Rashid Hussein
| Rashid Hussein | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1936 Musmus, British Mandate of Palestine |
| Died | 2 February 1977 (aged 41) New York City, United States |
| Resting place | Musmus, Israel |
| Occupation | Poet, translator and orator |
| Nationality | Palestinian |
| Citizenship | Israeli |
| Period | 1957–1977 |
| Genre | Arabic poetry |
Rashid Hussein Mahmoud (Arabic: راشد حسين, Hebrew: ראשד חוסיין; 1936 – 2 February 1977) was a Palestinian poet, orator, journalist and Arabic-Hebrew translator. He was born in Musmus, Mandatory Palestine. He published his first collection in 1957. He was the first prominent poet to appear on the Israeli Arab stage. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish called him "the star", who wrote about "human things" like bread, hunger and anger.
Hussein was born to a Muslim Fellah family in Musmus in 1936, during British Mandatory rule in Palestine. He attended elementary school in Umm al-Fahm, a town near his home village. He was educated in Nazareth, where he graduated from Nazareth Secondary School. Hussein described himself as a "lax Muslim", once writing in 1961, "I do not pray and I do not go to the mosque and I know that in this I am disobeying the will of God ... thousands of people like me are lax in fulfilling the divine precepts. But these disobedient thousands did not keep silent about what our pious judges who pray and fast, have kept silent".
In 1955 he worked as a teacher in Nazareth, a career which Israeli critic Emile Marmorstein described as "stormy". He taught poor, rural Arabs in dilapidated schoolrooms lacking sufficient textbooks. During his teaching career, he had ongoing struggles with the Zionist supervisors of Arab education in Israel and with the Arab section of the national teachers' union.
In 1952, Hussein began writing poetry. Two years later, he published his first poetry collection. In 1957, he published a small volume in Nazareth called Ma'a al-Fajr ("At Dawn"). In 1958, he became the literary editor of Al Fajr, a monthly Arabic-language newspaper of the Histadrut labor union and Al Musawwar, a weekly newspaper. At the time, the Iraqi Jewish critic Eliahu Khazum described Hussein as "the most promising Arab poet in Israel", the "only one interested in the study of Hebrew" and who surprised an audience of Jewish and Arab writers by "reciting his first poem he wrote in Hebrew". That year he published another Arabic volume called Sawarikh ("Missiles").
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