An outcast since childhood, seen and treated by his society as different and distant for being unique, he found his friends to be the rocks and trees of his village, and the words of his language.
He returned to Palestine to become a professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University, and went on to work for three years in Al-Quds University as a professor of Literature Critique and Theater in 1997, during which he was a founding member of the Palestinian “House of Poetry” and Publishing Manager in a couple of literature magazines.
[1] The various and diverse works of Hussein Barghouthi include novels, poetry, autobiography, critique, folklore, song lyrics, theater and cinema script, and many intellectual research and studies scattered in newspapers, books and magazines.
[1] His top works include: Barghouthi wrote his masterpiece, “The blue light” (2001), on his experience of living with the unorthodox, outcast and “mad” people of the streets of Seattle, frequenting at “The Grand Illusion” cinema, “The Blue Moon” bar and “The Last Exit” café, drawn to them by their names.
[4] He wrote his book “The third bank of the Jordan River”, published first in 1984, on his journey in Europe, describing his mental state at the time, that was edging both reality and insanity and not settling in either.
The book was meant to give the magical place of “Deir al Juwani”, an area of wilderness and mountains in the village of Kobar, eternal life, and so it did.
[1] The book was later translated to French by Marianne Weiss, and published as "Je Serai Parmi les Amandiers" in 2008.
[3] Among the Almond Trees, translated into English by Ibrahim Muhawi in June 2022, was a 2023 winner of the Palestine Book Award.
[7] Considered a cornerstone in cognition and psychology, in the form of an extended essay, the book serves as a therapist to the reader.
He introduces is it saying "The main reason is no more than a complicated reflection of the dominant social relations in a certain phase of time".
[10] Starting with a trip to Jibya, a woodland between the villages of Kobar and Umm Safa, Barghouthi loses his way and enters a state of disorientation - also mentioned in his other books - on his way back to the city.
The transformation of architecture from normal houses and rural life in the 1960s in Palestine, to new and bigger buildings, towers and villas that all “seem to say that the world is split only into ‘what is me, and what is not me’”.
The city of Ramallah, he explains, is a constant battle between the historical and the extinct place, due to the external entry of colonialism and the internal entry of capitalism and private ownership, “a plot similar to a plot of a realistic novel of a temporal and spatial progression” with a tangible script.
[10] The title, which is also the final conclusion of the script, can be explained in the last page: "That which was 'before the beginning' haunts it like an invisible ghost, and it tries to bury it, or deny it, but fails.
His philosophy is based on that each individual should re-build his “pyramid of thought”,[9] and that the reader has to be an active receptor and participator in this process of developing creativity.
In his writings, he presented new concepts to explain the mind, heart, language, psychological conflict, time, memory, cancer, blossom, occupation, love, exile, nature, passion, pain, magnitude, madness and poetry; all of which are themes discussed in his various works.
His holistic approach to each genre of literature, which combined philosophy and unbound experimentation with language, was a new and revolutionary method of writing.
In many of his poetic writings, he creates new words which he conceived from philosophical exploration; it was his style, more than the work itself, that gained Barghouthi his uniqueness and popularity.
Barghouthi's personal focus was his poetry, which he considered most important, and aimed to help the reader better understand it through writing narratives.
His popularity in the Arab world grew after the release of his postmortem narratives, mostly in his homeland Palestine, which increased interest and support for publishing older works of his, like "The Vision" and "Liquid Mirrors", both which are poetry books; his narratives are considered a simpler form of his poetry.