Mourid Barghouti

Mourid Barghouti (Arabic: مريد البرغوثي, Murīd al-Barghūthī; 8 July 1944 – 14 February 2021) was a Palestinian poet and writer.

Biography

Barghouti was born in Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah, on the West Bank, in 8 July 1944. He studied English literature at Cairo University, graduating in 1967, though he was exiled from Egypt in 1977.

The Oslo Accords finally allowed Barghouti to return to the West Bank, and in 1996 he was able to return to Ramallah after 30 years of exile. This event inspired his autobiographical novel Ra'aytu Ram Allah (I Saw Ramallah), published by Dar Al Hilal (Cairo, 1997), which won him the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in the same year. A follow-up, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here was written when he and his son, Tamim, made a visit to the city. Mourid is also widely respected and known for his beautiful poetry, such as his long poem in Midnight and Other Poems, and has among other awards received the Palestine Award for Poetry, in 2020.

In an interview with Maya Jaggi in The Guardian, Barghouti was quoted as saying: "I learn from trees. Just as many fruits drop before they're ripe, when I write a poem I treat it with healthy cruelty, deleting images to take care of the right ones." In an interview with Tahrir Hamdi, Barghouti was quoted again on poetry saying "Love and poetry are made of the highest degree of attention. If you love someone (...) you have to notice. The highest degree of noticing, this is life and this is poetry.

In terms of his political outlook, Barghouti was a vocal critic of the 1993 Oslo Accords and its negotiators, viewing the treaty as an attempt to eradicate any means of Palestinian self-determination and statehood. He also expressed dissatisfaction with the corruption of the late PLO's leadership. He commented disparagingly about the increase in Israeli settlements within the West Bank and its ability to pursue such policies in defiance of international law, whereas Palestinians are deprived of the right to resist such actions, further compounded by the ineptness of the Palestinian Authority to act. He cites these developments as the being the demise of the two-state solution.

Barghouti was married to the novelist Radwa Ashour since 1970, whom he met while studying at Cairo University. The couple had a son, the poet Tamim Barghouti. Barghouti died in Amman on 14 February 2021, aged 76.