Naomi Shihab Nye: Portrait of a Palestinian-American Poet

By Robert Hirschfield


	Poet and author Naomi Shihab Nye (Photo R. Hirschfield).

Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
It’s ridiculous.

The words are those of Naomi Shihab Nye, from her poem “Jerusalem.”

Her father, a middle-class Palestinian from Jerusalem, lost his home and everything he owned in 1948. He put down roots in St. Louis, Missouri, where, in 1952, Naomi Shihab was born.

“My first images of Palestine were the thin blue airletter sheets that he would mail to Palestine, then receive in the mail,” his daughter recently recalled. “How the light would come through those translucent pages! There was something magical about words that had travelled so far.”

The author of many books of poetry and young adult fiction, Nye was a National Book Award finalist for 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of The Middle East, and twice has won the Jane Adams Children’s Book Award.

One of her young-adult novels, Habibi (available through the AET book club as is her Space Between Our Footsteps), is based on her experiences as a teenager in the West Bank in the mid-1960s, when her father decided to return to live in his native land. (The outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967 sent him back to America to stay.)

“I had a rebellious streak, as teenagers have,” Nye explained. “I had no patience at all with the conservative Old World culture, yet I loved how tuned-in my grandmother and cousins were to every little detail of daily life. So very much like poetry.”

Nye has been back many times since then. Like any ordinary Palestinian—even one from San Antonio, Texas, where she now lives with her family—the poet is in possession of a hidden cargo of occupation horror stories.

“I was sitting once with my grandmother, when she was about 103, and my child was with me,” she told the Washington Report. “Suddenly, bursting into the house, was the son of my cousin. The Israelis broke into his house while he was in the shower and brutally beat the boy. Both his eyes were blackening. He said, ‘They think I know a boy who threw some stones last week, but I don’t know him.’

“I sat there thinking, If someone beat up my son, what would I be inclined to do?”

Other times, while walking in her grandmother’s village with old Palestinian men, she would find Israeli guns pointed at them.

“I would say in English to the soldiers, ‘We are not fighting you. We are just out for an evening walk. Why are you doing this?’” Nye said. “They would be furious, and ask to see my passport.”

Her contact with Jews, since her teens, has mainly been as friends. There was their shared Semitic background, their shared conflict—bloodlines and bloodshed.

“There is a scene in Habibi, at the dinner table,” Nye said, “where the girl asks her father, ‘Is this irrevocable? Do we all have to fight forever? Or is it just that we fight the way families fight?’”

The poet writes about the Southwest, a lost parrot, an old love, Mother Teresa and other subjects, as well as about Palestine and the Palestinians. She sees her words as her contribution to Palestinian resistance.

“Many people would say that words do nothing,” she noted. “Others, like myself, believe that language, whether it be poetry, like [Mahmoud] Darwish’s poetry, or song, can fortify and rejuvenate the spirit.”

What poetry can do, Nye believes, is to transport people “across the gap,” beyond tribal borders. Israeli poets Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch are long-time residents in her pantheon of poets who matter. “Presence and truth” were the checkpoints they had to pass through to get there.

Nye closely monitors the pollution of political language in America. “George Bush said, when Hamas won the election: ‘You cannot be a partner in peace if you’ve got an armed wing.’ He should talk!” his fellow Texan said. “He has an armed wing, an armed tail feather, and another armed wing. He has every armed wing there is.”

As an Arab-American, Sept. 11—and the reaction to Sept. 11—wounded her two hearts (three, if you count Darwish’s “land of words” as a third body).

“9/11 was horrific,” Nye stated. “I think all the civilian deaths in Iraq are equally horrific. I think the unspoken, undescribed oppression of Palestinians for 58 years is horrific. I think the suicide bombings of Israel are horrific.”

In her open letter “To Any Would-Be Terrorists,” written after 9/11, Nye begins by saying how very much she hates using the word “terrorists.”

“Do you know how hard some of us have worked to get rid of that word, to deny its instant connection to the Middle East?” she writes. “And now look. Look what extra work we have. Not only did your colleagues kill thousands of innocent, international people in those buildings and scar their families forever, they wounded a huge community of people in the Middle East, in the United States and all over the world. If that’s what they wanted to do, please know their mission was a terrible success, and you can stop now.”

A scolding mother, she mentions her own American mother, who has worked so hard in her life to undo people’s poisonous stereotypes about Arabs.

In tones of an exhausted friend, Nye ends her letter by saying, “We will all die soon enough. Why not take the short time we have on this delicate planet and figure out some really interesting things we might do together? I promise you, God would be happier.”

She suggests they read Rumi, even American poetry, and quotes the Arab-American writer Dr. Salma Jayyusi: “If we read one another, we won’t kill one another.”

Nye detects an edge of rage in some of her own post-9/11 poetry. It doesn’t please her. She likens poetry to a lever that keeps trying to flip up a lid so one may discover what lies beneath it. Rage, she knows, kills wonder.

Robert Hirschfield is a free-lance writer based in New York City.