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Verbicide: Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti resists the political language of stupidity and hate - Essay
New Internationalist, August, 2003 by Mourid Barghouti
Miserable is a country that requires all kinds of heroism from all its citizens. This is the brink of life, or life at the brink: You want to end the occupation of your homeland. You resist. And the occupation gets more brutal. Your dream of normal life is postponed and you feel that everything is temporary. And when you learn to live in this transitory eternity you will know-what it means to be a Palestinian! Prolonged occupation prevents you from managing your affairs in your own way. It interferes in every aspect of life and death; it interferes with longing and anger and desire and walking in the street. It interferes with going anywhere and coming back, with going to the market, the emergency hospital, the school, the beach, the bedroom or a distant capital.
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Israel took from us the land of the poem and left us with the poem of the land. But our poem's horizon expanded far beyond this confined duality to embrace the universal, the human, as well as the intimate and personal. Most Palestinian writers are aware of this fact: for a fanatic it is always useful to simplify; for a poet it is categorically suicidal. The suffering of a nation should not be used as a pretext to justify the mediocre, the cliched and the thumb-worn, in any form of artistic expression. It is not acceptable that because we are on the tragic edge of history our paintings should be reduced into posters, our lyrics into military anthems, our plays into preaching, our novels into straight ideology, or our poems into slogans.
In a time of crisis people gradually learn to accept the relative and imperfect. In a prison, or a detention camp, prisoners dream of such small miracles as having a bath, a haircut, a letter, a visit, or a pen; on the operating table the patient dreams of a drop of water after awakening from anaesthesia; the paralyzed dreams of the slightest motion and the drowned looks for a straw. Is this the age of small dreams? As a Palestinian, with negated history and negated geography, with an occupied will and an occupied homeland, I understand why the oppressed, in general, do not soar up in the eternal gazes but rather they delve deep in the earth in search of the living roots, potential shrubs and trees. Didn't Martin Luther King sum up the aspirations of successive generations of African-American poets in a simple vision of black and white kids boarding the same school bus? Didn't he pay with his life for that down-to-earth dream? Dreams become most tragic and dangerous when they are simple. Many of my poems are built up on dreaming of little things, tiny little things that might seem insignificant. There were times when the poetic imagination worked to escape reality. I claim that the poetic imagination now works to confront it.
Through poetic imagination I construct my own perception of lived experience; a new version of reality, different from the original. Language is a shared element between the world of the marketplace and that of poetry. The dissimilar language of poetry is our suggestion of a different language for this world. It is our attempt to restore to each word its specificity and resist the process of collective vulgarization and to establish new relations among words to create a fresh perception of things. Poetry is stepping out of the orchestra to play solo with the single instrument of language. That is why the poetic imagination becomes an act of resistance par excellence. It is a declaration of mutiny on board this world's ship whose course we are never allowed to direct.
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