By Edmund Ghareeb & Atul Singh
Editor-in-Chief Atul Singh speaks with historian and author Edmund Ghareeb about Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, a landmark anthology first published in 1970. The book’s trajectory — from repeated rejections to publication by an Afro-diasporic press, its later obscurity and eventual reissue — tells how Palestinian poetry became both testimony and a tool of resistance when political avenues failed.
Ghareeb traces the anthology’s origins to 1969. As a Georgetown student visiting the Middle East, he interviewed PLO chairman Yasser Arafat in Jordan and attended a reading by Palestinian poets, some recently freed from prison. Deeply moved, he returned to the U.S. and began translating works by Samih al-Qasim, Mahmoud Darwish and others for student outlets. He teamed with Naseer Aruri to assemble a manuscript that was rejected by 13 publishers. Beacon Press considered it but withdrew under external pressure.
The breakthrough came when Drum and Spear Press — founded by activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — agreed to publish the manuscript after Ghareeb argued the parallels between Palestinian and African American struggles. Drum and Spear printed ten thousand copies; they sold out and made the collection a bestseller. The anthology’s title came from an al-Qasim poem: a defiant image of refusing to be eclipsed, which came to symbolize the collection.
For Ghareeb, Palestinian poetry is inseparable from the 1948 Nakba — the mass displacements that shaped Palestinian life and exile. Poets responded with anger, grief, love, calls for solidarity and appeals to dignity. Their work drew on classical Arabic forms and the modernizing Nahda currents, linking Palestinian voices to wider Arab and diasporic literary movements. Though overshadowed regionally by poets from Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, Palestinian writers nevertheless carried a distinctive testimony of dispossession and endurance.
Translation played a crucial role in the anthology’s impact and later rediscovery. An intriguing episode involved George Jackson, a Black Panther leader killed in prison, who had copied two poems from Enemy of the Sun. When Black newspapers printed them, Jackson’s name was sometimes mistakenly attached, but the episode revealed a felt kinship between struggles: oppressed peoples recognizing their experience in one another’s words. Such cross-movement translation bridged geographies and politics.
Singh and Ghareeb also stress that the Palestinian movement of mid-20th century was broadly socialist and ecumenical. Long before contemporary associations with Islamist currents, Arab nationalism and socialism — from Nasserism to Ba’athist influences — shaped the PLO and much Palestinian political thought. Many leading intellectuals and activists were Christian; early leftists often allied with Jewish socialists and expressed solidarity with anti-imperialist movements worldwide. Poets reflected that pluralism: some, like Rashid Hussein, embodied intercommunal ties personally; others wrote about Vietnam, African Americans and Indigenous struggles abroad.
Religiously plural imagery appears across the poetry. Mahmoud Darwish could invoke Jesus while another poet might echo the trials of Job. This was less an abstract literary choice than a reflection of a historically diverse Palestinian society and a deliberate statement of coexistence and shared human claims.
A central theme of Enemy of the Sun is the struggle for recognition. The poets demand that Palestinians be seen as a people with rights and dignity after decades of dispossession, neglect and erasure — first by British imperial decisions and later by state formations that excluded them. Ghareeb emphasizes the human depth in these works: they assert that Palestinians are “a people like anybody else,” enduring loss but refusing to disappear.
The anthology also includes notable women’s voices. Fadwa Touqan stands out for imagery of a tree battered by storms yet rooted and rising — an emblem of resilience that reads as prophecy. Such female perspectives broaden the anthology’s emotional and political scope.
After years in which original copies became scarce collector’s items, Seven Stories Press reissued Enemy of the Sun with new poems, confirming the collection’s continuing resonance. More than a literary artifact, the anthology functions as an archive of emotional history, a bridge between struggles, and a counter to enforced silence. It shows how poetry can serve as testimony, identity-making and a weapon of resistance when other structures fail.
Edited by Lee Thompson-Kolar.
The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
