Samih al-Qasim

Samih al-Qasim was born in 1939 in Zarqa, Jordan, to a Druze family from the village of al-Rama in the Galilee, where he grew up and lived most of his life. He came of age as a Palestinian under Israeli military rule and became one of the leading voices of the resistance poetry movement that emerged among Palestinians who remained inside the 1948 borders.

One of the first members of the Druze community to refuse conscription into the Israeli army, al-Qasim was imprisoned and placed under house arrest several times over his life. He worked as a journalist and editor, published dozens of poetry collections, and maintained a celebrated literary friendship with Mahmoud Darwish, with whom he exchanged letters later published as a book. He died in al-Rama on 19 August 2014.

Selected works

• “Travel Tickets” (Tazakir Safar)
• “End of a Discussion with a Jailer”
• Sadder Than Water: New and Selected Poems (trans. Nazih Kassis, Ibis Editions, 2006)
• All Faces but Mine: The Poetry of Samih Al-Qasim (trans. Abdulwahid Lu’lu’a, Syracuse University Press, 2017)

Sources

• Samih al-Qasim — PalQuest
• Samih al-Qasim — Wikipedia