Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Samih al-Qasim was born to a Druze family in the town of Zarqa in Jordan. His father, Muhammad al-Qasim al-Hussein, was from the village of al-Rama in the Upper Galilee. His mother was Hana Shihadeh Muhammad Fayyad. He had four brothers—Qasim, Sa‘id, Sami, and Mahmud—and two sisters, Shafiqa and Sadiqa. He and his wife, Nawal Salman Hussein, had four children: Muhammad, Waddah, Umar, and Yasir.
In 1941, Samih al-Qasim returned with his family to al-Rama and attended the Latin Nuns School and al-Rama School between 1945 and 1953. He then continued his education in Nazareth at the Terra Sancta College between 1953 and 1955 and subsequently at the Municipal Secondary School between 1955 and 1957. Thus from age nine al-Qasim was educated in Israel after it was established in 1948.
Al-Qasim began his professional career as a government teacher and taught at primary schools in the Galilee and al-Karmel. But the Israeli education minister ordered his dismissal from his post because of his literary, political, and nationalist activities. So he worked at many jobs. He was a worker in the industrial district in Haifa, an assistant electrical welder, a gas station attendant, and inspector in the Urban Planning Department in Nazareth. In 1958, al-Qasim, who was politically close to the banned al-Ard Arab nationalist movement, established a semi-secret organization called the Free Druze Youth Organization.
Samih al-Qasim was among the first Arab Druze youth to defy the compulsory military service imposed by the Israeli authorities on his community in the framework of a “divide and rule” policy. Inducted by force in 1960 into military service, he refused to carry arms and was put in jail until the army command agreed to assign him non-military tasks. He began by teaching soldiers; then he was sent on a nursing tour in the Sarafand camp and finally to the morgue at Rambam hospital in Haifa.
Al-Qasim began to compose poetry at an early age. His first collection of poems, Pageants of the Sun, was published when he was nineteen years old. His second collection, Songs of the Footpaths, appeared in 1964. His poetic creativity lasted to the end of his life. In one of the last interviews he gave, he said: “I have spent my life in the service of the ode.”
In the early 1960s, al-Qasim began to work as a journalist. This came about as a result of an invitation from the editorial board of the magazine al-Ghadd issued in Arabic in Haifa by the Israeli Communist Party. By the mid-1960s, he was editing the Arabic edition of the Hebrew magazine HaOlam Hazeh (This World), published in Tel Aviv by the leftist Israeli activist Uri Avnery. After he resigned from that magazine, he was invited to join the editorial board of the Haifa daily al-Ittihad, the organ of the Communist Party in Arabic, and al-Qasim settled in Haifa.
On the morning of the Israeli aggression on 5 June 1967, al-Qasim was arrested inside the editorial offices of al-Ittihad newspaper and spent some time in the Damun prison on Mount Karmel. While in prison, he submitted a request for a nominal membership of the Communist Party and some years later was elected a member of the party’s central committee.
In 1968, he and Mahmoud Darwish joined a Communist Party delegation to the World Youth Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, and in 1971 he travelled to Moscow where he studied for a year at the Institute of Social Sciences.
In 1973, Samih al-Qasim helped to establish the Arabesque Publishing House in Haifa and ran the Popular Arts Institute in the same city. For several years he headed the Arab Writers Union in Israel.
Source
Achievements and Awards
Samih Al-Qassem has received many awards, shields, certificates of appreciation, and honorary membership in several institutions. won an award
Laurel hair" from Spain.
And two prizes from France for his anthology, which was translated into French by the Moroccan poet and writer Abdel Latif El Laabi.
He was awarded the Babtain Prize.
He was twice awarded the "Jerusalem Medal for Culture" by President Yasser Arafat.
He received the Naguib Mahfouz Award from Egypt.
and the Peace Prize from the Peace Oasis.
The Palestinian Poetry Prize.
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