I Saw Ramallah

"Yes. The language for me is almost more important than the story which is a moving account of his homecoming. Mourid writes very much in the Arab tradition of poetry. And he depicts a situation that so many of us in exile or living under occupation feel. Occupation interferes in every aspect of life and death, he says; ‘it interferes with longing and anger and desire and walking in the street’. But life goes on. I am in Palestine at the moment for the literature festival and what I see among the young people is so humbling. Students from Gaza University are telling us about how they’re missing basic necessities but mostly they’re starving intellectually – desperate for books and knowledge. What they’re living under is so inhuman but they have such remarkable spirit. This is the untold story – for all these years Palestinians have been going on with their lives, getting an education, getting jobs, getting married, and dealing with this occupation as best they can, going through checkpoint after checkpoint, roadblock after roadblock, one procedure after another, and yet they still live. That’s what is so often missing in the dominant mainstream narrative about Palestine and how Palestinians have been resisting passively for 62 years simply by going on, refusing to break or hate . . ."