In I Saw Ramallah, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti recounts crossing back over the Allenby Bridge into the West Bank in 1996, thirty years after the 1967 war left him unable to return to his family's village of Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah. Barred from Egypt as well after Anwar Sadat's crackdown on Palestinian activists, Barghouti spent much of his exile in Budapest, separated for years at a time from his wife, the Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, and their son Tamim.
Moving between the present-day journey and memories of the family and landscape he lost, Barghouti writes with a poet's precision about displacement, the disfigurement of occupation, and the disorientation of finally standing in a home that has become half-familiar, half-strange — deepened throughout by grief for his brother Mounif, who died suddenly in Paris in 1993.
Translated from the Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif with a foreword by Edward Said, who called it "one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement," the book won the 1997 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.