Mahmoud Darweesh knew better than most the radical potential of poetry: “We live in a new age,” he writes, “The past is dead / And he who writes poetry / In the age of the storms, of the atom / Is a prophet.” Seven Stories Press has reassembled such a collection of prophets in Enemy of the Sun, an anthology of Palestinian poetry. The collection was originally released in 1970 by the now-defunct Drum & Spear Press, a Washington, DC-based publisher that dedicated itself to the cause of racial liberation.
The first anthology of Palestinian poetry in the US, Enemy of the Sun was partially responsible for awakening the Black Power movement to the Palestinian cause. It first takes us back to the early years: we join Darweesh as he writes from prison after the Six-Day War, and follow Sameeh al-Qassem, the author of the titular poem, as he accuses the UN’s Security Council of inaction. “My voice,” he cries, “reaches you / by air mail / from the forest of blood / fire, bitterness and tents.”
Both the beauty and tragedy of this new release is that it now includes contemporary voices. For instance, Ali Ibrahim al-Tawil, a doctor, writes from Gaza that displacement is “to be torn apart / from the inside / before becoming / a pile of remains / on the outside.” Fifty-five years have elapsed between these poems, but not enough has changed.
- Enemy of the Sun edited and translated by Nassur Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb is available from Seven Stories Press, details.
