on Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir by Hussein Barghouthi, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi
“After an absence of thirty years I have returned to live in the countryside near Ramallah,” begins Hussein Barghouthi’s memoir Among the Almond Trees. The year was 2002 and the Second Intifada had ignited. “I had exiled myself from my beginnings and chosen to live as an expatriate.” But the itinerant Barghouthi did not come home to confront the occupiers. Diagnosed with lymphoma, he began treatments at Ramallah Hospital: “Here there is room for me between the new births on the upper floor and the morgue refrigerator below. I am infirm, wandering around on the outskirts of things, on the edge of what is happening.”
Born in 1954 the village of Bokar, west of Ramallah, Barghouthi spent parts of his boyhood in Beirut where his father worked. After high school in Birzeit, he went to Budapest where he studied political science for five years, then returned to Birzeit University to obtain his B.A. in English literature. In 1984, he went to the U.S. to study at the University of Washington where he earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. (1992) in comparative literature. In 1997 he returned to Palestine where he taught at Al-Quds University. Some might argue that he was never truly in exile since his departure was voluntary and his absences temporary. In turn, his response to such a claim might have sounded something like these lines from his writings: “If you tended to what you were, then you are with the memory. And if you tended to what you will be, then you are with the exile.”
Barghouthi embodied, exerted, queried and venerated both tendencies within a single self. The Palestinian writer Ziad Khaddash said of him, “For Hussein Al-Barghouthi, Palestinian culture is humanist, not a martyred culture, convulsing and besieged in one small piece of land.” His self-expression as a lyrical humanist didn’t always please those Palestinian intellectuals who demanded more polemicism from their writers. His most celebrated work, The Blue Light (2001), reflected his time in Seattle and his feelings of displacement and dread – but ultimately embraced tenets of Sufist philosophy inspiring the negation of the ego. In Barghouthi’s work, nescience and speculation are preferred over certainty and assertion.
Nevertheless, the Israeli presence and its suppression of freedoms loom over Among the Almond Trees as Barghouthi portrays himself wandering through the land of his youth. But he seems to be asking us to regard this oppression as a recurring element in human history – while the individual perceives in his solitary history the perennial struggles discovered in world literature: “The meadow by moonlight was as white as salt, almost as transparent as lunar crystals that cannot hide what is inside them. I thought I saw a road running through the meadow and branching out into three paths, as in the folktales of my people: ‘the path of clarity,’ ‘the path of uncertainty,’ and ‘the path of no-return’ … Yet, what path did I take in my beginnings? Not ‘the path of clarity,’ for I lived like a man who had lost his way for thirty years; nor ‘the path of no-return,’ for I have come back to the Monastery. Consequently, I have taken ‘the path of uncertainty.’”
The Monastery, or what he called The Inner Monastery, located on a mountain, is the central point of the narrative, the site of remembrance. He writes, “Something in the Mountain was saying to me: ‘Even if you have only two years to live, two years here are better than two centuries there.’ Resist! This land is yours. Resist! I was standing at the window, looking out on thew woods – the pine and almond trees — and it occurred to me that Petra [his wife] would collapse if I collapsed. ’Resist, not for your own sake. Resist!’ I felt that the Mountain was crying out to me: ‘Say to her, Whatever happens, when you visit me, I will be among the almond trees. It will be sunny, and light will diffuse the air. There will be orchards, bees, and the path of bees,’ and until that time comes, resist!”
“Disease, like time, shatters the sharp edges in all of us,” he says while walking at night. In his writings, which included poetry, film scripts, song lyrics, essays, cultural critique, and autobiography, Barghouthi strove to dull the sharp edges of whatever tries to obscure or diminish the very essence of human life. He saw history as a single moment in which he, like other visionaries, “can breathe the air of other places and other times in order to sense another moonlit space inside my spirit that would grant me the strength of beginnings so as to face the cruelty of endings. For imagination is power.”
