The Politics of Poetry

Sumaiya Ahmed

I am in eighth grade, having lunch with my English teacher. I tell her about Little Women. She tells me about Shakespeare. I want to mimic her hand gestures (so delicate), her eye contact (no nonsense), and her straight posture (so dignified). I straighten my back. I choose my words. She asks me about the summer. Now I get to tell her about Bangladesh. That's where I went that summer; I've been there more times than I can count.

"I love Bangladesh," I say.

"You do?"

Her eyes grow small. She looks at me, perplexed, shocked even. That's what concerns me more than the question, to which I don't know how to respond. After a few seconds of delay, I answer in a voice that's too high pitched.

"Yeah!"

Behind my over-earnest exclamation, I am confused. Why would she ask that? How do I explain my love for a country where I grew up just as much as I did on Long Island? I try to tell her, but for me it's like trivializing a beauty that is obvious, arguing for something I should not have to argue, something I should just be able to share––can't she imagine the thick air? The bougainvilleas spilling over the balustrade? My aunts chatting on the balcony in the evenings, sipping tea, the fishermen singing, the sonorous call to prayer flowing through the streets, or the children playing tag, unsettling dust?

She has reason for asking me to explain my love for a country that the headlines often reduce to poverty and governmental corruption. Those headlines are true of the country but hardly give a full picture of the people who live there. The newspapers do not tell you about the generosity that resides in the hands of those who seemingly have so little, the fisherman by the river who gives me two blowfish to hold and take home when I am eight years old. They do not speak of Mona, my aunt who washes the menstrual wraps of my mother, the youngest of six sisters, while growing up during the 1971 war for independence, who hands over her son to her sister, Berry, because she cannot have children. The newspapers do not report how excitedly my aunts bring home bags of lychees when the season arrives, how they bite into the fleshy white skin of the sweet fruit like children. Reporters do not quote their laughter in the dark, when the electricity goes out due to power shortages, or their snide remarks when the prime minister offers platitudes on television. What the newspapers leave behind, my poetry depends upon.

If my English teacher were to ask me today why I love Bangladesh, I would leave my impulse for self-defense aside. I would share with her some of the lines from a letter I wrote to my friend this winter while in Bangladesh: "The mosquito net bellows underneath the ceiling fan as I sleep with my aunt Mona. Ensconced in her belly, I become a spoon, a baby in the womb. My head rests on her breast. I am nineteen going on five. I want nothing else."

I don't know if I would have thought to turn to poetry as a response to politics had it not been for the work of Naomi Shihab Nye. A Palestinian-American poet, Nye taught me to place politics in the context of small, day-to-day matters.

"I'm not interested in poetry that keeps people out," Nye says in a telephone interview from her home in San Antonio, Texas, where she has lived since she was 15. "I'm interested in poetry that invites people in."

A published poet since the age of seven, Nye has written several books, both poetry and prose, not just about her experiences as a Palestinian, but as a Palestinian-American growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, and San Antonio, Texas, where she now lives with her husband and son. A National Book Award Finalist, 19 Varieties of Gazelle was published after the attacks of September 11, 2001, because, as Nye writes in the introduction, "we need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name." She also wrote Habibi, an autobiographical novel aimed at young adults about a girl moving from St. Louis to Jerusalem. Her other works have titles that are like flashes of poetry: Never in a Hurry, You & Yours, A Maze Me, The Words Under The Words, This Same Sky, Fuel, and The Tree Is Older Than You Are.

Nye never doubted the place of poetry in conflicts, local or international. Thinking of the conflicts in the Middle East, Nye says, "I simply cannot believe that people could commit acts of violence so easily if they imagined one another's lives. And I think poetry helps us imagine each other's lives."

In her poem "The Small Vases From Hebron," Nye asks

And what do the headlines say?
Nothing of the smaller petal
perfectly arranged inside the larger petal
or the way tinted glass filters light.

