Rajeh al-Salfiti

Rajeh Ghuneim al-Salfiti was born in 1921 in the village of Salfit, Palestine. He was the son of Ahmad Ghuneim, better known by the title al-Hijjawi. He had three daughters (Yusra, Duha, and Andaleeb) and a son (Ahmad).

Salfiti grew up in a poor family. When he was eight, his father enrolled him in al-Hurriyya (Freedom) school run by Sheikh Nafe‘ Mismar, who made his students learn nationalist songs by heart and taught them the history of Palestine and the impending danger the country was in. At this school, Salfiti’s love and aptitude for poetry was deepened. The first poem he learned by heart was “al-Thulathaaʾ al-Hamraaʾ” (The Red Tuesday) by the Palestinian poet Ibrahim Tuqan (1906-1941), a eulogy for the martyrs Muhammad Jamjoum, Fouad Hijazi, and Atta al-Zeer, who were executed by the British Mandate authorities on 17 June 1930, for their alleged participation in al-Buraq Disturbances in August 1929.

In 1933, Salfiti’s father died, and he was forced to drop out of school before he could complete the third grade to support his family. He thus became the family’s main breadwinner; he worked as a muezzin chanting the call to prayer at mosques, a construction worker paving streets, and an agricultural worker harvesting crops. Just one year after his father’s death, his mother died, and he had to go through the pain of losing a parent again.

When he was a teenager, he began singing at wedding parties in Salfit and the surrounding villages; his fame spread so widely that his fellow villagers started saying, “A wedding in Salfit isn’t a proper party without Rajeh.”

After the outbreak of the Great Palestinian Revolt in 1936, Salfiti joined the rebel group led by Arif Abdul Razzaq and Hamad Zawata, which was fighting in the Nablus region. However, he soon left the group because he thought the rebels imposed excessive burdens on people. However, he soon rejoined the revolt when Fayez al-Zeer formed a new faction that continued to fight until the end of the revolt.

In the early 1940s, Salfiti’s inclination for zajal–lyric poetry sung in colloquial dialect–began to emerge. His first attempt at composing zajal was inspired by an incident where one of his neighbors killed his rabbit, which had been trespassing onto the neighbor’s land. His rabbit’s death caused him great sorrow, and he composed a poem that opened with the following couplet:

 

What a loss, what a disaster

For us and her, hereafter

 

Old Man Rabbit snatched from us

And Mrs. Rabbit made a widow

 

After the end of World War II, Salfiti moved to the village of Salama near Jaffa in search of better work opportunities. There, he began to recite his poetry at gatherings and festivals. When the Nakba began, and war between Zionist militias and the Arab states broke out in 1947-48, he joined up with the Palestinian resistance once again to fight. During one of the battles that took place in Salama, he was wounded by a bullet that lodged near his lung and resulted in pulmonary fibrosis, causing him chronic lung ailments, most notably asthma.

In 1949, Salfiti returned to his village, where he was introduced to Palestinian communists and became a member of the National Liberation League in Palestine. Then, in 1951, he joined the Jordanian Communist Party, which was accepting members of the league who had remained in the Jordanian-controlled part of Palestine west of the Jordan River.

In 1955, Salfiti was the main slogan-chanter in the demonstrations organized against the Baghdad Pact, leading protesters with chants such as the following:

 

  Neither colonialism nor reactionaries scare us, the People

Even our little girls react:

No! to the Pact

 

After the coup that overthrew the nationalist government in Jordan headed by Suleiman al-Nabulsi in April 1957, martial law was imposed and many were arrested. As a result, Salfiti fled first to Syria and from there to Iraq, where he participated in demonstrations against the monarchy. He was arrested and deported to Lebanon. From there, with the help of some Communist Party comrades, he was able to travel to Czechoslovakia, where he worked and interacted with Arab students. His poems became known in Europe.

Salfiti returned to the West Bank in 1965, after a general amnesty was declared for political prisoners and fugitives. However, he learned that the authorities were looking for him, which prompted him to flee once again to Syria. He stayed there until the June 1967 war, when he returned to his birthplace, Salfit.

After 1969, Salfiti started singing at weddings and participating in nationalist festivals and university celebrations, and performing his poetry became his sole source of income.

After the outbreak of the October 1973 War and the success of the Egyptian army in breaching the chain of fortifications known as the Bar-Lev Line, he composed a poem that opened with the following couplet:

Bar-Lev, so ultra-modern

 An impregnable, colossal bunker

 

Folded like cardboard under

 the boots of Egyptian soldiers

 

In 1974, the Israeli occupation authorities launched a sweeping crackdown targeting nationalists and communists, who had formed the Palestine National Front in the Occupied Territories in August 1973. This front had recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Salfiti’s comrades acknowledged that his words were more powerful than the front’s communiqués; not surprisingly, he was among those arrested during this crackdown. He was held in cell no. 10 of the Nablus Central Jail.

