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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

In 2000 Mourid Barghouti published I Saw Ramallah, the acclaimed memoir that told of returning in 1996 to his Palestinian home for the first time since exile following the Six-Day War in 1967.  I Was Born There, I Was Born Here takes up the story in 1998 when Barghouti returned to the Occupied Territories to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim, to his Palestinian family. Ironically, a few years later Tamim had himself been arrested for taking part in a demonstration against the impending Iraq War. He was held in the very same Cairo prison from which his father had been expelled from Egypt to begin a second exile in Budapest when Tamim was only a few months old.

Ranging freely back and forth in time between the 1990s and the present day, Barghouti weaves into his account of exile poignant evocations of Palestinian history and daily life – the pleasure of coffee arriving at just the right moment, the challenge of a car journey through the Occupied Territories, the meaning of home and the importance of being able to say, standing in a small village in Palestine, ‘I was born here’, rather than saying from exile, ‘I was born there’.

Full of life and humour in the face of a culture of death, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here is destined, like its predecessor, to become a classic.

Author

Mourid Barghouti

Mourid Barghouti

Books

I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

Mourid Barghouti is a Palestinian poet and writer. He was born in 1944 in Deir Ghassana near Ramallah. He has published over ten books of poetry, including Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight). His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997. He was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry in 2000. His autobiographical narrative Ra’ytu Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah) won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature (1997) and was translated into several languages.

Translator

Humphrey Davies

Humphrey Davies

Books

Gate of the Sun

The Yacoubian Building

Yalo

I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

Humphrey Davies holds a PhD in Near East Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He has spent 36 years working and living in the Arab world – 20 of these in Egypt, with lengthy periods in Palestine, Sudan and Tunisia.  He works out of Arabic (both formal and four dialects: Egyptian Arabic, Sudanese, Tunisian and Palestinian).

His translations include Ala’ Al-Aswani’s The Yacoubian Building, Naguib Mahfouz’s Thebes at War and Sayed Ragab’s ‘El Far’ (‘Rat’) – a short story in Egyptian Arabic, published in Banipal Magazine (Summer 2002)

In addition to his translation work, he has worked for the Ford Foundation in Cairo and Khartoum; for the Save the Children Federation; and for Oxford University Press. He is based in Cairo.

Published by

Bloomsbury, 2011
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In 2000 Mourid Barghouti published I Saw Ramallah, the acclaimed memoir that told of returning in 1996 to his Palestinian home for the first time since exile following the Six-Day War in 1967.  I Was Born There, I Was Born Here takes up the story in 1998 when Barghouti returned to the Occupied Territories to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim, to his Palestinian family. Ironically, a few years later Tamim had himself been arrested for taking part in a demonstration against the impending Iraq War. He was held in the very same Cairo prison from which his father had been expelled from Egypt to begin a second exile in Budapest when Tamim was only a few months old.

Ranging freely back and forth in time between the 1990s and the present day, Barghouti weaves into his account of exile poignant evocations of Palestinian history and daily life – the pleasure of coffee arriving at just the right moment, the challenge of a car journey through the Occupied Territories, the meaning of home and the importance of being able to say, standing in a small village in Palestine, ‘I was born here’, rather than saying from exile, ‘I was born there’.

Full of life and humour in the face of a culture of death, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here is destined, like its predecessor, to become a classic.

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