Enemy of the Sun
عدو الشمس
Al-Qasim's defiant refrain — 'I shall not compromise... I shall resist' — traveled far beyond Palestine: a handwritten copy was found among George Jackson's prison books.
يا عدو الشمس لكن لن أساوم
وإلى آخر نبض في عروقي سأقاوم
You may take the last strip of my land, Feed my youth to prison cells. O enemy of the sun, But I shall not compromise And to the last pulse in my veins I shall resist.
(excerpt)
About this poem
“Enemy of the Sun” (Aduww al-Shams) builds verse after verse of concession — perhaps you take my livelihood, my clothes, the last strip of my land, feed my flesh to the dogs — and answers each with the same refusal: “I shall not compromise… I shall resist.” The poem gave its title to Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance (1970), the anthology edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb that first carried Palestinian resistance poetry to a wide English-language readership.
A copy of that anthology was found among the ninety-nine books in George Jackson’s cell after the Black revolutionary was killed at San Quentin in 1971; Jackson had transcribed the poem by hand and shared it with fellow prisoners. When it later ran in the Black Panther newspaper misattributed to Jackson, the error only testified to how completely its defiance had crossed borders.
Sources
- Samih Al-Qasim, George Jackson, and “Enemy of the Sun” — World Literature Today (English translation)
- يا عدو الشمس — Manshur (Arabic text)
Connected in the archive
2 connected records2 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
written by — 1 record
- Samih al-Qasimسميح القاسم
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "samih-al-qasim" → Samih al-Qasim
names this record — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Red Tuesday and the Songs of the Prison
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Samih al-Qasim, 1970 — “feed my youth to prison cells.” The prison had by then changed hands, and the refusal had not changed at all.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Enemy of the Sun — Samih al-Qasim.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poems/enemy-of-the-sun.- MLA
“Enemy of the Sun — Samih al-Qasim.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poems/enemy-of-the-sun. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-enemy-of-the-sun, title = {Enemy of the Sun — Samih al-Qasim}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poems/enemy-of-the-sun}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }