Palestinian-American author and poet Ibtisam Barakat

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Ibtisam Barakat

By Jill Renae Hicks

Columbia Daily Tribune

Sunday, March 18, 2012

For Palestinian-American author and poet Ibtisam Barakat, writing is not just a pursuit — it is almost a fever. "I don't think I can think without writing," she said, scratching her pen in a small notebook even as she spoke. She writes "every minute, every hour." Writing her thoughts, she said, brings her to her real self and makes those thoughts truly her own.

Barakat grew up in the West Bank under periods of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her first visit to the United States was as an intern for the magazine The Nation, and she eventually earned two master's degrees — in journalism and human development — from the University of Missouri. Her 2007 young adult memoir, "Tasting the Sky," propelled her to national recognition. In the novel, she recalls her family's escape to Jordan in wartime, their eventual return to Ramallah and the events that unfolded during the family's stay in Barakat's favorite childhood home. Stealing sweet pastries from a vendor's cart, running shoeless from gunfire, adopting the family goat as a pet, spying on Israeli soldiers with her brothers, making friends with the Arabic letter Alef, whom she believed lived in pieces of chalk — all of these are described in a winsome, honest childhood voice.

Barakat had to let other voices inside herself recede and allow her childhood voice to speak when she wrote "Tasting the Sky," she said. "I negotiate my life through writing, so I used writing to heal that past in important ways, to tell it against much silence in myself and in the world about childhood and war."

She added that children have much to say, but their voices often are suppressed or ignored.

The writer first met staff from The Nation while they were on a visit to Palestine, and then-Editor-in-Chief Victor Navasky invited her to participate in an internship at the magazine. The best skill she learned there, Barakat acknowledged, was fact-checking. "It is as though every piece of information is on trial until fact-checked enough. There is responsibility and great pride in that practice," she said. Even now, she checks her written facts against three different sources....READ MORE

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