News at Eleven: Reflecting on crossing the bridge from Jordan

to his West Bank birthplace in 1996 after 30 years' exile--a visit under Israeli control that he [Mourid Barghouti] refused to call a return--he described a condition of permanent uprootedness. A student in Cairo when the 1967 Arab-Israeli war broke out, he was prevented, like many others, from returning to the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He was later exiled from Jordan for 20 years, Egypt for 18 years, and Lebanon for 15 years. Yet all writing, for him, is a displacement, a striving to escape from the "dominant used language" and the "chains of the tribe--its approval and taboos".

from The Guardian: A life in writing: Mourid Barghouti

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