Read against the terrible incineration of Rafah today, this poem of resistance and refusal, by Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim, is as powerful now as it was fifty years ago.
“Enemy of the Sun” was the title of a collection of poetry of Palestinian resistance, edited by scholars Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb, and originally published in 1970 by Drum and Spear Press, the Washington, DC bookstore and publishing house of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The title of the collection comes from a powerful poem by Samih al-Qasim (May 11, 1939 – August 19, 2014), a much beloved Palestinian poet and essayist from the village of Al Remeh in Galilee.
However, through a curious but momentous editorial slip, “Enemy of the Sun” is often associated with the martyred Black revolutionary George Jackson. After his assassination on August 21, 1971, a hand-written copy of “Enemy of the Sun” was found among the 99 books in Jackson’s cell in California’s San Quentin State Prison. That September, al-Qasim’s poem was published across a two-page spread in the Black Panther Intercommunal New Service under Jackson’s byline.
In 1973, passages from “Enemy of the Sun,” properly attributed to al-Qasim, appeared in “The Voice and the Mirror-Poems from Palestine,” a special section of Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Freedom Movement. Yet for decades, “Enemy of the Sun” was associated with Jackson, not al-Qasim. When the Black Panther’s editorial “error” was discovered, it was, rightly, not only interpreted as a sign of the profound, subterranean literary bonds between al-Qasim and Jackson, but also between the Black and Palestinian struggles.
That solidarity remains unshaken today. And al-Qasim’s great poem of resistance and refusal, read against the terrible incineration of Rafah, is as powerful now as it was fifty years ago. For these reasons – and with the promise that the liberation of Palestine is at hand – we reprint Samih al-Qasim’s “Enemy of the Sun” below.
Enemy of the Sun
Samih al-Qasim
I may – if you wish – lose my livelihood
I may sell my shirt and bed.
I may work as a stone cutter,
A street sweeper, a porter.
I may clean your stores
Or rummage your garbage for food.
I may lie down hungry,
O enemy of the sun,
But
I shall not compromise
And to the last pulse in my veins
I shall resist.
You may take the last strip of my land,
Feed my youth to prison cells.
You may plunder my heritage.
You may burn my books, my poems
Or feed my flesh to the dogs.
You may spread a web of terror
On the roofs of my village,
O enemy of the sun,
But
I shall not compromise
And to the last pulse in my veins
I shall resist.
You may put out the light in my eyes.
You may deprive me of my mother’s kisses.
You may curse my father, my people.
You may distort my history,
You may deprive my children of a smile
And of life’s necessities.
You may fool my friends with a borrowed face.
You may build walls of hatred around me.
You may glue my eyes to humiliations,
O enemy of the sun,
But
I shall not compromise
And to the last pulse in my veins
I shall resist.
O enemy of the sun
The decorations are raised at the port.
The ejaculations fill the air,
A glow in the hearts,
And in the horizon
A sail is seen
Challenging the wind
And the depths.
It is Ulysses
Returning home
From the sea of loss
It is the return of the sun,
Of my exiled ones
And for her sake, and his
I swear
I shall not compromise
And to the last pulse in my veins
I shall resist,
Resist—and resist.
Samih Al-Qasim, “Enemy of the sun,” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, Edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb (Washington, DC and Dar es Salaam: Drum and Spear Press, 1970).
Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance will be reissued by Seven Stories Press in February, 2025.
Michael Li is Senior Counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
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