Sharif S. Elmusa
This interview with poet Naomi Shihab Nye explores how her poems are informed by an inquisitive, child-like spirit and an ever-watchful eye of a mother. Such 'vital attitude' uniquely enables her to write poetry for all ages. It has also propelled her to travel across the United States and five continents, teaching the craft of poetry, and inviting audiences to experience how poems possess the power to connect people, to illuminate the mysteries of things, and to avail us of moments for self-restoration.
Introduction
I first got acquainted with Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry in the mid 1980s when I was selecting poems with Gregory Orfalea for what would become Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry. (1) I was immediately taken by the beauty of the poems, by the direct, almost artless language, fresh images, and deep immersion in the philosophy of everyday life--"impure poetry," advocated by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Both Orfalea and I agreed that she was going to occupy a large space in the anthology.
Since then, Nye--who is also a folksinger--has become a prominent poet in America, invited to read at, among other places, the White House during Bill Clinton's presidency and the Library of Congress. Her books won coveted prizes--including in 1982 the National Poetry Series selection--and many notable and best book citations from the American Library Association. More recently, her anthology 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2005) was a National Book Award finalist. She has won the Jane Addams Children's Book Award twice and the Pushcart Prize four times.
Nye is the daughter of an American mother and a Palestinian father, a journalist who immigrated to the United States a short while after the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) in 1948. Although she lived all her life in the US, Palestine has been one of the major, nourishing arteries of her creativity. Perhaps I would not be off the mark to say that the Palestinian plight is constitutive of the poet's sensibility: empathy with the vulnerable, aversion to loss, and abhorrence of aggression and violence.
Nye published numerous poetry collections, anthologies, and occasional fiction. Her poems are plentiful in quantity and encompassing in scope. It is as if every object, person, and organism she comes across can be molded into a line, a stanza, and, if lucky, a whole poem. What makes for this opulence?
I do not claim to know. The easiest thing to say is that it is a natural gift. And gifted, she is. But there must be something else besides the gift. That something might be found in what the Mexican poet Octavio Paz termed the "vital attitude" of the poet. Nye seems constantly astonished by the mystery of things, fleeting events, or flashes of memory: "Sometimes objects stun me/I touch them carefully/saying, tell what you know." (2) And they have much to divulge: "A man leaves the world/and the streets he lived on/grow a little shorter." (3) And: "The train whistle still wails its ancient sound/but when it goes away, shrinking back/from the walls of the brain/it takes something different with it every time" (Yellow Glove, "Trying to Name What Doesn't Change" 1). In Nye's astonishment there is the child who refuses to be repressed.
Yet, she seems never to sleep, keeping one eye open on our imperfect, vulnerable selves: "Each carries a tender spot/something our lives forgot to give us" (Red Suitcase, "Jerusalem" 21-22). Still, she looks most after the missing, the hurt, and the maltreated. The bull escaping men with pistols in the street, "could he have gotten away?" (Yellow Glove, "The Tunnel of Questions" 10). The fireflies which once captivated her little son prompt the lines, "Lately I looked for you everywhere/but only night's smooth stare gazed back" (Red Suitcase, "Fireflies" 71). In Jerusalem the poet grows indignant: "Why are we so monumentally slow !/Soldiers stalk a pharmacy/big guns, little pills ./If you tilt your head just slightly/it's ridiculous" (Red Suitcase, "Jerusalem" 21-22). At a dinner party she protests how everyone comments on "texture of meat or herbal aroma," and ignores "the translucence of onion/now limp, now divided/or its traditionally honorable career:/For the sake of others/disappear" (Yellow Glove, "The Thinly Fluted Wings of Stamps" 27). Nye's vigilance is that of a mother.
The offspring are scattered across the Globe: in a classroom, a park, India, Amman, Lima (Peru), Mexico City, Niagara, San Antonio--the mostly Hispanic Texan city where she resides with her husband, Michael Nye, a lawyer and photographer, and her son, Madison Cloud Feather.
This is Nye, child and mother. It is most natural that she also decided to devote herself to writing for, and teaching, young people poetry--becoming a poet for all ages. The last time I saw her read was in the summer of 2006, when she came to Virginia to visit schools and bookstores. At the bookstore where she gave a talk and read poems before an audience of youngsters and adults, she wove a wonderful web of associations and propositions about the "word": how it connected us, gave us power, made us go places, brought out laughter, provided a boulder to scan the landscape, endowed us with depth. If purchasing books was an indicator, the many bags of Nye's books that left the store afterward told of great appreciation.
