{"id":12231,"date":"2014-08-20T06:31:18","date_gmt":"2014-08-20T10:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=12231"},"modified":"2014-08-20T06:31:18","modified_gmt":"2014-08-20T10:31:18","slug":"palestinian-poet-samih-al-qasim-dies-at-75","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/palestinian-poet-samih-al-qasim-dies-at-75\/","title":{"rendered":"Palestinian Poet Samih al-Qasim Dies at\u00a075"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via the always excellent Arab Literature (in English)<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

BY\u00a0MLYNXQUALEY<\/a><\/span><\/span>\u00a0on<\/em>\u00a04<\/a>\u00a0)<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t like you, death<\/em>
\nBut I\u2019m not afraid of you<\/em>
\nAnd I know that my body is your bed<\/em>
\nAnd my spirit is your bed cover<\/em>
\nI know that your banks are narrow for me<\/em>
\nI don\u2019t love you, death<\/em>
\nBut I\u2019m not afraid of you.<\/em>–One of Samih al-Qasim\u2019s final poems<\/a>\"samih2\"<\/a>Beloved Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer, followinga worsening of his health this past week<\/a>. He was 75.Al-Qasim \u2014 whose stature in Palestine ranked alongside Mahmoud Darwish\u2019s \u2014 will be widely mourned.<\/p>\n

Al-Qasim was born in 1939 in the Jordanian city of az-Zarqa, where\u00a0his father was working at the time. He hailed\u00a0from a Druze family from the town of Rameh in the Upper Galilee, and attended school there and in Nazareth, as his family did not flee in 1948.<\/p>\n

As Dr. Issa Boullata wrote over at\u00a0World Literature Today:<\/em><\/p>\n

Together with poets like Mahmoud Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad, Rashed Hussein, and others in Israel, he expressed Palestinian opposition to Israel in the 1950s in recurrent oral poetic recitations at village gatherings\u2014activities that were celebrated in the Arab world as \u201cresistance poetry\u201d and later published. Al-Qasim was eighteen when his first collection of poems was published, and he was to experience Israeli prisons several times because of his writings, face personal trouble in his livelihood, and publish censored poems.<\/p>\n

He was\u00a0one of the first Druze to refuse to serve in the Israeli army<\/a>\u00a0and is credited, along with Darwish, with founding Palestinian resistance literature. As his stature grew, he wrote poems that were recited and sung across the region, often\u00a0set to music by Marcel Khalife<\/a>.Ghassan Kanafani wrote of Al Qasim\u2019s poem \u201cKafr Qasim\u201d that it was \u201cmemorized throughout the entire Galilee.\u201d<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0in a recent interview<\/a>, al-Qasim told Liam Brown that he doesn\u2019t care how he will be remembered:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the Palestinian people will be free, if the Arab world will be united, if social justice will be victorious in all the world, if there will be international peace. I don\u2019t care who will remember me or my poems. I don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless, al-Qasim will be long remembered, for his poems, his journalism, and his activism.<\/p>\n

Many other Palestinian poets penned tributes to al-Qasim on Tuesday, including Mourid Barghouti and Majeed al-Barghouthi:<\/p>\n

\"mourid\"<\/a>\"majeed\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Al-Qasim also recently published a\u00a0memoir,\u00a0It Is Just an Ashtray.\u00a0<\/em>In\u00a0Al-Akhbar<\/em>\u2018s review<\/a>, they quote from the wide-ranging book:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne day I was marching in a large protest in Haifa and I was chanting with protesters \u2018Jewish-Arab Brotherhood.\u2019 Suddenly a Jewish Israeli challenged me from across the side walk yelling \u2018this will never happen. There will be no such brotherhood!\u2019\u201d al-Qasim says, adding, \u201cIn a flash\u2026I told that provocative person \u2018hell if I care\u2019 and continued on my way marching enthusiastically\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Only one collection of al-Qasim\u2019s\u00a0works,\u00a0Sadder than Water<\/em>, trans. Nazih Kassis<\/a>, has been published in\u00a0English translation. However, numerous individual poems have also made their way across the language barrier.<\/p>\n

One of his most well-known, \u201cTravel Tickets,\u201d trans. A.Z. Foreman:<\/p>\n

The day I\u2019m killed,
\nmy killer, rifling through my pockets,
\nwill find travel tickets:
\nOne to peace,
\none to the fields and the rain,
\nand one to the conscience of humankind.
\nDear killer of mine, I beg you:
\nDo not stay and waste them.
\nTake them, use them.
\nI beg you to travel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Selected works by Al-Qasim:<\/strong><\/p>\n

PBS:\u00a0Samih al-Qasim Reads \u2018End of the Talk with a Jailer\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

The Guardian:\u00a0There was a village called Sireen\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

PoemHunter:\u00a0Six poems<\/a><\/p>\n

The ArabArts Blog:\u00a0From\u00a0The Qur\u2019an of Death and Jasmine<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via the always excellent Arab Literature (in English): BY\u00a0MLYNXQUALEY\u00a0on\u00a0AUGUST 20, 2014 \u2022\u00a0(\u00a04\u00a0) I don\u2019t like you, death But I\u2019m not afraid of you And I know that my body is your bed And my...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76,79,830,91],"tags":[1567],"class_list":["post-12231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries","category-palestine","category-poet","category-poetry","tag-samih-al-qasim"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12231"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12235,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12231\/revisions\/12235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}