The Power of Poetry to Travel: An Interview with Mourid Barghouti

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0656
• Pages: 656-675
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016
• Author: Tahrir Hamdi

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

Tahrir Hamdi, Arab Open University, Amman, Jordan.

THE POWER OF POETRY TO TRAVEL: AN

INTERVIEW WITH MOURID BARGHOUTI

Tahrir Hamdi

A car pulls up and the driver comes out, revealing the tall, graceful figure of one

of Palestine’s most important and well-known poets, Mourid Barghouti, the author

of twelve books of poetry and two excellent memoirs, I Saw Ramallah (2003) and

the sequel I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2011). Barghouti’s words, even if

only routine greetings, are very carefully and elegantly spoken as he makes his

way into the guest room and chooses the exact spot that would be his home for the

next two and a half hours of this interview. The poet lights a cigarette and makes

a polite request that coffee be his constant companion, but “please make it alqam

[bitter],” he says. The conversation which follows travels from thoughts on poetry,

religion, revolution, and Palestine to his son, the popular poet and scholar Tamim

and Mourid Barghouti’s late wife and Tamim’s mother, the novelist and academic

Radwa Ashour.

Tahrir Hamdi The British poet W. H. Auden in his tribute to the Irish poet

(TH): W. B. Yeats says “Poetry makes nothing happen,” but he

probably meant, not immediately, because after all, a poem is

not a political slogan. In your long poem, “Midnight,” you say:

The importance of the brave intellectual minority in each and every society cannot

be underestimated. And in this khaki age that we live in they are most needed. In

the battle for language, silence is definitely not the answer and connivance is a

crime.

What can poetry do in our context? What can poetry make

happen or not happen? Can poets create countries? I am saying

this in the context of what has been said about the Irish poet

W. B. Yeats—that he invented a country and called it Ireland.

Mourid Barghouti I’ll start by endorsing Auden’s statement. Poetry

(MB): can make nothing happen. Sometimes you feel that there is

THE POWER OF POETRY TO TRAVEL 657

ASQ 38.4 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

the following illusion—an audience expects that a poet writes

a poem on Saturday and then the country is liberated on

Sunday, or the dictator is overthrown the next day. A poem

cannot liberate a street from its occupiers, cannot remove a

dictator, no poetry, no poem, no poet can do that ... poetry

does not work [in] this way. Poetry works slowly, on the front

of the beautiful, the right, the imagination, and it works like

a slow-release medicine that you take for your body; poetry

works like a slow-release medicine for the mind and the soul

of the receiver. It doesn’t have an immediate effect, but it stays

there and then it travels. Edward Said speaks about travelling

theory. Poetry also travels. The word travels from one person

to another, from one country to another, from one language to

another, from one generation to another. That’s why we could

find a Tunisian teenager in a secluded room writing some lines

and then he dies before he is twenty-five and then one hundred

years later, the Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Bourgeba Street

in Tunisia are rocking with his “If the people one day will

to live/then destiny must respond.” The line travelled through

ages, through geography, through minds, through the pages.

TH: So the poem survives ...

MB: The poem survives, that’s why we are still reading poems that

have been written thousands of years ago.

TH: But it can’t have an immediate effect.

MB: No, no ... I want to make a difference between music and

military music. Military music is not music. Military music

can do immediate things, can organize the steps of the boots of

the soldiers, can send some enthusiasm only at the minute the

conductor is leading the band. After that everybody goes to his

kitchen, everyday business ... your poem, to deserve its name,

should not affect only this audience, at this minute; it should

have the power to influence another audience in another age,

in another place, with another background. For instance, when

Yeats wrote “Easter 1916” in Ireland—“a terrible beauty is

born,” I can feel it when an act of great heroism is done in

any other country, in Palestine, Ireland, Vietnam, El Salvador,

Chile, so I mean, if you achieve the demands of the aesthetics

of writing, then the work can survive, can acquire these two