It is as though reporters drain the life from a story in getting down to the who, how, where, and when. "That's why we need literature," Nye says, recalling a terrorist attack at a mosque in Hebron. She wrote "The Small Vases From Hebron" thinking about the way the light came through the mosque's glass windows. She adds, "Never was it mentioned in the headlines, the simple pure color of the glass. How will people think of this town if they just see it as another battlefield?" Without the details that underline the humanity of a place, places remain just that, places. Once we notice the details––the thrum of slapping wet cloth on the terrazzo tiles decorated with fading wedding designs painted by my aunt Daisy, the hours I spend perusing my cousin's music collection with everything from The Moody Blues to Tagore while the sound of someone singing with the harmonium filters in from next door––it is easier to comprehend how close to our own lives seemingly disconnected situations hundreds of miles away really are. We may grow numb to numbers, the body counts after conflicts, but it is difficult not to be permeable to the fragile, silent moments of beauty to which Nye's poetry gives voice.

Since tenth grade (before this interview), Nye's voice has resonated with me. My Forensics coach for the speech and debate team handed me a book of her poetry because she thought of my child-like voice when she skimmed the poems. Relating to Nye's words immediately, I was in awe of her faith in the beauty of people and places in any circumstance, even one as sprawling as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Nye is not a complicated poet. She writes simply, patiently, highlighting the miraculous in the everyday. When I read Nye's poetry, her voice fills the space around me, surrounding me with a clarity that cleanses and soothes. Nye writes to her uncle in the poem "For Mohammed on the Mountain":

This is what I am learning, the voice I hear,
when I wake at 3 a.m.
It says, Teach me how little I need to live
and I can't tell if it is me talking, or you,
or the walls of the room. How little, how little,
and the world jokes and says, how much.
Money, events, ambitions, plans, oh Uncle,
I have made myself a quiet place in the swirl.
I think you would like it.
Yesterday I learned how many shavings of wood
       the knife discards
to leave one smoothly whittled spoon.
Today I read angles of light through the window,
first they touch the floor, then the bed,
till everything is luminous, curtains flung wide.

Nye creates her own question of "how little I need to live" and answers it with the sheer excitement brought on by the seemingly ordinary—the spoon, the floor, the bed, the curtains. The wonder of the everyday is what Nye relies upon to expose her readers to the depth of a place apart from "the swirl," the sweeping generalizations, the flashing headlines. I've borrowed Nye's angles of light" image to describe Bangladesh more than a few times. I imagine my mother tracing the shapes of such angles by the window, looking out on the bodies lying on the road during the war of independence for Bangladesh.

Something strikes me from the minute I hear Nye on the phone. Her voice is firm, strong, and angry.

Her incisive tone is different from her poetry, as though the poems were distillations of so many thoughts, the calm filtered from a maelstrom. She speaks cuttingly about President Bush's insistence that "freedom is on the march" in the most recent national address. As his words were being repeated, CNN showed the streets of Baghdad in total flaming chaos. "That's just a tragedy for everyone," Nye says. "Who is this good for?"

Nye does more than just rant. Last year she received an email from an American working in a literacy project in Iraq. The project really needed books. Nye says, "How offensive that my tax money couldn't have gone to books begin with. How offensive that it's books that we have to beg for. We should have to beg for weapons." She adds, "And for those of us who believe in language so much, it's very depressing that governments and countries don't live up to the basic civility of say, a school or a library. We're all taught when we're children to use words when we go to school, to ask a question when we don't understand something. Why can't our countries live up to such basic behavior?"

As a speaker around the United States, Nye is especially attuned to the nation's ideological divide. The divisions, she says, have come out more because of the war in Iraq. She explains, "There is the sense of this country going down a path, an arrogant path. I used to feel very confident that I would always want to remain a resident of this beautiful country."

This year, she sent President Bush a book for Christmas, Every War Has Two Losers by William Stafford, one of Nye's favorite poets.

