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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2022, pp. 60-61

Middle East Books Review

Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir

By Hussein Barghouthi, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, Seagull Books, 2022, hardcover, 154 pp. MEB $21

Reviewed by Rania Said

AFTER 30 YEARS in “voluntary exile,” the Palestinian poet Hussein Barghouthi returns to his homeland with his wife Petra and 4-year old son Āthar. This return was dictated by the author’s desire to reconnect with his beginnings, a desire made even more pressing by his deteriorating health. Sensing that the end is near after being diagnosed with lymphoma, Barghouthi relocates his family to a cottage surrounded by lush vegetation and wild animals, but also, and to the author’s deep chagrin, illegal Israeli settlements. 

Writing about the ravages of cancer at the time of the Second Intifada, the poet is made keenly aware of his “superfluousness.” In the hospital in Ramallah, he realizes that he is not “a healthy person, nor a wounded youth, nor a martyr,” that in reality, he is simply “an ordinary sick person.” This realization leads him to rebel against this ordinariness by re-imagining life as a cycle of reincarnation, and family history as a string of fairy tales. 

In this re-enchanted world, his 4-year old son morphs into a Tiresian figure whose fantastical language imbues the author with the desire to be reincarnated as “a child-prophet” in order to see the world anew. Fragments of family history coalesce into a tale of flying vipers, extinct animals, blessed orchards and one magical mountain in the Ramallah countryside. These flights of the imagination, as well as the lush intertextual references to Arabic, Spanish, Turkish and English poetry, make this memoir a veritable literary delight.

By unearthing the fairytales that his mother told him in his youth and adding his own mythologization of the countryside, Barghouthi challenges the settler colonial imaginary of Palestine. He asks “What does a settler from Russia or Estonia, who arrived perhaps no longer than a year ago, see when he opens his window and gazes at these mountains where I am now standing?” He then replies, “He will certainty not see the snake that flies and trills, hear its cry…He will not touch history even if he were a soothsayer; not my history anyway, even if he were a god.” The reinscription of the magical into history constitutes a strong affective claim on the land; a claim that the author believes to be more powerful than that of the divine, perhaps because it is in harmony with the fauna and the flora of Palestine.

Among the Almond Trees differs from the more political illness narratives that have marked the genre in Anglophone literature, namely Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) and Edward Said’s Out of Place (1999). Both of these narratives are characterized by a desire to historicize the self as first and foremost a political subject and to galvanize their audience around a cause, be it social justice, medical justice or national liberation. In other words, both of them can be read as manifestos of resistance. The politics of Among the Almond Trees on the other hand is more married to the local and the domestic, and therefore subtler. The memoir’s political power lies in its celebration of and contribution to the poetics of the Palestinian countryside. 

Ibrahim Muhawi’s masterful translation of this highly complex memoir is a much-needed step in the further dissemination of Arabic autobiographical writing at the global stage. The care with which the translator approached this text can be seen in the extensive “Translator’s Introduction” and in the “Translator’s Notes” at the end of the book. Not only does this paratext offer a solid contextualization of the memoir in its literary tradition, but it also opens a window into Muhawi’s creative process. I particularly appreciated when Muhawi pointed out the passages that he found most challenging, and when he shared with us the resources that helped him finalize his decision. These gestures serve as a reminder to the reader of the mediated nature of the narrative and of the intense intellectual labor that goes into translation as a craft.

The translator’s decision to use diacritics in Āthar’s name throughout the narrative and to transliterate certain Arabic words such as “ghreriya” is laudable. Translation into a dominant language such as English sometimes runs the risk of completely domesticating the original text in an effort to make it more palatable for the target audience. By keeping these traces of the Arabic text in his translation, Muhawi seeks to pique his reader’s curiosity and to engage them in a deeper dialogue with the memoir and its language. It is for this reason that I think that he should have also transliterated the Levantine word “nawari” instead of translating it as “gypsy.” While the word does carry a classist connotation in Levantine Arabic, it is not intended as a racial slur in Barghouthi’s narrative. The translator did provide an endnote on the word and the history of the community in Palestine, so it makes more sense that he would use “nawari” instead of a word that is considered an offensive term in the English language. 

Additionally, while I truly appreciate the need to clarify certain words for the reader, I would have preferred that any grammatical or stylistic explanations remain in the endnotes. For example, I found the brackets in the following sentence a bit distracting: “He was asleep in my lap under the stars, moving his fingers and saying, ‘I told you [feminine plural] don’t play by yourselves in the streets.’” The information in the brackets is interesting to know, but unfortunately it does interrupt the flow of the text. 

Overall, I highly recommend this translation both for lovers of world literature and for academics looking to enrich their syllabi with more life writing from the Global South. I am also looking forward to the translation of al- Ḍaw ʾ al- ʾAzraq, the first volume of Barghouthi’s autobiographical project, which is set to appear in December 2022, also with Seagull, in a translation by Fady Joudah.

Rania Said is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at UMass Boston. She has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Binghamton University and an agrégation in English from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Tunis. Her research centers on autobiographical writing and the city in Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) literature.