When Alif asked me to do this written interview with Naomi in fall 2006 for this special issue on children, I felt both pleased and honored. I also thought of it as an opportunity to hold a sustained conversation with a longtime friend about her work, something we could not manage before in the fleeting encounters, letters, and e-mails.
SE: You are trying to encourage kids to write poems and to appreciate the value of words and the worlds that words open up for them. When did you start writing poetry?
NSN: I started at age six. I started sending work to children's magazines at age seven.
SE: Modern education has banished memorization, celebrating analysis and so-called critical thinking. Does this stymie poetic creativity? Do you encourage kids to memorize poems?
NSN: I think memorization, of a few short well-loved poems, is a great thing. They become yours forever. I still "own" the poems I memorized in second grade. Yes, I encourage this whenever possible. But I am usually not around long enough to see the results. Last year, some graduate students requested that I add memorization of a beloved poem to our curriculum (I was visiting writer at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin for one semester--the third time I have done this) and I loved hearing them recite their poems, hearing what they chose.
SE: When my son started listening to rap, the genre was controversial because of the foul language and the violence it seemed to promote. But I encouraged him to listen because I liked the way rappers played with words. Rap seemed like the next-best thing to poetry. Was that bad parenting?
NSN: No, I think it was good parenting. My son also loved rap. He used to make up his own too. I also appreciated the ways rappers played with words. My guess is our sons do not use worse language than others because they listened to rap. We had a few conversations about how saying "bad words" more often made it easier to say them. But my guess is I still use more "bad words" than my son does.
SE: The philosopher Gaston Bachelard was a great advocate of waking up the child in us, of opening the gates of memory and the unconscious to let the dormant child daydream. Do you feel that being in constant touch with children keeps the child within you alive or makes you more conscious of the gap?
NSN: I think being with children keeps our own child-sense alive. I find it waking up very quickly when I am with them. The refreshment of being with children remains one of the most creative uplifts I know. So I tell teenage-kids, if you're having trouble writing something, go babysit.
SE: On the same point, someone, rejecting likening humans to computers, said that the computer was never a child. Do you feel grownups shed away too much of the child in them that it becomes seductive to compare them to computers? Would reading children's books restore some of the lost childhood?
NSN: Yes, we should all read children's books forever. Read and reread. Sometimes I stand back at gatherings of adults and just listen to all the predictable grooves of chit-chat and wish I could run away to a playground. Or a lost woodland trail.
SE: Poetry in modern American history was considered sissy, whereas in the Arab tradition it was more legitimate, sometimes associated with heroism. Does the seeming femininity of poetry affect American boys' interest in it?
NSN: This is where good teachers come in. I think it is all in the presentation. The exposure to good poetry, the relationship of poetry to life, seizes a boy's imagination as quickly as a girl's. But some boys who are not exposed might only have a vague notion of greeting-card, sweetie-pie verse. So how could they feel attracted?
SE: Do you find differences in the reaction of boys and girls to particular types of poems? Do love poems, for example, appeal more to girls than to boys?
NSN: I never used love poems-as in, love between people-in very many classes. I was always trying to extend the notion of what people might write about-and "love poems" was a stereotype for many kids. I used love poems toward things, ideas, cities, animals, objects, more frequently. I would think that traditionally "romantic" poems might appeal more to girls but really do not have the expertise with this.
SE: The poet Federico Garcia Lorca spoke of two kinds of lullaby, the "wounding," Spanish variety and the mild, Anglo-Saxon one. Do you think children's poems should wound?
NSN: I think children are wounded by many things automatically and poetry parallels those painful experiences, or shines light on them, without healing or solving them completely. I was, for example, particularly wounded as a child by how the things/moments/scenes I loved were so finite. They were all going away. We could not save them. Poetry also seemed to me to be describing that experience, so it helped me a great deal. I had an over-active nostalgia for everything, and still do.
SE: Do you assume that children are capable of moral understanding, like, say, Antoine de Saint-Exupery assumes in the The Little Prince? The poems you yourself write for children, and that you select in your anthologies, do they lean one way or the other?
NSN: At this point, I think children may have more moral understanding than adults do. I am stricken by how adults get "bought out"--by money, power, greed; goodness knows what they want--and children are not yet so "tainted." The Little Prince was one of my favorite books when I was growing up. I do not mind moral leanings in poems. I just do not think brazen messages work very well there.
