I was born there, I was born here
By: Mourid Barghouti ; translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies
Contributors: Davies, Humphrey T. (Humphrey Taman)
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2011
Place of publication: London; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9781408815588; 9781408822470
Subjects: Family; Exile; Palestinian Arab Authors; Biography; Exiled Authors; Exile (Punishment); Families
Work titles: Wulidtu hunāk, wulidtu hunā
Description: 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". -- Book jacket.
Notes: Translated from Arabic.
Table of contents: title: Come closer: foreword / by John Berger; title: - 1. The Driver Mahmoud; title: - 2. Father and son; title: - 3. The Yasmin Building; title: - 4. I Was born There, I Was born here; title: - 5. The Identity card; title: - 6. The Ambulance; title: - 7. Saramago; title: - 8. The Alhambra; title: - 9. Things one would never think of; title: - 10. The Dawn visitor; title: - 11. An Ending leading to the beginning?