Café Ramallah By Moheeb Barghouti Hey short story writers, poets and novelists of either sex kick me out of your gatherings, and pour oil on my memory for the likes of me are good for nothing but homelessness and leftovers. You deserve Kundera, George Bataille, Rimbaud and Satre. My thoughts are sinful, my waters sewage and my room is smaller than Your Excellency’s bathrooms … Oh, friends of cookery, do as you wish; use every weapon of torture and destruction to inflict pain on me, to turn me into ruins, and use every kind of technology to drag my memory through the streets; yet I beg of Your Excellencies and I crave from Your Honours; leave me Café Ramallah and go wherever you wish, even to hell. 14