Verbicide: Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti resists the political language of stupidity and hate - Essay

The amazing paradox is that while political powers resort to exuberance, zeal, hyperbole and the soaring language of romantic flight, poets resort to physical language, surgical precision, understatement and economy of expression. The 'poetical' is not poetry any more. In my poetry I resort to the concrete rather than the abstract, to the eye's perception rather than to the mind's contemplation. The poet's eye can see the two faces of the coin simultaneously. It sees:

   The confident person's confusion
   The nun's desire
   The preacher's obscenity...
   The grandeur of the trivialities
   The loser's dignity
   The winner's loneliness
   And that stupid coldness one feels
   When a wish is granted.

One of its charming miracles is that through its form, poetry can resist the content of authoritarian discourse. It breaks with existing certainties and their official representatives. By resorting to understatement, concrete and physical language, a poet contends against abstraction, generalization, hyperbole and the heroic language of hot-headed generals and bogus lovers alike.

The 21st century has started in a catastrophic way. We are witnessing an international apartheid language; a language that labels and defines, and divides values and virtues, and segregates nations in two categories of good and evil. Individual terrorism and state terrorism, fundamentalism and fanaticism prevail on both sides of the divide. The language, intentions and deeds of terrorists and preachers of globalism, the neo-imperialists and the war-tailors alike, are endangering human life and making our planet a less safe place. However, poetry remains one of' the astonishing forms in our hands to resist obscurantism and silence. And since we cannot wash the polluted words of hatred the same way we wash greasy dishes with soap and hot water, we, the poets of the world, continue to write our poems to restore the respect of meaning and to give meaning to our existence.

Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti has published 12 books of poetry. He was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry (2000), and the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for his autobiographical narrative I saw Ramallah.

This article first appeared in AUTODAFE no 3, Spring 2003, a journal which gives voice to writers injured by censorship or marginalized by the media. www.autodafe.org

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