Othman Hussein
a Palestinian poet
Trace of the Tide: the tent is my home, and my neighbours live with me, though in their own tents. The tents are our homes, open onto one another. Among their residents, there are no secrets and no hidden stories. When I take a sip of water, my neighbour from the fourth tent says to me: ‘May it bring you health.’ Or when my little daughter calls me and I do not answer her, the camp residents shout at me: ‘Answer the girl.’ Even intimate relations between a husband and wife, or between lovers, happen within earshot of us all — not by our choice, nor out of curiosity, but because life has imposed on us a way of living that modern societies had never known before.
a Palestinian poet, born in the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip in 1963. He is considered one of the prominent poetic voices of his generation, and one of the figures who contributed to consolidating the presence of the prose poem in Palestine, particularly in Gaza and the West Bank. His poetic experience is concerned with questions of place, exile, the sea, and memory, approaching the details of everyday Palestinian life through a language that is transparent yet densely suggestive, where human sensitivity intersects with the impact of geography, loss, and uprooting. He founded and edited the literary magazine Ishtar, which accompanied the rise of the Palestinian prose poem and embraced new poetic experiences. He also held several cultural positions, including membership in the General Secretariat of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union, alongside roles in Palestinian cultural and media work. He has published several poetry collections, including Rafah: The Alphabet of Distance and Memory — co-authored with Khaled Juma — The Sailor Apologises for Drowning, Who Will Cut Off the Sea’s Head, For You, Things Are Left to the Blue, As If I Were Rolling the Galaxies, and The Victim’s Guard. His works reveal a recurring preoccupation with the sea, human fragility, love, and homeland, as well as with questions of survival and absence in the face of violence and loss. Othman Hussein is regarded as one of the poets who brought together poetic practice and public cultural work, maintaining a continuous poetic and cultural presence across decades of transformations and wars witnessed by the Gaza Strip.