Re: Purpose in(g) Palestinian Poetry

Re: Purpose in(g) Palestinian Poetry. Review of Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb

by Samuel E. Martin

The words of the Palestinian poets who have defied occupation over the generations remain as timely and potent as they have ever been.

Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb. Seven Stories Press, 2025, 208 pp., $18.95. ISBN 9781644214558

More than two years on from the launch of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, how do we begin to characterize the present moment? Rather than weigh up ways in which the situation has either become better or worse for Palestinians in recent weeks, perhaps we ought simply to acknowledge that no moment of the genocide has not been desperate, sordid, and obscene, but that the desperation and obscenity continue to mutate before our eyes – assuming we care to look, that is. Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians since “ceasefire” was declared, and it persists in obstructing the delivery of vital aid to people who now face the prospect of rebuilding their lives on ravaged lands and toxic rubble. The fear expressed in October by Canadian-Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu – namely, that the American administration’s 20-point plan for Gaza amounted to little more than a “repackaging of the genocide” – certainly appears well-founded. As Sameeh Al-Qassem wrote with bitter irony in his poem sequence “Job’s Diary” beneath the date 7/5/67 (exactly a month after the outbreak of the Six-Day War): “Nothing new” (p. 98).

Even as Israel’s enablers seem bent on dragging the region through yet another spin of an abhorrent colonial vortex, the words of the Palestinian poets who have defied occupation over the generations remain as timely and potent as they have ever been. Seven Stories Press has recognized as much by reissuing Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, a groundbreaking anthology from 1970 that has earned exalted status among liberation movements worldwide despite long being out of print. The original edition by Drum & Spear Press, edited and (primarily) translated by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb, gathered poems from a dozen poets including Sameeh Al-Qassem, Mahmoud Darweesh, Rashed Hussein, and Fadwa Touqan; the 2025 edition adds a further twenty-nine poems, most of them by new contributors. “It would be a withered soul,” declared Samuel W. Allen in his 1970 preface, “who did not respond to the passionate and moving witness of national purpose in much of this collection” (pp. xxi-xxii). Over half a century later, that purpose has lost none of its urgency.

Enemy of the Sun places an uncompromising emphasis on the thematic unity of the poems presented. The texts are not grouped by author; indeed, the poets’ very names are given only in the book’s front and back matter, leaving nothing except titles, page breaks, and occasional illustrations by Abed Abedi to separate one poem from another. Many readers will no doubt recognize iconic poems such as Mahmoud Darweesh’s “Identity Card,” which opens this collection, yet the values of common identity and shared struggle take precedence here over individual circumstance and reputation:

Record!
I am an Arab
without a name – without title
patient in a country
with people enraged (p. 23)

When translating Darweesh and others into English, Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb have tended to use punctuation sparingly. Lines upon lines of free verse cascade down the page largely unimpeded, whether in anguished lament or galvanizing incantation. Even the book’s sans-serif typeface seems deliberately chosen to facilitate the flow of words.

We shall fire poetry
from our throats
and transcend our wailing
make it into wine
to be served in the festival
and sung in the streets (p. 106)

These texts, in short, aspire to be serviceable, to be recited and recycled as the needs of the people’s struggle dictate; moreover, they function as powerful channels in a cross-fertilization of poetic and political resistance movements around the world. Various poems in the anthology honor individual figures from Federico García Lorca to Patrice Lumumba, victims of genocide from the Jews of Europe to the Indigenous peoples of North America, and anticolonial opposition from Algeria to Vietnam. In a new preface to the 2025 edition of Enemy of the Sun, Greg Thomas tells the extraordinary tale of how Sameeh Al-Qassem’s title poem was inadvertently attributed to George Jackson, the inspirational Black Panther activist, following Jackson’s murder by prison guards in 1971; Thomas calls the episode “a magical mistake of revolutionary solidarity and kinship” (p. xiv).

Just as these poems have circulated for decades among readers and freedom fighters, some familiar literary paradigms and figures circulate within the poems themselves, gathering subversive impetus along the way. Notably, several poets draw from the inexhaustible wellspring that is the Thousand and One Nights in order to test its usefulness for a contemporary Palestinian context of oppression and revolt. In “A Letter to Two Children on the East Bank,” Fadwa Touqan assumes Shahrazad’s narratory role, yet while declining to tell of Aladdin and Sinbad, she likewise hesitates to embark on a new set of stories, “Fearing they may / Put out the light in your world, / Frighten your childhood, / Rocking the anchors of safety and silence / In your island of innocence” (p. 53). Sameeh Al-Qassem’s “The Children of Rafah” opts to place Aladdin center stage – or, at least, a ten-year-old who happens to bear Aladdin’s name but has none of the usual attributes:

And from Aladdin’s voice came
the birth of the birds of prey:
– I threw stones on the military vehicle
   I distributed pamphlets
   and gave the signal
   and painted slogans
[…]
and we swore by the refugee’s exile
to resist (p. 127)

As for Samar Najia’s new poem “Prisoners,” the allusions in the fourth stanza to “the jasmine’s perfume” and “Aladdin’s magic carpet” inscribe it within the Disney film’s frame of reference, which makes the “electric walls,” “barbed fences” and “torturer’s whips” all the more difficult to stomach (p. 187).  

Although the poems of Refaat Alareer (whom Israel killed in December 2023) do not feature in the anthology, his spirit looms large. Already in 1970, Samuel Allen’s preface highlighted the affinity between the poetry of Palestinian resistance and Claude McKay’s 1919 poem “If We Must Die,” an affinity that Alareer’s now universally beloved poem from 2011, “If I Must Die,” would go on to reaffirm. Meanwhile, at least two new contributors to Enemy of the Sun, Samar Najia and Zeina Azzam, continue to serve as mentors for We Are Not Numbers, the writing program for Gazan youth which Alareer cofounded in 2015. Azzam’s poem “A Single Sentence” fleshes out a May 2021 tweet by the historian Ussama Makdisi summarizing the Palestinian struggle – and I use the image of flesh advisedly, for the third section of the poem evokes Shylock’s famous monologue (“Hath not a Jew eyes?”) from The Merchant of Venice:

Fingers and arms, legs and feet
Heads that contemplate, hearts that plead
Lungs that breathe teargas
Flesh that meets bullets
We bleed, we bleed

Need we prove more?
We are human. (p. 199)

Zeina Azzam may well have been recalling Refaat Alareer’s empathetic teaching of Shakespeare to his students in Gaza, who came to see their own experiences of prejudice and persecution reflected in Shylock’s plight. (One might also think of Isabella Hammad’s recent novel Enter Ghost, in which the characters defiantly stage an Arabic-language production of Hamlet in the West Bank.)

In a radio interview for France Culture a few years ago, Jean-Yves Masson described translation as an emblematic case of “the re- function.” The original edition of Enemy of the Sun, then, was already a double re-: the oppositional re- of resistance joined with the iterative re- of poems written again in another language. Now, in 2025, as the intolerable re- of mass murder and colonial ruination in Palestine goes on, this updated edition sees the promise of its poets’ words reinvigorated. “Nothing new” in one sense, ever new and necessary in another.

Samuel Martin teaches French at the University of Pennsylvania. He has translated works by several contemporary writers including Jean-Christophe Bailly and Georges Didi-Huberman; his translation of Didi-Huberman’s Bark was a co-winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.

Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, November 25, 2025