The Poetry They Tried to Erase: Discovering Samih al-Qasim in the Shadow of Genocide

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Samih al-Qasim—a Palestinian poet who endured decades of Israeli oppression—photographed during a visit to Madrid (Wikimedia commons)

I’ve loved poetry since I was a teenager. Poets can express nuance and complexity in ways that I can’t. Poems resonate with and validate inner experiences and feelings I don’t always have words for. Reading Munther Isaac’s Christ In The Rubble, in preparation for our next Book Club on Palestine Series, I have discovered the late Palestinian-Druze poet, Samih al-Qasim (1939-2014). Isaac translates parts of Al-Qasim’s 2009 poem, ‘I Am sorry’, which he describes as a “psalm of lament”.

Many people, including supporters of the Palestinians sometimes forget that Gaza’s genocide didn’t just ‘happen’ in isolation. As Isaac says, the attack on Gaza is “one more very intense episode of this process of the erasure of Palestinians, their displacement and dispossession.” (—Munther Isaac, Christ in the Rubble). As I witness this ongoing erasure from afar, I find myself experiencing complex emotions. Continuing to live my life while a genocide is unfolding—committed by the very society in which I was born and raised—requires quite a bit of integration (development). I feel all my feelings, and do not turn away from the horrors, the injustice, and the obscene hypocrisy and collusion of the world’s media and powers in the annihilation of an entire people.

Palestinians have always been referred to as ‘Arabs’ in Israel, in stubborn refusal to acknowledge their humanity, identity and history. Most of the time they were rendered invisible in Israel’s deeply segregated society. Palestinians existed as shadows in our midst, exploited for decades in menial, poorly paid jobs. If they were ever acknowledged, it was with contempt and degradation. Settler-colonisers must dehumanise the people they’re attempting to dispossess and replace. No settler-colonial project would be contemplated, let alone executed, if the perpetrators could see the people they have targeted for erasure and replacement as fellow human beings.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I was a direct product of Israeli society and its education system. I was taught to view Palestinians with contempt—to either be blind to their existence, or see them as ‘primitives’, ‘animals’ without culture, achievements, human feelings, morality, or even a soul. Israeli society has elevated ‘othering’ to an art form, and it’s all out in the open now. Emboldened by widespread, persistent support, Israel doesn’t even bother hiding its contempt for the Palestinian people—including children and newborn babies—nor its ultimate plan for them.

​​​​The majority of Israeli Jews continue to view Palestinians the same way I was taught to view them. Israeli society and its politicians relentlessly pressure the international community to embrace their prejudices, and support their barbaric agenda for the Palestinian people.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ This is why it is essential to make a huge fuss about Palestinian history, culture, craft, language, lived experience, cuisine, music, literature, poetry, and more—the full richness that defines all human societies and civilisations.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This in itself is powerful resistance against ‘othering’, dehumanisation and annihilation. They try to erase, we keep writing, teaching, learning and repeating. They try to make us forget, we remember and remind others. They tell us to be enemies, we make stronger connections and bonds of friendship. We should also make a fuss, and protest loudly against our countries’ and media’s decades-long indifference to Palestinian suffering, and their obscene and unsupportable collusion with Israel’s genocidal settler-colonialism.

I share with you ‘Enemy of the Sun’, Samih al-Qasim’s poem from 1970—the year I started primary school in Israel, oblivious to the colossal, and live crime scene I was born into, and in which I existed for twenty-seven years.

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Enemy of the Sun

Samih al-Qasim

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 humiliations,
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 wind
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.

Samih Al-Qasim, “Enemy of the sun,” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance , Edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb (Washington, DC and Dar es Salaam: Drum and Spear Press, 1970).

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