 years apart; she lived in Cairo as a professor of English at Ain Shams University, and he lived in Budapest as a PLO representative.

At the Beirut Arab University in Lebanon in 1980, one of the many poetry festival that Barghouti attended, the author read Hanzala, Naji al-Alis children. It was later printed by the newspaper al-Safir, and was surrounded by Naji al-Ali's drawings.

The Oslo Accords finally allowed Barghouti to return to West Bank, and in 1996 he came back to Ramallah after 30 years.

The book he wrote about this experience and exile, Ra'aytu Ram Allah (I Saw Ramallah) was published in 1997 and won the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for that year. Important Palestinian cultural personalities like Ghassan Kanafani and Naji al-Ali also appear in the book, which has been translated into several languages, including English.

[edit] Bibliography

Barghouti, Mourid (foreword By Edward Said, translated by Ahdaf Soueif): I Saw Ramallah Amer. Univ. in Cairo Pr., 2001, Dulles, Virginia, U.S.A. ISBN 977-424-499-0