A Poet Walks the Line
Hirschfield, Robert
A Poet Walks the Line By Robert Hirschfield Illustration by Jacqui Oakley Aweek after 9/11, a woman in San Antonio sent off an e-mail to five friends, under the heading: "Letter from Naomi Shihab...
...Look what extra work we have...
...Here was her message: "I am sorry to have to call you that, but I don't know how else to get your attention...
...I think we need to encourage that kind of attitude in children, in the young people we meet...
...Adeep listening quality characterizes Nye's poetry...
...Read Arabic poetry Poetry humanizes us in a way that news, or even religion, has a harder time doing...
...Its important to notice the details that make up our world, that connect us...
...Tough...
...A Poet Walks the Line By Robert Hirschfield Illustration by Jacqui Oakley Aweek after 9/11, a woman in San Antonio sent off an e-mail to five friends, under the heading: "Letter from Naomi Shihab Nye, Arab-American Poet: To Any Would-Be Terrorists...
...What drew me to poetry is the sense that everything is precious, and everything is worth noticing," she says...
...support for Israel's actions...
...Spit it out...
...It shocks me how many people seem to be able to avoid mentioning what goes on' even as it is happening," she says...
...In the introduction to her acclaimed book of poetry, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, Nye writes that she could hear her grandmother urging her to speak out: "It's your job...
...A finalist for the National Book Award for poetry in 2002, Gazelle contains the poem "Blood," in which Nye writes about 9/11: I call my father, we talk around the news It is too much for him, neither of his two languages can reach it...
...That poem appears in Red Suitcase, where she also has the poem, "For the 500th Dead Palestinian, Ibtisam Bozieh": Dead at 13, for staring through the window into a gun barrel which did not know you wanted to be a doctor...
...Being American and Palestinian puts her at the confluence of two warring rivers, an uncomfortable position that grew only more painful during Israel's assault on Gaza and Lebanon this summer...
...It was not intended as an exercise in solitude...
...In her poem "The Crossed-Out Word" from her book Red Suitcase, she mocks her lack of roughness: A letter arrives from New York advice, criticism "Be meaner...
...Ashort woman with a rich throaty laugh, Nye, fifty-four, credits her grandmother Khadra Shihab with being her guiding spirit...
...Speak for me, too...
...She denounces the devastating loss of civilian life and infrastructure in Lebanon, and she is grieved by U.S...
...Winik's sign said, "Sorry, Warmongers, Your Time Is Up...
...That's where she stood, all alone, with her "War Has No Imagination" sign, during the first jolts of the Abu Ghraib revelations in 2004...
...Echoing that sentiment, Nye in her 9/11 e-mail gave this advice: "Read Rumi...
...Or a depressed middle-aged poet holding a hand-painted sign...
...I hate that word...
...She was expecting other protesters...
...His work appears in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Ode Magazine, the National Catholic Reporter, and other publications...
...Robert Hirschfield is a freelancer who writes for many publications on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict...
...It does not make her happy...
...And she's even walked the line in front of the White House...
...There is also a lightness about her, personally and poetically, that in no way undercuts her commitment to taking on charged issues like the Iraq War or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict...
...They didn't listen to the United Nations or the advice of diplomatic experts or their own weapons investigators...
...Her ear is pressed with childlike ferocity to the ground of the world...
...Becoming doctors for one another, Arab, Jew instead of guarding the tumors of pain as if they hold us upright...
...Louis to an American mother and a Palestinian father, Aziz Shihab, a refugee from the war of 1948...
...A great Arab scholar, Dr...
...Nye was eventually joined in front of the White House by her good friend and NPR commentator, Marion Winik, who used to live in Austin, Texas...
...Poems can make us sound too nice...
...The poem "He Said EYE-RACK" begins like this: Relative to our plans for your country, we will blast your tree, crush your cart stun your grocery She is fond of quoting Shirin Ebadi, Iran's Nobel Peace Prize-winner and human rights activist: "When countries are in conflict, political conflict, it is more important than ever to share culture, to share literature...
...Off the printed page, Nye can be found in the classroom as a visiting poet...
...Where is common sense...
...Nye, during her many visits to the West Bank, where she has relatives, has had Israeli guns turned on her and her family...
...Since 9/11, she concedes, edges of rage have crept into some of her poems...
...Salma Jayyusi, said, 'If we read one another, we won't kill one another.' Read American poetry...
...It is unfathomable," she says, "that we have people without empathy in positions of power affecting so many innocents...
...You can feel those edges in a few of her poems in You & Yours, published last year...
...Say how much I hate it...
...At one point, an old, white-haired man stopped by to concur with her sentiment, and to offer his own: "This is the worst Administration...
...she asks...
...Nye's own poetic language is quiet, spare, humorously conversational, and almost unfailingly kind...
...Her first images of Palestine as a little girl were the blue airmail letter sheets he would send to relatives back home or receive in return...
...In that same poem, the Nye asks: How do we carry the endless surprise of all our deaths...
...Say it's not who we are...
...Nye was born in St...
...There was something magical about words that traveled so far...
...Nye wondered, in a piece she wrote for Organica News, if inside the White House anyone was paying attention...
...So why would they listen to a shaggy citizen from the sidewalk...
...If you tilt your head just slightly it's ridiculous...
...Nye also has a hard time fathoming the silence in the United States that greeted Israel's war on Lebanon...
...And now look...
...She's driven down to Crawford to join Cindy Sheehan, who wasn't there when Nye arrived...
...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...
...These lines are from "Jerusalem": Soldiers stalk a pharmacy: Big guns, little pills...
...Is intensified, extended violence going to help things in the long run...
...She does not want to miss a sound...
...They didn't listen to the largest global anti-war protests in history," she wrote...
...Plant mint...
...She joined protests against the Lebanon War, and she has repeatedly protested the Iraq War...
...She recalls "how the light would come through those translucent pages...
...She also can be found on the picket line...
...But she mocks the guns quietly in her poetry...
Vol. 70 • November 2006 • No. 11
