Memoir: This book is a record of displacement and dispossession. It is a kind of disjointed spiritual diary recording the experiences of a member of the Palestinian Diaspora Mourid Barghouti.
When I read it, the title of another book by an Arab, a young Moroccan writer and friend of Jean Genet, the French playwright and novelist, came to my mind. It was called A Life Full of Holes.
This is exactly what the record of Mourid Barghouti establishes. His life too is full of holes, absences, lacunae; he grieves for a fig tree remembered from childhood in an aunt's garden in Deir Ghassanah, cut down in his absence because without the men of the house it is impossible for her to gather up and use the fruit. Brothers, sisters, parents are spread out over the Arab world, Europe and the US and maintain contact by telephone, seeing each other only sporadically.
We meet him first on the Allenby Bridge in a scene reminiscent of the famous opening paragraph of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, "I have a camera . . .". We get only occasionally a sense of location like this. Much of the book is expended in abstract philosophising and a sometimes self-consciously literary reverie although the introduction, from time to time, of some of Barghouti's own poems demonstrate, even in translation, the powerfully direct appeal of his deceptively simple themes.
The Irish reader will find much that is sympathetic in this book and not just the fact that it is a story of the Palestinian underdog. Abd al-Wahhab, regarded as the village idiot, but something of a dab hand at love poetry, reminds one of the Kavanagh of The Green Fool, and the nickname of two inseparable friends - "Kleenex" (because if you pulled out one tissue the other appeared immediately) - is reminiscent of that wonderful recent RTÉ programme about the characters of Mountmellick as recorded by the local school master/archivist.
The author presents himself almost as a dispassionate observer at times, maintaining that, like my namesake Mr Norris in Isherwood's novel, his judgements - political, moral and social - are essentially "aesthetic". He claims that he has maintained an independence from the various Palestinian factions and parties. This is slightly disingenuous because, in his introduction, Edward Said refers to the fact that for 17 years Barghouti was the PLO representative in Budapest. It may be, of course, that he takes seriously Shelley's notion about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.
He is certainly good at political parables, such as the story of a thief who stole a car but returned it to its owners the next day leaving inside a polite note of apology and two theatre tickets. The following night, while the lucky recipients were at the theatre, he broke into their house and cleaned it out. The charitable thief, the iron fist inside the glove in this story represents the Labour party of Shimon Perez.
Sometimes there is a lyrical starkness about the writing, as when he describes two young men known to him: "He threw a stone, they shot a bullet and left to the screams of the village. Neither Lu'ay nor 'Adli' reached eighteen".
He can at times be very realistic and imaginative, comprehending the tragedy of the Jews as represented by Sachsenhausen and Dachau and in acknowledging the fact that his deportation from Israel was caused not by Mossad but by treachery amongst his own. He also reflects resentment at the ostentatious homes of some of the senior PLO officials in Gaza.
Perhaps the most powerful writing comes towards the end, with the description of the mysterious death of his elder brother in Paris and its tragic impact upon his family. This penultimate chapter ends in a powerful piece of rhetoric about the usurpation, not just of the land but of the life experiences - and even death - of the Palestinians by the new Israeli state.
The effect is, in my opinion, a little spoiled by an unnecessary short coda which defuses the impact. At the end there is a glossary in which I was glad to see confirmation of my judgment that the wonderful velvet voiced nightingale of Beirut Fayruz is "the greatest living Arab woman singer".
This small book gives us some additional insights into the Arab experience and mentality, but we will look in vain in it for answers to the complex problems of Israel/Palestine.
Senator David Norris is an Independent Senator representing the graduates of Dublin University (Trinity College). He is a long-standing member of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs
David Norris
Memoir