Hussein Barghouthi

Hussein Barghouthi Poems

Hussein Barghouthi Biography

Hussein Jamil Barghouthi, also spelled Barghouti, ( May 5, 1954 – May 1, 2002 ‎‎) was a Palestinian poet, writer, essayist, critic, lyricist, play write and philosopher, born in the village of Kobar in the Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate. Barghouthi lived his childhood between Kobar, where his mother lived, and Beirut, where his father worked. Barghouthi got his high school diploma from Amir Hassan School in Birzeit. He went on to continue his studies in Budapest, Hungary, studying Political Science and State Finance there for 5 years. After returning to Palestine, he studied at Birzeit University and obtained his BA English literature from in 1983, and taught there for one year before leaving to obtain both his M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1992) in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington - Seattle. He returned to Palestine to become a professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University, and went on to work for three years in Al-Quds University as a professor of Literature Critique and Theater in 1997, during which he was a founding member of the Palestinian “House of Poetry” and Publishing Manager in a couple of literature magazines. Barghouthi died on May 1, 2002 in Ramallah Hospital, after a long struggle with cancer.)

The Best Poem Of Hussein Barghouthi

Mirror Nine

(excerpt from poetry book 'liquid mirrors')

When she told him that she's not his until he wrote 'the poem in her mind', he tried to sense what she meant, so he recorded all his previous poems on a tape, and stayed in hope that she'd like something from them.
So the director protested from a completely unexpected angle:
'A black soul. Your poetry is a black river surrounding the earth like a bracelet, so carve these poems on a silver pendent, hang it on your neck in confession… that you are negative'.
Perhaps the poem in her mind is about 'love', without dispossession, without death, without condemnation. He thought. And after a while, he entered the studio with a stick in his right hand and a silver frame in his left; a rectangular mirror in it, and above the mirror, in a smaller rectangle, a piece of cloth from black silk on which was 'embroidered', in a Kufi font that was hard to read, a poem about her that was inspired from… she didn't listen. She hung it on the concrete walls of the hall in the studio. It was night. In the studio
It was night. She read, with a candle in her hand; its flame shaking in the rectangular mirror:
'I dreamt you.
Your eyes sanctuaries for guardians, a sanctuary visited in loyalty to vows, and lamps are lit inside,
With the oil of rituals, and another floats on water in my dream,
and illuminates things for me. Love amazes me in both cases: when it visits and when it is visited
It's as if you are a higher context of what I lost, and it comes back to me, when the curtains open
And your hands are a stairs
of bricks. I climb it and it breaks me, my body falls as glass,
and my soul rises
as perfumes,
And some rising is descension, and some rising is collapse
And not everyone saw you as my vision, the blind is not of guilt!
And some eyes are ash, and some eyes are bedazzlement
I dreamt you.
Your hair was a stained glass sky
It is unfelt, untouched, and brightens the floor, and was not touched by fire
Its light is premonition, and I wipe my eyes with love so I can see it, so my blindness is washed away
And some eyes are mirrors, and some mirrors are dust'.
He was listening to silence, his stick in his hand. The montage screen in front of him, him on a black seat. She read on, silently. She took him by the hand, silently, and walked out with him. Rain over the blackness of the asphalt. Small ponds in which lights glistening. In the spray she sees her face broken. She told him: you've started to understand what's in my mind. You see my hair 'a stained glass sky', (why did she assume the poem was about her? Thought the editor) I imagine it exactly: blue, yellow, red and green, dark colored at night, stars shining from behind it and illuminating the earth with a thin light. Long ago, in gothic churches, the windows of stained glass were of a geometric shape of 12 sides, so they imitate the 'zodiac circle' in the sky. In the Quran, God 'built' the sky, like in architectural engineering. And my hands 'a stairs of bricks', and on them you climb to another holy architecture: guardians' sanctuaries. Nice. The body has the same holy architecture of the universe. Old philosophy, but beautiful. We're now in a disassembled universe, or we want to see it disassembled.
The director was appeasing him maybe, or complimenting. If she loved a 'holy universe', with a harmonic, exquisite and divine architecture, why does she make him work for him as an 'editor' whose only job is to 'cut this part of the film'? to 'cut reality' and re-produce it and assemble it according to her desire and imagination? Isn't that a violation of reality as contextualized by God, isn't it, in other words, a universe of 'fragments' with no reality other than that which the director considers 'reality'? and remember the saying of Mahmoud Darwish:
'And my bones like a stick in the hand of the director, but I say:
I perfect the role tomorrow, sir
And that's why I quit'.
Hasn't reality become a 'stick' in the hands of cinema and television companies, and the bunches of editors and directors and financers and distributers? And after that, intelligence agencies and spies? What 'reality' will remain of 'the poem in her mind' after all that? And of the 'sky of stained glass'?
And he walked alone in the rain, leaving the director behind him. He turned to the dark backstreet, striking the floor with his stick like Oedipus when he left 'Thebes'.
Where to?

Hussein Barghouthi Comments