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" The Occupied Territories; you think there is absolutely no way you can get to it. Do you see how close it is? How touchable? How real?
When the eye sees it, it has all the clarify of earth and pebbles and hills and rocks. It has its colours and its temperatures and its wild plants too.
Who would dare to make it into an abstraction now that it has declared its physical self to the senses?
It is no longer ’the beloved’ in the poetry of resistance, or an item on a political party program, and it is not an argument or a metaphor. It stretches before me, as touchable as a scorpion, a bird, a well; visible as a field of chalk, as the prints of shoes.
I asked myself, what is so special about it except that we have lost it? 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. "
― Mourid Barghouti , رأيت رام الله
