By Haidar Eid  

This song was recorded 10 days before the eruption of the ongoing genocide of Gaza, to be released on the second anniversary of the death of Samah Idris whose death has left a vacuum in the BDS movement in the Arab World and beyond.

Samah was a co-founder of the Campaign for the Boycott of Supporters of Israel in Lebanon and the Arab boycott movement.

He was one of the most progressive, principled Pan-Arab activists who believed in the possibility of liberating Palestine in connection with the unification of the Arab World.

No wonder the journal he edited, Al-Adab, after the passing of his father Suhail, a giant literary figure in the Arab world, hosted some of the finest young and old writers.

Samah was not only an organic intellectual, but also a revolutionary writer who never shied away from supporting resistance not only in Palestine and Lebanon, but also in the global South.

Before his untimely death, I exchanged some audio messages with him, between Gaza and Beirut, in which I sang this song titled (Son of the Country) the lyrics of which were written by one of our Egyptian poets, the late Abdurrahman Elabnoudi for a political movie in the late 1960s.

The music was composed by the giant musician Baligh Hamdi. But we decided to rework it and give it a Gazan flavor lamenting the loss of Samah, with the help of an Egyptian guitarist.

We remember Samah today while Gaza is being slaughtered in broad daylight while the Arab World is watching idly. I

n May 2021 when Israel attacked Gaza butchering families, he contacted me offering the pages of Al-Adab as a platform for us to write whatever we wanted; a gesture that not many editors do! Not everybody understands the meaning of this gesture because they do not know that Al-Adab was his LIFE.

The boy (son of the country) is like any other boy

He loves the sound of sparrows when it fills the skies of the country/Balad

He has a kind, green heart

No wickedness, no envy

Like the hearts of the folks of the country/Balad

Performed by: Haidar  Eid

Mixing and mastering: Qasam El-Hajj

Guitar: Mostafa Nasri

El-Falastiniya Studios

(The Palestine Chronicle)

– Haidar Eid is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at the Al-Aqsa University, in the Gaza Strip. He is a research associate at the Center for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.