{"id":1426,"date":"2009-01-15T09:43:57","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T08:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mcrrview.web.its.manchester.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=273"},"modified":"2016-01-23T21:53:48","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T20:53:48","slug":"mourid-barghouti-midnight-and-other-poems-arc-publications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1426","title":{"rendered":"Mourid Barghouti, Midnight and Other Poems<\/em> (Arc Publications)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mourid Barghouti\u2019s first full length collection to be published in the UK is a wonderful book, sprawling, elegiac and elegant. The translation from the Arabic by Barghouti\u2019s wife, Radwa Ashour, is mellifluous and adept, full of lovely felicities in the English, which make the poems come alive in the language they were not written in.<\/p>\n

Barghouti, a Palestinian, the author of a memoir I Saw Ramallah,<\/em> which has drawn praise from Edward Said and John Berger, has undergone exile not only from Palestine, but also from Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. In the current book, the theme of exile predominates, but this is never agitprop poetry. And neither is the nostalgia stiflingly melancholic; the breadth of the approach adopted in this collect prohibits it; and the opening lines of the long poem \u2018Midnight\u2019 which begins the book, prohibit it, too:<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all you can do:
\ndump it in the dustbin,
\nthe whole calendar,
\nreturn its present to the past,
\nas if the past twelve months
\nhad departed with the final bell,
\nleaving their joys
\nto you alone,
\nand their aches and pains to oblivion.<\/p>\n

And when Death overlooks \u2018you\u2019, \u2018in a fit of irresponsibility\u2019, not only does he leave you with joys, but the people he has taken, have gone \u2018shrouded in banners\/where winds go to sleep\u2019. They are gone in the glory of their memorial, which may or may not be political, but they have also gone with the forces of nature which cannot be denied; neither can the joy that returns again \u2018slowly and shyly\u2019 even under these circumstances. That joy is not the joy of insensitivity, or relief, but it is not clouded with survivor guilt either. The poet\/narrator is, time and again, profoundly sensitive to the fragility of the small pleasures that carrying on can bring.<\/p>\n

Barghouti has a particularised sense of the archetype of the sufferer: the mourning mother; the returning dead; the moon in its silent witness. This takes Barghouti into larger gestures than is perhaps usual in poetry in the \u2018English\u2019 tradition:<\/p>\n

In the paralysed body,
\nthe muscle of imagination inflicts bruises to the jaws
\nof whomever it pleases,
\nbruises that will never heal.<\/p>\n

In the palace of obedience
\nthere remains one last locked room
\nwhere someone makes ready
\nthe guns of mutiny.<\/p>\n

And occasionally Barghouti\u2019s use of the repeated \u2018you\u2019 seems grating, almost hectoring.<\/p>\n

\u2018Midnight\u2019 is conceived in a series of consecutive movements that somehow overlap each other, and move the reader along with them, in the writing\u2019s repetitions and parallelisms. The group of individual poems that end the book can be much more direct. In \u2018Interpretations\u2019, \u2018a poet sits in a coffee shop, writing\u2019 observed by an old lady, a young woman, a child, a business man and a tourist who each have their own interpretations of what the poet is writing; however, \u2018the secret policeman\/walks, slowly, towards him’. In \u2018It\u2019s also fine\u2019, Barghouti pleads for the opportunity \u2018to die\/with a white pillow, not the pavement, under our cheek\u2019. In the poem \u2018In the neighbouring room\u2019, we are \u2018next to\/the interrogation room\/packed with the stupidity of screams\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But even this engaged\u00a0poetry is shot through with lyricism and plangent detail.
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mourid Barghouti\u2019s first full length collection to be published in the UK is a wonderful book, sprawling, elegiac and elegant. The translation from the Arabic by Barghouti\u2019s wife, Radwa Ashour, is mellifluous and adept, full of lovely felicities in the English, which make the poems come alive in the language they were not written in. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nMourid Barghouti, Midnight and Other Poems (Arc Publications) - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1426\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mourid Barghouti, Midnight and Other Poems (Arc Publications) - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mourid Barghouti\u2019s first full length collection to be published in the UK is a wonderful book, sprawling, elegiac and elegant. 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