I Was Born There I Was Born Here Mourid Barghouti Humphrey Davies Translation by Mourid Barghouti, Humphrey Davies (translation), John Berger (foreword) 9780802743527, 0802743528 instant download after payment.

In 1996 Barghouti went back to his Palestinian home for the 1rst time since his exile following the Six-Day War in 1967, first in Egypt & then in Hungary, & wrote a poignant & incisive account of the exile's lot in the acclaimed memoir I Saw Ramallah. In 2003 he returned to Ramallah to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim Barghouti, to his Palestinian family. Ironically, within a year Tamim himself had been arrested for taking part in a demonstration against the impending Iraq War & found himself not only in the same Cairo prison from which his father had been expelled from Egypt when Tamim was a baby, but in the very same cell.

I Was Born There, I was Born Here traces Barghouti's own life in recent years & in the past - early life in Palestine, expulsion from Cairo, exile to Budapest, marriage to one of Egypt's leading writers & critics (Radwa Ashour), the birth of his son, Tamim, & then the young man's own expulsion from Cairo.

Ranging freely back & forth in time between the 1990s and the present day, Barghouti weaves into his account of exile poignant evocations of Palestinian history & 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 & 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 & humor in the face of a culture of death, this is destined, like its predecessor, to become a classic.

Mourid Barghouti is a Palestinian poet & writer & was born in 1944 in Deir Ghassana near Ramallah. He has published over 10 books of poetry, including Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight). His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997.