SE: Adults seem confused about how to view children. Do you see children as adults in miniature form? Are they just a bundle of innocence? Is "the child the father of the man?" I'm asking because I suppose an author's initial premise usually affects the kind of things that she chooses to present to children.
NSN: I think we are all children forever, if we are lucky, in some essential way. I think a child's perspective-not yet so filled and guided by others--is fascinating. The receptivity of childhood, the willingness to swerve and bend and laugh and wonder and put things together in odd ways--might serve us all mightily, if we remembered it more often.
SE: How do children respond when you tell them you are Palestinian? Do they show interest in the place? What do they want to know? NSN: They are interested. They often want to know if I have been there,
when, how often, what happened, and how I feel about the most recent news. They often seem sympathetic to the plight of people in exile, what it would mean to be treated as a second-class citizen in one's own home-place. Recently, some students asked me very pointedly if I had ever had negative encounters with Israeli soldiers myself. They wanted to know all the details! Jewish children often want to tell about their own trips to Israel and how the people they met were interacting or not with Palestinian people.
SE: You wrote a novel for young readers entitled Habibi. Was that not a commercially-risky title, in the sense that the word is not known to the English-reading public? How was it received by readers?
NSN: My publisher suggested changing the title before the book came out, worried that students would not select a book whose title they did not understand (this is absurd, many books have odd or esoteric titles) and various alternative titles were suggested to me by editor/publisher. But I marched off to a local middle school, told some classes about the book, made a list of possible titles on board without suggesting my own predisposition, and took a survey. Hands-down they voted for Habibi as the favored title. So my publisher went with it and I have never been sorry.
SE: Once, when my daughter was six or seven, my wife went to a conference and my little daughter was concerned that I will not be able to do her pony tail. I tried to reassure her that I could; she was not convinced and said: "Morns are different." How are moms different? Does their difference translate, for instance, into more women than men promoting youngsters' literature?
NSN: We care more about domestic details and rituals. At least, in nay own house we do. So, kids, who like details, respond to that. I think there are probably quite a few men in my line of work. Kevin Henkes of Wisconsin, for example, not only does what I do, but he also does his brilliant art. Peter Sis, same. I am sure there are many people who do much more than I do, and better.
SE: Are there any particular books of poetry for young people that you would recommend for translation into Arabic?
NSN: A book by William Stafford, I believe it is called Living in the World, would be my top pick. Actually, any of William Stafford's books. His voice has guided my life since I was sixteen. He was a pacifist and a brilliant, deeply ethical human being, as well as a great and subtle poet.
SE: I suppose you receive fan-mail from your young audiences. What are some of the most memorable responses you have received?
NSN: One, just a few years ago, was from a twelve-year old girl in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I have never been there. She had never been to the Middle East. But she said she read Habibi once, fell in love with it, and decided to read it again. She asked her mother to cook only Arabic food for her while she was reading the book the second time. She made a list of all the foods that are mentioned. She said her mother had to go buy a special cookbook. She said: "I will never think about the Middle East in the same way again. It has become a real and human place to me. I care about it now." She also said, most wondrously, that whenever she read the sections of the book that contain Sitti, the grandmother character, she would "place a white cloth on her own head to feel close to her."
This was my favorite letter.
Notes
- The anthology was published by Utah UP in 1987 and was reprinted in paperback by Interlink Books in 1998 and 2000.
- Naomi Shihab Nye, "Breaking the Fast," Red Suitcase (Brockport, NY: Boa Editions,1994), 55. All subseuqent citations from this collection will be provided between parentheses in the interview.
- Naomi Shihab Nye, "Streets," Yellow Glove (Portland, Seattle: Breitenbush Books, 1986), 12. All subseuqent citations from this collection will be provided between parentheses in the interview.
Sharif Elmusa: A colleague of yours, Vive Griffith, has said that you have achieved a veteran status, working for thirty years--as poet, anthologist, and visitor to classrooms and bookstores--on children and young readers' poetry. And you are always on the move, crisscrossing the huge United States, not to speak of many countries around the world. Where do you get the "fuel," to use the title of one of your poetry books?
Naomi Shihab Nye: Well, I like being a nomad better than being in one place, work-wise. My father tells us our ancestors, at least on one side of the family, were nomads in Egypt long long ago. Maybe I am just living up to my gene-pool. I enjoy meeting people and looking out of new windows. Another thing is, as a writer, I had absolutely no desire at any point in my life for any sort of "working career"-which might have required that I work more in one place, for one institution. Reading, being quiet while en route, observation, all give me the "fuel."
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics
Jan 1, 2007