In 2000 Mourid
Barghouti published I Saw Ramallah, the acclaimed memoir that told of
returning in 1996 to his Palestinian home for the first time since exile
following the Six-Day War in 1967. I Was Born There, I Was Born Here
takes up the story in 1998 when Barghouti returned to the Occupied
Territories to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim, to his Palestinian
family. Ironically, a few years later Tamim had himself been arrested
for taking part in a demonstration against the impending Iraq War. He
was held in the very same Cairo prison from which his father had been
expelled from Egypt to begin a second exile in Budapest when Tamim was
only a few months old. Ranging freely back and forth in time between the
1990s and the present day, Barghouti weaves into his account of exile
poignant evocations of Palestinian history and 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 and 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 and humour in the face of a culture of death, I
Was Born There, I Was Born Here is destined, like its predecessor, to
become a classic.
