In the Presence of Marwan Barghouti, We Gaze at the Sun Twice
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In the Presence of Marwan Barghouti, We Gaze at the Sun Twice

He has appeared before us like an urgent telegram from his cell, visiting us Palestinian after Palestinian, the free one who raises prayers in our homes, he is Marwan Barghouti.

He knows how to begin and how to end, through this righteous transition from the roof of beginnings to the war of freedom, he rises in a tolling that revives distances from a land that was Palestinian and still is, hardly 200 km away from our occupied capital, during his continuous journey to his village, Kober.

There are those who seize freedom as a collective heroism, echoing this land to him as he passes through it dozens of times, patting the heart’s recesses, as he tears open the drawers of the sea within us, sometimes with prayers and sometimes with certainty.

We are the isolated ones, and he is now memorializing the space and consecrating it, making the flame roar beneath his feet, and the flaming bullet is burned in his blood, reaching us from the clutches of his face, and his brown hands, where he writes the alphabet of the country with the ink of his heart, and revives the lungs of the banner within us in our book of freedom.

Barghouti seized the bend of the wind and the nobility of the elements, for he truly embraced his Palestinian identity: as a child, then as a youth, and then as a freedom fighter, roaming the squares of Birzeit University to the fields of Ramallah and its camps, and then from prison to prison, into exile where he was forcefully displaced, and then back again.


In the presence of Marwan Barghouti, who unlocks the chains of wishes, surviving assassination attempts until his body was arrested, and the sentencing was life imprisonment five times, plus forty years, as the ashes of homes shatter on his fingers, he turns towards his daughter and his three other children, and his wife.

He who grew up under the guidance of the immortal martyr Yasser Arafat, and martyr Faisal Husseini, and assumed many positions, not least of which was secretary of the Fatah movement in the West Bank, and then a member of the legislative council for Fatah, until he was elected to the central committee of Fatah while he was still in prison, and a people rests entirely on his arms.

Barghouti was not ashes in a jar, but rather he stripped the pain of the land from every corner and stone, pouring down like olive leaves from every door.

We will write on his prison cell here was Marwan Barghouti; and it will become a sanctuary and a shrine for those seeking the forthcoming freedom, and we will carve under our skins our kaffiyehs (white and black) as we rewrite history, gazing at the sun twice.

This article expresses the opinion of its author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Sada News Agency.