Mourid Barghouti Quotes

The stranger is the person who renews his residence permit...He is the one whose relationship with places is distorted, he gets attached to them and repulsed by them at the same time. He is the one who cannot tell his story in a continuous narrative and lives hours in every single moment...He loves the ringing of the phone, yet fears it...He lives essentially in that hidden silent spot with himself

A tiresome friendship is a voluntary stupidity.

I also do not find it easy to fit in with any grouping. I was never convinced enough to join any Political party and I have never joined any faction of the PLO. Perhaps, for someone who has lost his country, that is a vice rather than a virtue.

In my despair I remember
that there is life after death;
there is life after death
and I have no problem.
But I ask:
Oh my God,
is there life before death?

Occupation prevents you from managing your affairs in your own way. It interferes in every aspect of life and death; it interferes with longing and anger and desire and walking in the street. It interferes with going anywhere and coming back, with going to market, the emergency hospital, the beach, the bedroom, or a distant capital.

The fish,
Even in the fisherman's net,
Still carries,
The smell of the sea.

It is over. The long Occupation that created Israeli generations born in Israel and not knowing another 'homeland' created at the same time generations of Palestinians strange to Palestine; born in exile and knowing nothing of the homeland except stories and news. Generations who posses an intimate knowledge of the streets of faraway exiles, but not of their own country. Generations that never planted or built or made their small human mistakes in their own country. Generations that never saw our grandmothers quarter in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his headdress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took of their clothes and bathed, naked, in the pool of 'Ein al-Deir.

The Occupation has created generations without a place whose colours, smell, and sounds they can remember; a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles. There is no childhood bed for them to remember, a bed on which they forgot a soft cloth doll, or whose white pillows - once the adults had gone out of an evening were their weapons in a battle that had them shirking with delight. This is it. The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved; distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror.

The long Occupation has succe

Why does everyone in the world think that his particular situation is 'different'? Does a man want to be different even in loss? is it an egoism that we cannot shake free of?

I found myself retreating to there; to that hidden place inside each one of us, the place of silence and introspection. A dark private space in which I take refuge when the outside world becomes absurd or incomprehensible.

When you hear on the radio and read in newspapers and magazines and books and speeches the words 'the Occupied Territories' year after year, and festival after festival, and summit conference after summit conference, you think it's somewhere at the end of the earth. You think there is absolutely no way you can get to it. Do you see how close it is? How touchable? How real? I can hold it in my hand, like a handkerchief.
Now here I am looking at it.

Who would dare make it into an abstraction now that it has declared its physical self to the senses?

Palestine at this moment is not the golden map hanging on a golden chain adorning the throats of women exile. I used to wonder - everything I saw that map encircling their - if Canadian women, or Norwegians, or Chinese carried their maps around their necks as our women do.

He had the most beautiful smile despite his gold teeth, because his smile was formed essentially in his eyes.

In the disaster of 1948 the refugees found shelter in neighboringcountries as a 'temporary'measure.They left their food cooking onstoves,thinking to return in a few hours.They scattered in tents andcamps of zinc and tin'temporarily.'The commandos took arms andfought from Amman 'temporarily,'then from Beirut'temporarily,'then they moved to Tunis and Damascus'temporarily.'We drew up interim programs for liberation 'temporarily' and they told us they had accepted the Oslo Agreements 'temporarily,'and so on, and soon. Each one said to himself and to others 'until things become clearer.

As the days passed I began to understand. You do not rejoice immediately when life presses a button that turns the wheel of events in your favor. You do not arrive unchanged at the moment of joy dreamt of for so long across the years. The years are on your shoulders. They do their slow work without ringing any bells for you.

I tried to put the displacement between parenthesis, to put a last period in a long sentence of the sadness of history, personal and public 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, to attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now.

Is it not odd that when we arrive at a new place living its new moment we start to look for our old things in it? Is there something new for strangers? Or do they go around the world looking for stains of the past?

Behind me the world, ahead of me my world.

The Occupied Territories; you think there is absolutely no way you can get to it. Do you see how close it is? How touchable? How real?

When the eye sees it, it has all the clarify of earth and pebbles and hills and rocks. It has its colours and its temperatures and its wild plants too.

Who would dare to make it into an abstraction now that it has declared its physical self to the senses?

It is no longer 'the beloved' in the poetry of resistance, or an item on a political party program, and it is not an argument or a metaphor. It stretches before me, as touchable as a scorpion, a bird, a well; visible as a field of chalk, as the prints of shoes.

I asked myself, what is so special about it except that we have lost it? It is a land, like any land.

We sing for it only so that we may remember the humiliation of having had it taken from us. Our song is not for some sacred thing of the past but for our current self-respect that is violated anew every day by the Occupation.

Statistics are meaningless. Discussions and speeches and proposals and condemnations and reasons and maps for negotiation and the excuses of negotiators and all we have heard and read about the settlements, all this is worth nothing.

Hungarian Proverb:

A dish of cabbages can be heated when it grows cold, but it will never taste the same.

If you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with 'secondly'.

Has he killed any of us in the wars of his state or in our continuous uprisings against his date? Can he developed an appetite for killing? Or is he performing a military duty he cannot avoid? Is there anyone who has tested his humanity? His own individual humanity? I know everything about the inhumanity of his job. He is a soldier of the occupation, and in any case his situation is different from mine, especially at this moment. Can he know this is my humanity? The humanity of Palestinians will pass under the shadow of his shining gun every day?

And now I pass from my exile to their...homeland? My homeland? The West Bank and Gaza? The Occupied Territories? The Areas? Judea and Samaria? The Autonomous Government? Israel? Palestine? Is there any other country in the world that so perplexes you with its names?