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- Country of residence: Palestine
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I stop in front of this great poet , with whom I had a silent meeting in 2001, during which some of his poems that I have memorized blended before me. He sat in a corner alone in the Alumni Club of the American University during the “Tuesday Palestinian Cultural Meeting ,” which was chaired by Dr. Anis Sayegh, his friend who invited him to the meeting, and he preferred to sit in silence until the meeting ended.
I tried to meet him to tell him: You have created our literary history for us. I am the young man before you who always memorizes and recites your poems, and like me is a large generation that does not forget Fayrouz’s masterpiece: One day we will return to our neighborhood... and drown in the warmth of sperm. We will return no matter how much time passes... and the distances between us grow farther
away
.
I have a heart, be patient and do not throw yourselves.. on the path of our return. We are weakened.
Tomorrow it is dear to us that you will return.. shelves of birds while we are here.
There are hills in the hills... that sleep and wake up according to our time,
and people who are the love of their days... calm, melodious waiting, richness. Quarters
as far as the eye can see its willows... on every water and its, so
the toil of the afternoons bent down in its shade... the scent of calm and clarity of our God.
We will return. The nightingale told me... the morning after we met on a curve.
That the bulbuls are still gone.. there they live in our poetry
and still among the hills of nostalgia.. and the people of nostalgia are a place for us
in my heart, how much the winds have displaced us.. come, we will return, let us go,
this poem from which it is difficult to delete a single line, for its perfection and beauty..
I wanted to tell him, that we More than one generation of Palestinian refugees, we sang the morning anthem in UNRWA schools:
We are returning, we are returning. We will return,
for there will be no borders, nor castles nor fortresses.
So shout, oh displaced people
, we are returning . We
are returning to the homes, to the plains, to the mountains,
under the flags of pride, jihad, and struggle
with blood, redemption, brotherhood, and loyalty.
We are returning. We are returning,
O Lord. We are returning, oh highlands,
returning to youth. We are returning to the youth
, to struggle in peace and harvest in the country.
We are returning
. And I wanted to tell him: When we listened to the committed songs, The most prominent creativity that came out by Islamic singers was a poem for you, O great poet, in the album “Yarmouk - Twenty Years”, the poem “O Jerusalem”: What will I write
about your streets lit by the blood
and tears of my toiling and sad people in the night of torment?
What will I write, O Jerusalem,
for whose eyes are my city that She was imprisoned
for her mosque to the fullest extent because of her sanctity, which was violated by
Muhammad’s stepping on it, when she became pregnant and did not preserve it
I call all our dead... I call every one. Sometimes
I call them Bibles... if they listen and the Qur’an , I call
them in the name of God... old and young, I call
them from the depths... knights and brave ones. I call
them our battalions
and I call them our squadrons
. I say to them for the sake of Jerusalem, with determination and faith.
For the sake of Jerusalem , I call them.
Jerusalem has become cleansed. I call
them for the sake of its broken eyes. I call
them in the name of God with all the purity of anger. I call
on the Arab nation
. I wanted to say a lot to him that day, but he left us in these days last year. Now that a year has passed since his passing, we ask the logical question:
Where did our poet stand in terms of the renaissance?
As we mentioned previously, and more than once, that the Renaissance is in waves, some see it as two waves and others see it as three (and I support the opinion that says three, and perhaps more).
The first wave emerged at the end of the Ottoman era. Then the second wave with Ibrahim Tuqan and his two companions (Abdul Rahim Mahmoud and Abu Salma), and the third wave with Mahmoud Darwish and his two companions (Tawfiq Ziyad and Samih Al-Qasim). As the writer Muhammad Abd Atwat says in his thesis “National Trends in Contemporary Palestinian Poetry”: The two trios were separated by a period of astonishment and tragedy in the fifties, represented by the poets: (Haroun Hashim Rashid, Moin Bseiso, Mahmoud Salim Al-Hout, Youssef Al-Khatib, Radi Saduq, Tawfiq Sayegh, Muhammad Al-Adnani, Burhan Al-Din Al-Aboushi and others).
These “others” include their veteran counterparts such as: Hassan Al-Buhairi, Kamal Nasser, Ali Hashem Rashid, Misbah Al-Aboudi, Raja Samreen, Khalil Zaqtan, Khaled Nasra, Fadwa Touqan, Salma Al-Khadraa Al-Jayousi, Daad Al-Kayyali, Samira Abu Ghazaleh, and Asma Toobi..
I translated it
The poet Haroun Hashim Rashid was born in Gaza in 1927. He studied in its schools and finished his secondary studies in 1947. Then he obtained a higher teachers’ certificate and worked as a teacher in the schools of the refugee camps (Al-Bureij, Al-Maghazi, and Al-Rimal). He lived through the Nakba and its victims in (1947-1954)...
He moved to media work, and was appointed as head of the “Voice of the Arabs” radio office in Gaza. He also worked as head of the Public Affairs Department in the administration of the Governor-General of the Gaza Strip. In 1967, he joined the office of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Cairo, and represented Palestine in the permanent committees of the League of Arab States, and a permanent delegate to the university.
He participated in editing a number of Arab newspapers published in Gaza after the Nakba. He was prolific and built literary and artistic relations in Egypt, making his poems a destination for composers and artists, to the point of nearly ninety poems sung by prominent figures in Arabic singing, led by: Fayrouz, Fayda Kamel, Muhammad Fawzi, Karem Mahmoud, Muhammad Qandil, Muhammad Abdo, and Talal Maddah. et al.
He won the first prize for poetic theater from ALECSO in 1977, the first prize for Arabic poetry on Radio London in 1988, and won the Jerusalem Medal in 1990. He is considered one
of the first poets to emerge from the Nakba, and his poetry best represented the refugees in their tragedy, their struggle, and their insistence on returning, even to the point of being named He is a poet of the Nakba and the return, as his poetry is filled with sounds of revenge, revolution, return, and the call to prepare to confront the enemy.
His poetry is characterized by rhetoric and directness in its depiction of the conditions of refugees and the expression of their suffering and hopes, and his poetic dictionary is full of words related to the lives of refugees.
Our poet died in Canada on July 27, 2020, at the age of 93, which he spent in the struggle for return and liberation.
Among his poetic works: “With Strangers” (1954). “Several Strangers” (1956), “Gaza in the Line of Fire” (1957), “Land of Revolutions” (1958), “Until Our People Return” (1965), “Ship of Rage” (1968), “Two Letters” (1968), "The Storm's Journey" (1970), "Guerillas" (1970), "Psalms of Earth and Blood" (1971), "The Return" (1977), "A Lover's Notebook" (1980), "The Complete Poetry Collection" (1981), "Diary Resilience and Sadness” (1983), “Gaza..
Studies of “Combat Poetry in the Occupied Territories” (1970), “A City and a Poet, Haifa and Al-Buhairi” (1975).
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