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23 July 2010

Words in Pictures: Mourid Barghouti

The Palestinian poet reads extracts from his work.

By Mike Sweeney

In this week’s issue, travel writer Stefan Simanowitz reports from FiSahara, an annual film festival held in a Saharawi refugee camp in the Algerian desert. He cites Mourid Barghouti‘s aphorism that “if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story.”

This week’s Words in Pictures clip shows the Palestinian writer elaborating on that theme. A previous winner of the Najuib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Barghouti was born in Ramallah on the West Bank but forced into exile during the Six Day war of 1967. He has been writing about the Palestinian conflict, and his own sense of cultural displacement, ever since.

Speaking with the British poet Ruth Padel, he discusses the background to some of his work.

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