Without a Passport
Born without a passport, the poet watches his country turn into prisons — and answers by planting a country, a sun, and wheat inside every house.
I was born without a passport, I grew up…
(opening lines, translated by Sinan Antoon)
About this poem
Rashid Hussein was one of the Palestinians who remained inside Israel after 1948 and lived under military government — a population that held identity cards and, for years, no meaningful right of movement. “Without a Passport” begins from that condition literally: born without a passport, grown up watching the country turn into prisons, still without a passport.
The poem’s second movement is a refusal to accept the terms. Rather than petition for the document, the speaker sows: raises a country in every house, a sun, wheat, trees, and writes verse to make the people of his village happy — happy without a passport. What follows is a harder recognition. A man whose land has been taken, he says, learns not to love the rain, and if he returns he returns home without a passport; and the speaker admits he is tired of minds that have hardened into a single chain of hotels for longings that cannot give birth without one.
Sinan Antoon’s translation was published by Jadaliyya alongside “With the Land,” marking Land Day — the commemoration of the strike and protests of 30 March 1976 against Israeli land expropriation, in which six Palestinians were killed. Hussein founded the Land Movement, and thousands attended his funeral after he died in a fire in his New York apartment in 1977.
Sources
Connected in the archive
3 connected records3 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
written by — 1 record
- Rashid Husseinراشد حسين
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "rashid-hussein" → Rashid Hussein
named in this record — 2 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Land Day
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Sinan Antoon's translation was published by Jadaliyya alongside "With the Land," marking Land Day — the commemoration of the strike and protests of 30 March 1976 against Israeli land expropriation, in which six Palestinians were killed.
- Land Day
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Sinan Antoon's translation was published by Jadaliyya alongside "With the Land," marking Land Day — the commemoration of the strike and protests of 30 March 1976 against Israeli land expropriation, in which six Palestinians were killed.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Without a Passport — Rashid Hussein.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poems/without-a-passport.- MLA
“Without a Passport — Rashid Hussein.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poems/without-a-passport. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-without-a-passport, title = {Without a Passport — Rashid Hussein}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poems/without-a-passport}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }