Somia’s Reviews > I Saw Ramallah > Status Update

'It is a land, like any land.
We sing for it only so that we may remember the humiliation of having had it taken from us. Our song is not for some sacred thing of the past but for our current self-respect that is violated anew every day by the Occupation.

'Friends who had crossed the river after a long absence told me they had wept there.
I did not weep.
The slight numbness did not rise from my chest to my eyes. No one was with me to tell me what my face looked like during those hours waiting.
I look at the body of the bridge. Will I really cross it? Will there be some last-minute problem? Will they send me back? Will they invent a procedural error?'

'But I do know that the stranger can never go back to what he was. Even if he returns. It is over. A person gets 'displacement' as he gets asthma, and there is no cure for either. And a poet is worse off, because poetry itself is an estrangement.'

Forward by Edward Said:

'This compact, intensely lyrical narrative of a return from protracted exile abroad to Ramallah on the West Bank in the summer of 1996 is one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we now have.'