Renowned Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti died in Amman Sunday after spending most of his life in exile.
Renowned Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti has died at the age of 76 in Jordan’s capital, Amman, after spending most of his life in exile.
Mourid’s son, the Arab poet Tamim Barghouti, wrote late on Sunday on his Facebook page: “May Allah have mercy on my mother and father”.
Palestinian Culture Minister Atef Abu Saif lamented the death of Barghouti, saying that the Palestinians and the Arab world had “lost a symbol of national struggle and creativity”.
On July 8, 1944, Barghouti was born in the Palestinian town of Deir Ghassanah on the outskirts of the city of Ramallah on the West Bank, four years before the Nakba (Disaster), Palestinian ethnic cleansing and near-complete destruction of Palestinian society when the state of Israel founded in 1948.
What was left over after the creation of Israel was taken over and added to after the 1967 war.
Before the war, Barghouti moved to the Egyptian capital in 1963 to study for a degree in English literature at Cairo University. He took over in 1967, and was unable to return to Ramallah for another 30 years.
‘Palestine Movement’
As a supporter of the Palestinian cause, Barghouti spent years of his life writing about his home country and the role of Israel. He lived in several countries across the region, including Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, before returning to Egypt.
There, he met his wife Radwa Ashour, an Egyptian novelist who died in 2014. Ashour translated Barghouti’s acclaimed autobiographical novel, I Saw Ramallah.
His memory of exile and movement was sparked when he returned to Ramallah after signing Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
The late Edward Said described it as “one of the best accounts of the Palestinian movement”.
In 2009, Mourid released another novel, widely regarded as an extension of his debut, titled: I Was Born There, I Was Born Here. It was written when he returned to Ramallah with his only son, Tamim, and was also written in English in 2012.
In addition to his novel, Barghouti has published 12 poetry collections over the years.
He read his poetry and exhibited his books all over the world, and lectured on Palestinian and Arabic poetry at universities in Oxford, Manchester, Oslo, and Madrid, among others.
Barghouti was strongly opposed to Oslo Accords and the outcome of the agreements, and recently overturned the latest Arab convention agreements broken by the US with Israel.
Although a member of the Palestinian Liberation Group, Barghouti did not associate with any political party. He spent years as the group’s cultural link in Budapest, Hungary.
The cause of Barghouti’s death was not immediately named.