EDMUND GHAREEB, [email protected]
Ghareeb is co-editor with Nasser Aruri of a just-released new edition of Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance from Seven Stories Press. The original edition was published by Drum and Spear Press, the publishing house of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in 1970.
He said today: “The title of the collection comes from a poem by Sameeh al-Qasem, a Palestinian from Galilee, but it was attributed for years to George Jackson, a member of the Black Panther Party. This happened because after Jackson was killed in prison in 1971 a handwritten copy of ‘Enemy of the Sun’ was found among the books in his cell. It was prominently published in Black Panther newspapers under Jackson’s name and came to be associated with him in the U.S. At the same time, the phrase ‘Zionism is an Enemy of the Sun’ became a summary of Palestinian resistance to Zionist occupation.”
The book has a forward by Greg Thomas who teaches Black Studies and Literature at Howard University and discovered the misattribution, calling it “a magic mistake of revolutionary solidarity and kinship.” He curated the traveling exhibition “George Jackson and the Sun of Palestine,” which opened in the West Bank in 2015 and was most recently shown in Gaza City. He has also stated that SNCC’s pro-Palestine position — such as publishing the original edition — contributed to its dissolution, as funding from “white liberalism in general and white ‘Jewish’ liberalism in particular came to a screeching halt.”
The poem begins:
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.
For more background and the full poem, see here. Other poets in the book include Tawfiq Zayyad and Mahmoud Darwish. The new edition contains new poems, some from Gaza by Hend Joudat and others.
Ghareeb has taught as a professor at American University, Georgetown, University of Virginia and George Washington University. His other books include book The Kurdish Question in Iraq, War in the Gulf and Split Vision: The Portrayal of Arabs in the American Media.