I Saw Ramallah
by Mourid Barghouti
Exile ends. He crosses the bridge. Nothing's left.
For you if
you want to understand displacement as a lived experience rather than a statistic
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In 1996 Barghouti crossed a bridge over the Jordan River and returned to Ramallah after thirty years of exile. This slim memoir is the record of that return — what it feels like to come back to a place that has changed without you, where your childhood home belongs to someone else, where you are a foreigner in the city you grew up in. Edward Said called it the most eloquent book ever written about the Palestinian experience. One of the most quietly devastating dispatches on this entire shelf.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Palestine • Middle East
- Voice
- Written by a Palestinian author
- Topics
- 1948 palestinian exodus
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
5 Broken Cameras(2011)
dir. Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi
Five cameras destroyed. Every one kept filming.
A Palestinian farmer in Bil'in documents his village's nonviolent resistance to encroaching Israeli settlements over five years, structured around each of his cameras' destruction.
Why it’s here: Shot almost entirely by a Palestinian farmer with no filmmaking background, on cameras that kept getting destroyed and kept getting replaced — testimony in the most literal sense, edited (not directed) into shape by an Israeli co-director after the fact.
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
