Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Rashed was born in Musmus, near Umm Al-Fahm, in 1936, wrote his first poetry while still a pupil, published a small collection of poetry, Ma’a al-Fajr (At Dawn) in Nazareth in 1957 and some of his poems were published in a thin volume compiled by the Nazarene poet Michel Haddad under the title A Variety of Arabic Poetry in Israel a year later. Much of his poetry dealt with national issues such as the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees, life under Israel’s military government, and land appropriations; worked as a school teacher in Nazareth; was arrested for spreading his progressive ideas in 1958.
Rashed was employed by MAPAM (The United Workers Party) as an editor of its Arabic-language literary journal, Al-Fajr, in Tel Aviv; was also involved in Israeli-Arab dialogue among journalists and intellectuals in the late 1950s; moved to Paris in 1965, then to New York in 1967, where he worked as Hebrew-Arabic translator for the PLO and the Arab League.
He moved to Syria in 1973 and established the Palestinian Studies Association in addition to preparing Hebrew news for the Syrian Radio; serves as correspondent of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation in New York 1973; later became correspondent for the Palestinian delegation to the UN in New York, where he died after a mysterious fire incident in his room.
Published poetry collections, incl. Sawarikh (Missiles) (Arabic, 1958), Palestinian Poems (Arabic, 1982), and translated some works from Hebrew into Arabic, for instance a book on Israeli poet Chaim Nahman Bialik (1966); was buried in Musmus on 8 Feb. 1977; some of his writings were published in 1979 in the volume The World of Rashid HusseinA Palestinian Poet in Exile (edited by Kamal Boullata, Detroit: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1979).
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