Salfiti remained in prison for twenty-two months, during which he wrote some of his most beautiful poetry. They included “al-Ziyara” (The Visit), which depicts how the prisoners suffered during visits with their children and families and the deprivation and provocations they endured at the hands of the prison guards; “Ruʾya” (Vision); “Bit-houn” (It’ll Get Easier); and “Wasiyya” (A Will). This latter poem was dedicated to his son Ahmad, who later explained that his father wrote this poem as a letter addressed “to my son Ahmad.” There was another memorable poem called “al-Mlabbaseh” (The Candy) that Ahmad said was written for “my elder sister Andaleeb, when he [Salfiti] tried to give her a piece of mlabbaseh [almonds in a glazed sugar shell] through the openings in the grille separating the visitors from the prisoners in the visitation area, but was forbidden by orders from the Israeli prison guards.” His fellow detainees learned many of his poems by heart and carved them out on their cell walls.

After his release from prison, Salfiti continued to be active in the Palestinian liberation struggle. He recited the following poem in the first rally marking Land Day that was held on 30 March 1976:

Our soil is sacred

As sacred as our articles of faith

 

Our creed dictates this principle:

Love your land, guard its honor

 

Long live the fiercest trinity ever seen

Deir Hanna, Arrabeh and Sakhnin

 

Salfiti contested the municipal council elections, held in the occupied West Bank in April 1976, as a candidate on the Palestine National Front’s list for his village. He campaigned with the same slogan that all the nationalist blocks inside the Occupied Territories had agreed to consolidate their campaigns under: “No to the [Israeli] Civil Administration, Yes to National Unity!” The National Front won the election in Salfit and led efforts by nationalist Palestinians to resist Israeli settlement expansion and land confiscation, in addition to providing social services and strengthening ties between all the municipalities across the West Bank, until the municipalities announced the suspension of their work in May 1982.

Salfiti sang at nationalist gatherings in Nazareth, Taybeh, Acre, and Jerusalem and especially at Birzeit University, where the sound of his zajal verses rang out in the university’s corridors; he performed there on numerous occasions. When the Israeli occupation forces shut down the university, he recited the following couplet:

Close down universities, shut the gates 

is that democracy, kicking students out?

 

Drawings on scraps of paper scared a country

 with jets, tanks and warships strutting about

 

When the Palestinian uprising that subsequently came to be known as the First Intifada erupted in December 1987, Salfiti immediately emerged as one of its foremost voices; he wrote poems, composed zajals, and came up with fiery chants and slogans. He would also look out for the incoming patrols of occupation soldiers, and upon seeing their jeeps approaching, he would begin banging on a sheet of corrugated iron (called zinco in local slang) with his walking stick. Salfiti also composed verses hailing the role of Palestinian women in the intifada:

Learn the secrets, the secrets of the struggle                      Bear the pain, it’s sweet no trouble

 

He also composed a couplet that evoked a famous song by the Palestinian folk music ensemble Firqat al-Ashiqin hailing the resistance against the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982:

            Let the world witness us

            In Gaza and the West Bank

 

            Demonstrators pitched in battle

            Against the Zionist army’s tanks

 

In early 1988, Salfiti recited one of his most famous colloquial poems, “al-Kaff illi b-yksir al-mikhraz” (Fists Overpower the Blades), which gained widespread popularity because of the simplicity of its lyrics and the power of their message. It opens with these lines:

Let the voices of the spirited call

Let the souls lost in whoring fall

 

News of the massacres resounds in this country and that

Rattles consciences, shakes awake those lying flat

 

 And it concludes with the following verses:

Experience taught us the greatest lessons

Like a lighthouse guiding our voyage

 

            United and unwavering

            Our fingers, curved into fists, proved

           

            They don’t just wrestle with the blades

            They snap them

 and the necks of the traitors sharpening them

 

In another famous poem, he says:

            My hometown is Birzeit, my hometown is Salfit

            Lydd, Ramleh, Gaza, Haifa, Jaffa, Akka

            Safad, Jenin, Tulkarm, Anabta, Nablus is my hometown

            al-Bireh, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron my hometown

            Arab Jerusalem, the holiest spot in my hometown

            My hometown that I’ll protect, as my flag flies freely there

            Flying freely, high above the fields and mountains

            To liberate and live there free

            I’ll sacrifice everything and everyone I hold dear

…

 

While a chorus of youth, in call and response, repeats after every stanza:

            For every olive tree we plant, our homes rise higher

 

In 1989, Salfiti was awarded the Martyr Nuh Ibrahim Folkloric Heritage Award by the Jordanian-Palestinian Committee for Heritage Preservation. He was also given an honorary award at the Palestinian Culture Festival that was held in Cairo, 10-17 January 1990. The PLO also awarded him the Jerusalem Medal for Culture, Arts and Literature at the beginning of that year, and Palestinian President Yasir Arafat gave him the title of “the voice of the Intifada.”