In his introduction, translator Ibrahim Muhawi suggests, “I think Barghouthi saw himself as a cultural Alexander in reverse – a Middle Easterner who spent thirty years in Europe and the United States, adding to his Arab heritage the cultural dimensions of Western education and then returning to his native land as a cosmopolitan inheritor of all these traditions.” The memoir cites in passing Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Poe, Chekhov, Mishima, Nietzsche and Marquez: “Lorca says that art is swerving, as in the bullfight: for, what idiot would throw himself at the bull’s horns? Rather, art is the matador throwing himself at the bull’s horns, then swerving at the last moment. This Mountain is a bull’s born, and I must swerve from it at the last moment. I must see it in a gyre, like a child.”
But Among the Almond Trees takes root in the locale, tales, and family history of the Barghouti clan. From this unshakable foundation, Barghouthi gropes and grasps, clutches and releases. And as he walks morning and evening through the countryside near Ramallah, sometimes with his own son Áthar, he meditates: “I must return to the dormant child in me, so as to walk the earth as a child-prophet, if not in this life then in the next one.” Hussein Barghouthi died in Ramallah on May 1, 2002.
[Published by Seagull Books on May 17, 2022, 139 pages, $21.00 hardcover]
To watch “The Language of Almonds,” a 14-minute tribute to Hussein Barghouthi, including clips of him, click here (YouTube).
/ / /
on Rose Royal, a novel by Nicolas Mathieu, translated from the French by Sam Taylor
A narrative portraying the lives of young people in the northeast region of France, Nicolas Mathieu’s novel And Their Children After Them was one of my favorite books of 2020 and the recipient of the Prix Goncourt. Rose Royal, his novella subtitled “a love story,” has the impulses and gestures of the novel – a preoccupation with diminished possibilities and emotional ruination, tart assessments of characters and snappy plot movements. What strikes me about Mathieu’s approach to the shorter form is how with a few adjustments, the attitude of his prose approaches the noir.
The novella’s main character is Rose, an executive assistant at an accounting firm, married at twenty, divorced with children, now nearing fifty “but she didn’t mind too much. She was aware of her attributes: her figure was still good and her legs were gorgeous.” One evening after work, she goes to her favorite bar and meets a man named Luc. As in the novel, Mathieu locates us among the crowd: “She recognized those people … relationships pockmarked with silences and grudges, a small town in the back of beyond, with two factories and houses lined up across narrow streets, a town full of prejudices and animosities that went back to the Occupation … the way they kept quiet about things, the heavy accents, the stubbornly shaking heads. The journalists made fun of them, but those people existed. They were the country’s cannon fodder …”
There had been several relationships with men, such as with Thierry: “She’d recognized the tension in his face, the ugliness of these men whose arguments have run dry. It was always the same old story. You touched the nerve of his pride and his fist came down on you.” After he slams the door on the way out, she decides to purchase a .38 caliber revolver from an American website. As Ibsen said, “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.”
Rose visits dating sites, giving Mathieu an opportunity to limn the online crowd: “They were all divorced at forty, addicted to fucking, ton their screens, uprooted to unknown cities, eaten away by a need for constant change that extended to their romantic lives, and in the end they spent their evening on the computer, typing away late at night in bed, hoping to be saved by a hypothetical hot date.” Mathieu makes us care a great deal about Rose, though he doesn’t satisfy the typical urge to portray his lead character as exceptional in some way. On the contrary, Mathieu finds a dire inevitability in the actions of people based on primal need. As for Rose and Luc, “They had both had plenty of love affairs, one-night stands, kids heartaches, bereavements. They were mature. But starting your fifties was like entering a strange new land … They could feel it in their bones – the fatigue, the chronic diseases – and they could see it in the dryness of their skin, the sparseness of their hair.”
Luc is a contractor who lives in an upscale house. He drives a German car and dresses Rose in fur. She doesn’t resist these pleasures and amenities. But soon things unravel: “He made her feel she was dangling by a thread. Such was her dependence, so deep had she fallen into servitude, that a single word would be enough to send her spinning into the void.” Bleeding into the noir genre, Rose Royal generates a mist of doom while suggesting that male behavior is predictably selfish and finally violent. That is, in line with Mathieu’s broad perspective on humanity, the maltreatment of woman here is presented not only as widely practiced abuse, but embedded and predictable. It’s good versus evil, á la noir, and with a noir’s unsentimental, lovelorn lesson: “She should never have loved them as much as she did.”
[Published on February 8, 2022 by Other Press, 96 pages, $17.99 hardcover]