Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance - Paperback

by Naseer Aruri (Editor), Edmund Ghareeb (Editor)

A collection of Palestinian poetry originally published in 1970 that resonates with liberation and civil rights struggles around the world.

This updated edition for the current generation of activists features new poems translated by Edmund Ghareeb, an internationally recognized Lebanese American scholar, and a new foreword by Dr. Greg Thomas.

In 1971, in the wake of George Jackson's killing by San Quentin prison guards, a poem entitled "Enemy of the Sun" was found among ninety-nine books in the revolutionary's cell. The handwritten poem came to be circulated in Black Panther newspapers under Jackson's name, assumed to be a vestige of his more than a decade long incarceration. But Jackson never wrote the poem; it was authored by the Palestinian poet Sameeh Al-Qassem and had been included in an anthology of the same title a year before Jackson's death.

Originally published by Drum & Spear, the publishing arm of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance links twelve poets working in a poetics of refusal and of hope. Bearing witness to decades of Zionist occupation, to a diaspora exiled in refugee camps and writers held captive in Israeli jails, the collection offers a means to an end: "as poetry, yes it sings--as bullets on a mission; it calls for change."

In each poem is a whole life--joy, love, beauty, rage, sorrow, suffering--and in each life is a record of resistance: the traces of a people who refuse to leave their homeland, who time and again alchemize grief into principled struggle. In the intertwined histories of this book, and in the unyielding political edge of the poems themselves, is a long story of solidarity between oppressed peoples: from Palestine to South Africa to Algeria to Vietnam to the United States.

Author Biography

NASEER H. ARURI (1934-2015) graduated from American International College and received his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, where he later taught. His specialty was in the fields of Middle East governments and politics, international studies, and American government and foreign policy. He taught at Southeastern Massachusetts University and traveled extensively as a researcher throughout the Middle East.

EDMUND GHAREEB is of Lebanese origin and has traveled widely throughout the Middle East. He earned a degree in political science and history from American International College and an MA and PhD from Georgetown University, before teaching as a professor at American University, University of Virginia, and George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. He was the editor of Dialog, the graduate journal of Georgetown as well as a frequent interviewer of Arab liberation leaders who visit the United States. He lives in Washington DC.

A native of Southeast, Washington DC, GREG THOMAS teaches Black Studies and Literature in English at Howard University. He is author of The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire as well as Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge and Pleasure in Lil' Kim's Lyricism. His many articles and essays appear in a wide variety of academic and other periodicals. Currently, he is completing a book on the writings of George Jackson and continuing to curate the traveling "George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine" exhibition, which first opened in October 2015 at the museum of the Abu Jihad Center for the Political Captive's Movement in the West Bank. Its most recent mounting was in Gaza City.

Contributors include: Mahmoud Darweesh, Rashed Hussein, Sameeh Al-Qassem, Tawfiq Zayyad, Salem Jubran, Nizar Qabbani, Fadwa Touqan, Arshad Tawfiq, Yusif Hamdan, Abdel Rahman Muhamad Rafie, Hadia Abdul-Hadi, Fawzi Jiryis Abdullah.