Still ailing from the aftereffects of the bullet that had been lodged in his lung for four decades, Salfiti became seriously ill in 1990. He died on 27 May 1990.

Salfiti left behind his collected poems under the title Zajaliyyāt Rājiḥ al-Salfītiī, published in 1987 by al-Aswar Press in Acre. The collection, published in one volume, has a foreword written by the Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim and contains a wide assortment of his poetic output that affirm his sense of belonging to the working class, his identification with his people, and his identity as a Palestinian. The poems in the collection also show us his calls for resistance against the occupation and for national unity. The Palestinian scholar Mustafa Kabha sees him as an example of “an outstanding vernacular poet who, in addition to embodying the cause of his homeland and people, also had a clear ideological message for the world, one that called for achieving social justice and wiping out oppression against the downtrodden, impoverished classes.” The Palestinian writer and novelist Emile Habibi shared his memories of Salfiti from the First Intifada: “I would see them carrying stones in one hand and Rajeh Salfiti’s zajal poems in the other.” Issa Qaraqei, the Palestinian Authority’s Minister of Prisoner Affairs, headed a delegation from the ministry that visited Salfiti’s family in Salfit village on 18 October 2018, during which he said: “Rajeh Salfiti was an outstanding vernacular poet who, in addition to embodying the suffering of his homeland and his people, also had a clear ideological message for the world, one that called for achieving social justice for all humanity.”

The second session of the Vernacular Poetry Festival, organized jointly by al-Quds Open University and the General Union of Palestinian Writers and Journalists in cooperation with the Palestinian National Commission for Education, Culture and Science on 22 April 2013, was dedicated to Rajeh Salfiti and held in his village. For twenty years, Salfiti’s family tried to collect and properly document the poet’s creative output over the course of his life but were unsuccessful in their attempts. This prompted the participants in the festival that year to come together to form an association dedicated to collecting and transcribing the work of vernacular Palestinian poets, first and foremost among them Rajeh al-Salfiti.

 

Sources

أرشيف المتحف الفلسطيني الرقمي. "مجموعة راجح السلفيتي 1940-2013".

https://www.palarchive.org/index.php/Detail/collections/94/lang/ar_PS 

حسن، شاكر فريد. "حادي الوطن والحرية راجح السلفيتي في ذكراه الثلاثين". "ديوان العرب"، 21/5/2020.

https://www.diwanalarab.com/حادي-الوطن-والحرية-راجح-السلفيتي-في-ذكراه  

حمادة، محمد عمر. "أعلام فلسطين"، الجزء الثالث. دمشق: دار قتيبة،1991.

الرفاعي، إيمان. "الزجال الأحمر". "شبابيك"، 19/1/2018.

https://shababeek.org/الزجال-الأحمر

السلفيتي، راجح، "زجليات راجح السلفيتي". عكا: دار الأسوار، 1987.

السلفيتي، صالح، "راجح السلفيتي.. صوت الانتفاضة الأولى ومؤسس زجلها". "وكالة القدس للأنباء"، 3/4/ 2017.

https://alqudsnews.net/post/108156/راجح-السلفيتي-صوت-الانتفاضة-ال

عبد الحفيظ، عيسى. "راجح أبو غنيم السلفيتي". "الحياة الجديدة"، 22/آذار/2016.

https://www.alhaya.ps/ar/Article/19690

وكالة وطن للأنباء. "في ذكرى رحيله.. راجح السلفيتي واكب بصوته مراحل النضال الوطنية منذ الثلاثينات، فغنى للمقاومة وللمرأة وللعامل"، 29/5/2028.

https://www.wattan.net/ar/news/254257.html

لوباني، حسين علي. "معجم أعلام فلسطين في العلوم والفنون والآداب". بيروت: مكتبة لبنان ناشرون، 2012.

المتحف الفلسطيني. "راجح السلفيتي… شيخ الزجّالين الفلسطينيين" 31/1/2023.

https://palmuseum.wordpress.com/2023/01/31/1338/

يوسف، زياد وعصام العاروري (إعداد)، "دردشة عن أيام زمان مع الزجّال الشعبي راجح السلفيتي". "الاتحاد"، حيفا، 7/2/1990.