TEHRAN-The second edition of the Persian translation of the autobiographical book “I Saw Ramallah” written by the Palestinian writer and poet Mourid Barghouti has been released in the bookstores across Iran.

Hajar Zamani has translated the book that has been brought out by the Ketabestan Marefat publication in 220 pages, Mehr reported.

Winner of the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Medal, this fierce and moving work is an unparalleled rendering of the human aspects of the Palestinian predicament.

In 1966 Mourid Barghouti went to Cairo, Egypt, for higher studies. In 1967, after the Six-Day War, when he came back to Palestine after completing his studies, he was barred to enter the country. Like many others he started living abroad. Thirty years later, after continuous struggle, he was allowed to enter Ramallah, his own hometown, where he was born and had grown up.

Barghouti spent 30 years in exile—shuttling among the world’s cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest.

As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over the Jordan River into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the city of his youth. Sifting through memories of the old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters in this mere “idea of Palestine,” he discovers what it means to be deprived not only of a homeland but of “the habitual place and status of a person.”

“I Saw Ramallah” is about home and homelessness. The harrowing experience of a Palestinian, denied the most elementary human rights in his occupied country and in exile alike, is transformed into a humanist work. Palestine has been appropriated, dispossessed, renamed, changed beyond recognition by the usurpers, yet from the heap of broken images and shattered homes, Barghouti repossesses his homeland.

A tour de force of memory and reflection, lamentation and resilience, “I Saw Ramallah” is a deeply humane book, essential to any balanced understanding of today’s West Asia.

Mourid Barghouti (1944-2021) was a Palestinian poet and writer. He published 12 books of poetry. His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997. In 2000, he was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry. He wrote articles of literary criticism on poetry and prose and delivered lectures on Arabic literature at several Arab and international universities.

SS/