"The most eloquent statement in English of what it is like to be a Palestinian today....No other book so
well explains the background to recent events in Palestine/Israel."
--The Times Literary Supplement
"An important literary event....One of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we
now have."
Barred from his homeland after 1967's Six-Day War, the poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile--shuttling
among the world's cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain
whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli
occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over the Jordan River into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the
city of his youth. Sifting through memories of the old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters
in this mere "idea of Palestine," he discovers what it means to be deprived not only of a homeland but
of "the habitual place and status of a person." A tour de force of memory and reflection, lamentation
and resilience, I Saw Ramallah is a deeply humane book, essential to any balanced understanding of today's Middle
East.