Born in 1963 into the crude conditions of a refugee camp near Gaza City, Saleem al Naffar was hardly of walking-age when the aftermath of the 1967 war with Israel forced his family to migrate to another camp of desperation, called Al Raml, near Latakia in Syria.
Saleem’s word for that boyhood is “melancholy,” and it ended at age ten when his father passed away there, making him the family-man most responsible for his mother, brother and sisters.
Literature and poetry were Saleem’s solace: he began writing lyrics in high school, and then studied Arabic literature at Tishreen University. After first seeking out any available stage for reciting his poems, he soon began placing them in Arabic journals and newspapers.
As Saleem began a family of his own, his literary reputation grew, finding his works honored in West Bank and Gaza communities, and required reading in Palestinian schools. After the 1994 founding of the Palestinian Authority, he returned with his family to live in northern Gaza City. Until December 2023, Saleem kept on publishing new critically-recognized volumes of poems, novels (for example, Nights of Latakia), and an autobiography (Little Memory on Happiness)—working also as an editor for a range of Arabic journals and magazines.
Then, this “wild adventurer” (in the affectionate phrase of his close friend, Palestinian historian Muhammad Ismael) simply refused to evacuate and leave his family home even as Israel’s genocidal 2023-24 war on Gaza increased its naked omni-destructive brutality. One day in late December 2023, Saleem was at home with his entire household—his wife, his son and three daughters, his brother Salamah and his wife, plus their five children—when all thirteen of them were murdered by an Israeli air-strike.
Theirs was/is not the first Palestinian family thus entirely wiped out, and to this day it is still impossible to retrieve their bodies from beneath the rubble. In the midst of all their other sufferings, Palestine’s communities in both territories held sorrowful commemorations for Saleem, and his works will continue as an incandescent part of their history and heritage.
“Generations of my family have endured the needless poverty of apartheid,” Naffar once said. “From that, I sometimes sing of our despair. But maybe people like my work because, even so, it never gives in to hatred or calls for violence.”
While Muhammad Ismael has lost his own younger brother, brother-in-law and other relatives in Israel’s national racist pogrom, his heart holds a place of special sorrow for Saleem, who for years was Muhammad’s mentor-in-letters, close friend and frequent coffee-pal. So, Muhammad now works in his own nightmarish conditions to translate Saleem’s poetry into English (an endeavor that made Saleem himself ecstatic)—and Muhammad asks me to polish that English into the poems you find in Part 1 here and below.
We are also trying to make a program about Saleem’s life, work and friendship (please watch for it with our many others at YouTube), but so far the weak and battered internet signal from Muhammad’s home in Deir al Balah has foiled us. We will not stop trying till it’s done.
We hope you enjoy below these six newly-translated poems from Saleem’s Poetic Works (Ramallah: Ministry of Culture Publications 2016). Muhammad and I welcome your comments, questions, criticisms and discussion.
***VIDEO-READING OF THESE POEMS AT BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE***
***
TIME
Never…They will never be able
although they try to play
with loose tendons of time,
sending their rats into my shirt,
gnawing the ropes of my stairs—
Futility…they will never be able,
I am hiding my resurrection among flowers
***
WHICH ONE?
In a tavern’s mirror,
a philosopher was meditating on a drunken man.
The drunk was kneading time with ecstasy,
then asking intercession with a couple of tears:
which one is the philosopher?
***
DEATH
Was close to me.
I was calling him various names:
we played together,
tug of war, hide and seek, heads or tails.
But today
he passes blithely from me
and I pass blithely from him
***
ECHO
Do you remember?
Love a sparrow above us
nesting inside a cloud—
Do you remember?
Dreams were courting us
and arriving on time.
That is the tale of our virgin love
and our ecstasy of life—
Do you remember?
***
QUESTIONS
Your soft hands
are the tenderness of wave upon sand,
the scent of peppermint
after weary evening—
Why is the heart tired?
Why the window of life shut forcibly?
Why has April let the sparrow go
through threads of your braids?
I swear by this collapsing age
that I never lived
except through that thin window
***
GAZA
Upon the tents along my way
I tattooed you as a star
and painted for the camel herdsman
paths of agate
upon the heart.
Your letters
guided a drowned man in his drowning.
What lives between you and me is clear:
no matter how intense the fire in our folds
this lives between us,
the sand of my toys,
and the shadow of my father
despite his passing.
His shadow stands erect here:
it grew from a coffin in its place
as a road grows weeds.
***
