Slit lips and other poems

Abstract

The work and experience of a Palestinian poet living in Israel Samih al-Qasim is a poet who lives and works in Haifa. Born in 1939, his first collection of poems appeared in 1958. His second book, Songs of the Alleys (1965), was ‘full of empty pages. The censors cut whole poems, parts of poems, or individual lines’ (see the interview with him and Emile Habibi in Index 4/1982). In 1967 while in prison during the Six Day War he joined the Israeli Communist Party. He decided not to submit his next work Waiting for the Thunderbird (1968) to the censor and he was arrested. The poems which follow are from an anthology Three Arab Poets ( Samih al-Qasim, Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish) to be published in 1984 by Saqi Books. They are preceded by a short interview. This was given on 18 June 1983 when Samih al-Qasim was one of several writers who took part in a series of readings entitled ‘Voices at Curfew’. The interviewer is the Yemeni writer Abdullah al-Udhari.