Over the past twenty years, thousands of people have attended performances by the Palestinian-Egyptian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti. In conversation, he speaks with the booming voice of someone practiced at commanding a crowd. He is deliberate about word choice, rummaging around for the precise match, and thoughtful about what he will say on the record. When we met this summer, at a hotel in Amman, Jordan, he recorded our conversation on his phone. He knows that his words can have serious consequences. In 2003, Al-Barghouti was pressured to leave Egypt, his home country, after protesting the American invasion of Iraq. “People came to my house, blindfolded me, and threatened me with Kalashnikovs at four o’clock in the morning,” he told me. “I didn’t see any legal documents, no stamp, nothing.” One of the armed men, who did not identify himself, told Al-Barghouti to buy a plane ticket and leave, he said. He was able to return to Egypt several weeks later, but he was denied the right to work there, and so he had to leave once again.
When we met, Al-Barghouti had just finished speaking at a conference concerning the effects of occupation on human development in the Palestinian territories. He’s currently working with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia—he calls it his “nine-to-five.” Al-Barghouti has a Ph.D. in political science, from Boston University, and he has taught the subject at Georgetown, the Free University of Berlin, and the American University in Cairo. He has also published six collections of poetry. He recently released “In Jerusalem and Other Poems,” his first book translated into English. He’s been frustrated, in the past, he said, by the difficulty of translating his work, and he selected the poems in the collection—composed, in Arabic, over the course of a decade—primarily because they were the most translatable. Missing from the book, for instance, is a poem called “Ya Masr Hanet,” which Al-Barghouti wrote during the first sparks of the Egyptian revolution, in 2011, and which was subsequently projected onto screens in Tahrir Square. Al-Barghouti was not satisfied with any English version.
“Words have—like human beings—they have a shadow, they have a smell, they have an aura about them, and they change drastically once you move them from one language to another,” he said. He used the example of matar, the Arabic word for rain, which connotes generosity, good luck, bounty, or rescue. “In English, a rainy day is not the best day one could have.”
Al-Barghouti’s mother, the Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, convinced her son to embark on the translation project, and she did most of the translations herself. His work was beginning to have an impact on people, she told him, and non-Arabic speakers wanted to understand it. Al-Barghouti believes that such comprehension is impossible—the translation provides “just a taste,” he said. His experiments with various dialects cannot be conveyed in English, he explained, and his allusions to Arab mythology and history require a degree of familiarity for which the footnotes are a weak substitute. Still, he loved working with his mother on the book. “She would liberate me from this feeling I get whenever I’m speaking in English or writing in English, which is that I’m swimming in a sea of jelly,” he said. “She would try, with these huge, huge wings—like this Egyptian goddess of justice—separating the waves like Moses and allowing me to move.”
Ashour died in 2014, at the age of sixty-eight, before the project was completed. To that point, Al-Barghouti had repeatedly put off finishing the book. “And then when I lost my mother, after she had decided to do that, I felt it was my duty to have it published,” he said. He finished some of the translations himself.
Ferial Ghazoul, a professor of comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, told me that the best way for Westerners to get a handle on Al-Barghouti as a figure is to think of him as a sort of spoken-word rock star. Al-Barghouti told me that in the streets of Cairo and the Palestinian territories, children compete at reciting his poem “In Jerusalem,” a mournful narrative poem that follows a cab ride into and then back out of Jerusalem, in which the speaker laments that the city he loves regards him only as “a footnote or a margin.” “In Jerusalem beauty is octagonal and blue,” he writes, “Supporting, gentle listener, a golden dome/ That looks like, I think, a convex mirror/ Containing the sky, playing with it, pulling it close.” The rival political groups Hamas and Fatah have both aired the poem on their respective TV channels, and a recording of it became a popular ringtone.
Al-Barghouti’s tastes run to allegorical, epic, and narrative poetry; he believes that the responsibility of art is to help people reimagine the very order of the world, envisioning, for the future, “a more beautiful form of government, a more beautiful form of man-woman relationship, a more beautiful relationship between humans and nature,” he told me. “Power exists mainly in human imagination,” he went on, pushing his chin-length, midnight-colored curls out of his face. He added, “If people in the street decide that the policeman is only someone dressed in a weird way, then he would become someone dressed in a weird way.” In the poem “The Little Sky in My Hands,” Al-Barghouti writes, “I try to turn a policeman into a human being/ Since he looks like one/ I will appoint a few kings and presidents I know/ To new positions/ As waiters, bartenders/ Or offer them other honest jobs.”
Al-Barghouti’s father, Mourid Barghouti, is also a well-known Palestinian poet. Al-Barghouti was five months old when his father was deported from his home in Egypt, during President Anwar Sadat’s attempts to broker peace with Israel. The separation was painful, but Al-Barghouti has warm memories of summers and holidays spent with his father in Budapest, where he lived in exile. “Budapest is a beautiful city with a lot of marzipan and nice sweets—so it’s heaven for a child,” Al-Barghouti said.
“My father would write, all through the year and in the summer, and wait for my mother to come to read the poetry to her,” he said. “And I would be there. He writes only in standard Arabic. So there’s something strange about this kind of speech—it’s not the speech we use everyday. It has more—more vowels. So more music in it. Also at that time, cartoons were dubbed in standard Arabic. As a kid I would watch these movies where you had heroes fighting aliens, defending the Earth. So my father is speaking the language of my heroes!” He went on, “I remember as young as four or five, I thought that if I could speak in standard Arabic I would be physically able to fly.” He began to think of writing as a source of power, a kind of “self-defense.”
Al-Barghouti wrestles with the desire to write as an individual and the obligation to be the people’s poet. “Sometimes people write poetry with their feet, by walking,” he said, by way of explaining the writing process, which he considers a collaboration between himself and the Arab people and those listening. “A little kid standing, facing the tank in Palestine. Faris Odeh, a fourteen-year-old boy. He lost his life. That act of courage is a poem, right there. I didn’t write anything, I just read it off his feet.”
Though Al-Barghouti’s activism is best known in connection with the Palestinian territories, he’s outspoken about the situation in Egypt, too. “I’m O.K. to have it on record: I think the current government in Egypt is the worst in this century.” He went on to say that he couldn’t think of a worse Egyptian government in the last hundred years. When I asked if he’d ever be allowed back into the country, he replied, “Let’s see, after this gets published.” When I asked Al-Barghouti if he was interested in a political career, he said that he was not, because he can accomplish more as an artist, and because, in his view, there are not “any proper governments.” His parents held similar views. He mentioned his father’s memoir, which explains that, for Arab people, politics “is the family at breakfast. Who is there. Who is absent and why.”
Al-Barghouti is optimistic, though, that increased human connectedness will upend traditional power relations. “If you have a million people in the streets and you confront them with a thousand tanks, the million people, though unarmed, would physically be able to defeat the one thousand tanks,” he said. What happened in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring brought this possibility into focus, he added. “The change in action has already begun. There will be setbacks, but I don’t think it’s reversible.” He is adamant that the resistance will transcend borders. “Today, as Nero wears the diadem, cry woe to Rome and to Jerusalem,” he wrote on Twitter, in January. We must resist our Neros, all of them, together, he told me.
“One good thing about most dictators is that they are not very sensitive to art,” he said. “They are too thick to recognize the threat that beauty represents to them.” When they do recognize the threat, and move to quash it, people create proxies—if they close the galleries, people will paint on the walls. No dictator can take creation itself away, nor erase from the people’s consciousness existing art that has already worked its magic. “How are they going to prevent the Egyptians from reading ‘Macbeth’?” he asked. “How can they jail William Shakespeare and Al-Mutanabbi?”
