#Samih al-Qasim

[hyperions-fate]

My dear brother - please forgive me. I will not visit your childhood tree in al-Birweh and I will not engrave our two names on it... Simply, and with complete honesty: I cannot do that. But there is something else I can do for my sake and yours: engrave our names on the wind. I can etch the wind into the homeland. I can inscribe the homeland on my flesh. I can scatter my flesh in the poem.

Samih al-Qasim, 'Letter to Mahmoud Darwish' (6th October 1986)

[tendermimi]

Samih al-Qasim, Shalom

[kitchen-light]

Samih al-Qasim, from "The Tent Generations | Palestinian Poets", edited and translated by Mohammed Sawaie, Banipal Books, 2022

[thenewgothictwice]

Samih Al-Qasim, translated by Elliot Colla, “Rafah’s Children” (1971)

"To the one who digs his path through the wounds of millions

To he whose tanks crush all the roses in the garden

Who breaks windows in the night

Who sets fire to a garden and museum and sings of freedom.

Who stomps on songbirds in the public square.

Whose planes drop bombs on childhood’s dream.

Who smashes rainbows in the sky.

Tonight, the children of the impossible roots have an announcement for you,

Tonight, the children of Rafah say:

“We have never woven hair braids into coverlets.

We have never spat on corpses, nor yanked their gold teeth.

So why do you take our jewelry and give us bombs?

Why do you prepare orphanhood for Arab children?

Thank you, a thousand times over!

Our sadness has now grown up and become a man.

And now, we must fight.”

[edwordsmyth]

Samih al-Qasim

[manwalksintobar]

The Story of a City // Samih al-Qasim

A blue city Dreamt of tourists Shopping day after day.

A dark city Hates tourists Scanning cafés with rifles.

(translated from the Arabic by Abdullah al-Udhari)

[feral-ballad]

Samih al-Qasim, tr. by Abdullah al-Udhari, from Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry; “Slit Lips”

[Text ID: “I would have liked to tell you / The story of a nightingale that died. / I would have liked to tell you / The story… / Had they not slit my lips.”]

[aridante]

Tawfiq Zayyad reading his story “The Disfigured” to Samih al-Qasim & Mahmoud Darwish in Haifa, 1963 // The Palestinian Museum [Digital Archive]

[firstfullmoon]

Samih al-Qasim, “Enemy of the Sun,” trans. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb, in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance

for several decades, this poem was circulated in Black Panthers circles and attributed to George Jackson, a Black revolutionary, because it was found handwritten in his cell after he was killed. Greg Thomas, who discovered this, said it was a “mistake of radical kinship.” [more on this]

[garadinervi]

Enemy of the Sun. Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, Edited by Naseer Hasan Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb, «Poets of Liberation» Series, Drum & Spear Press, Washington, D.C., 1970 [Ottoman History Podcast]

[tendermimi]

Palestinian poets of resistance ♡︎; Samih al-Qasim, Fadwa Tuqan and Mahmoud Darwish amongst olive trees.

[a-queer-seminarian]

"Tickets" by Palestinian resistance poet Samih al Qasim (1939-2014)

The day I'm killed my killer will find tickets in my pockets: One to peace, one to fields and the rain, and one to humanity's conscience. I beg you - please don't waste them. I beg you, you who kill me: Go.

Find more info about al Qasim under the readmore.

Samih al-Qasim very much believed in the power of poetry as a tool of revolutionary change, seeing it as water that drips and drips until, at last, a stone is worn down.

Al-Qasim was born in 1939, making him 8 or 9 for the 1948 Nakba, when over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by Zionist militias.

His family remained, and Al-Qasim actually had Israeli citizenship — which means that he was expected to serve in the Israeli army. He very publicly became the first member of the Druze faith to refuse to serve, writing a letter to the prime minister to say that he was born for poetry, not the gun.

Across the years, his poems were often banned, he was imprisoned multiple times, and he experienced the terror of being hounded by the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret service. In the end, he died of cancer, not Israeli guns or bombs — but it’s clear from "Tickets" that he knew death by murder was all too possible.

This article by Liam Brown, which shares one of al Qasim's last interviews, is definitely worth reading. Here's one quote from it:

"I am a resistance poet, and not only Arab and Palestinian resistance. I am a poet of international resistance. ... I always say racism, Zionism, imperialism - they will beat us only in one condition: that they make us give up our humanity. I will not allow anybody to take from me my humanity…that is my trench. It is there I fight and nobody can ever take from me this barricade.”

[thenewgothictwice]

Samih Al-Qasim, "Enemy of the Sun."

"I may - if you wish - lose my livelihood

I may sell my shirt and bed.

I may work as a stone cutter,

A street sweeper, a porter.

I may clean your stores

Or rummage your garbage for food.

I may lie down hungry,

O enemy of the sun,

But

I shall not compromise

And to the last pulse in my veins

I shall resist.

You may take the last strip of my land,

Feed my youth to prison cells.

You may plunder my heritage.

You may burn my books, my poems

Or feed my flesh to the dogs.

You may spread a web of terror

On the roofs of my village,

O enemy of the sun,

But

I shall not compromise

And to the last pulse in my veins

I shall resist.

You may put out the light in my eyes.

You may deprive me of my mother's kisses.

You may curse my father, my people.

You may distort my history,

You may deprive my children of a smile

And of life's necessities.

You may fool my friends with a borrowed face.

You may build walls of hatred around me.

You may glue my eyes to humiliation,

O enemy of the sun,

But

I shall not compromise

And to the last pulse in my veins

I shall resist.

O enemy of the sun

The decorations are raised at the port.

The ejaculations fill the air,

A glow in the hearts,

And in the horizon

A sail is seen

Challenging the winds

And the depths.

It is Ulysses

Returning home

From the sea of loss

It is the return of the sun,

Of my exiled ones

And for her sake, and his

I swear

I shall not compromise

And to the last pulse in my veins

I shall resist,

Resist - and resist."

[edwordsmyth]

"Universally, poetry of resistance is consciously committed to the global revolution as this revolution is, ultimately, the context that the local revolutionary movement grows within, influences, and is influenced by.

The resistance literature we have in our hands draws our attention to the remarkable quantity and quality of productions chanting for the revolutions of the world and their common causes for freedom. This poem by Mahmoud Darwish titled “Cuban Anthems” expresses the essence of this commitment and its significance:

I touched neither the sugar cane Nor the green land I did not ride a fisherman’s boat in the Caribbean I did not splash a drop of water I did not stay at a hotel for tourists and strangers I did not get drunk in Havana on the sweat of the poor I did not dip my pen in the wound of the wretched and miserable I did not read Cuban poetry But I have of Cuba things and more For the words of revolution are light Read in all languages And the eyes of the revolution are a sun That rains in all weddings And the anthem of the revolution is a melody Known by all bells And the flag in Cuba Is held by the revolutionary in the Aurès And the roots of revolution, no matter how many branches they grow They sprout from the same barricade And the blue, red, and green flame Sparks from the same anger So keep warm… And kindle another fire O you people who feel cold.

When we said that the different dimensions of a resistance literary work coalesce strongly around one central axis, which is the axis of the writer’s own resistance, we were actually summarising this poem in one sentence."

[literature-is-my-utopia]

Samih al Qasim

[feral-ballad]

Samih al-Qasim, tr. by Abdullah al-Udhari, from Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry; “The will of a man dying in exile”