"I didn't get a thank you letter yet," she says.

Nye doesn't expect one, at least I don't think she does. The gift seems to be nothing more than a symbolic statement—something she seems to make quite often. Soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Nye wrote "A Letter to Any Would Be Terrorists." Not knowing what to do with it, she emailed the letter to five friends and wrote, "just send it anywhere." The letter spread, becoming published in anthologies, newspapers as far as Beirut, even, a friend tells her, posted on the wall of a Buddhist temple in San Francisco. In the letter, Nye talks about her father who became a refugee from Palestine in 1948 and came to the United States as a college student. In typical Nye fashion, she focuses on the details:

He is 74 years old now and still homesick. He has planted fig trees. He has invited all the Ethiopians in his neighborhood to fill their little paper sacks with his figs. He has written columns and stories saying the Arabs are not terrorists, he has worked all his life to defy that word. Arabs are businessmen and students and kind neighbors. There is no one like him and there are thousands like him—gentle Arab daddies who make everyone laugh around the dinner table, who have a hard time with headlines, who stand outside in the evenings with their hands in their pockets staring toward the far horizon.

Nye's softness towards potential terrorists catches the reader off guard: "I am sorry if you did not have a father like that. I wish everyone could have a father like that."

Yet for all of her symbolism, I am skeptical of her statements' ability to contribute to real policy changes. It seems naïve to me that Nye should write a letter to any would be terrorists (or for that matter, send symbolic books to Bush for the holidays). It's clear that Nye's letter is not intended for the terrorists. Her letter is meant for fellow Americans, her next door neighbors. A woman from a small town newspaper asked Nye if she could publish the letter. Nye recalls one of the women's comments: " 'I'm sure you must feel a lot of shame being half Arab.' And I'm thinking, didn't you read my letter? I guess I have double shame for being Arab and American? I thought that remark was very odd. That was one of the moments when you feel your blood pressure rising." Hearing Nye's story, I feel myself back in the eighth grade, unable to muster a rapid-fire response to my English teacher's question.

Nye's letter to the terrorists is more than a symbol. It's also a mechanism of self-defense. It's a natural reaction, one with which I sympathize. Still, I am wary of this impulse towards self-defense that often turns into misplaced energy, of declaring peacefulness and righteousness when one can just as well show those qualities through behavior. It seems fruitless to wallow in the mentality of "people hate us."

This mentality seems ever more common in some of the circles in which I travel. Consider my dinner table on one of the nights following the attacks of September 11, 2001, a gathering of family friends who are all Muslims.

"What will happen to the Muslims all over the world?" someone asks, and the worried conversation continues on into the night. And I'm thinking, that is so secondary, such a non-issue next to the tragedy, the deaths, the unquantifiable loss that the attacks imposed. Instead of taking on this sweeping task of self-defense, why not start small? Instead of using our energy to shout what Muslims are not, I believe we can focus on all the cultural gifts that come from being Muslim—the moments that ground a Muslim's day, like waking up to the call to prayer as early as 5 a.m. in the summertime because, as the verse says, "prayer is better than sleep," or splashing water over our bodies in that certain way for the ablutions, or relating, no matter which part of the world we are from, to the beauty of Arabic that Nye expresses in her poem "Steps":

A man letters the sign for his grocery store
in Arabic and English.
Paint dries more quickly in English.
The thick swoops and curls of Arabic letters
stay moist and glistening
till tomorrow when the children
show up jingling their dimes.

I still wonder about the practical value that poetry can have in such dialogue. I don't need convincing that Nye's poems move individuals, but I am skeptical of how they can move masses of people towards positive change. Certain poems strive to be revolutionary, but Nye's explicitly do not. Nye says herself, although I think it is more an expression of modesty than anything else, "I'm just a dumb poet."

"I can't figure how anything is going to work out anywhere but I do believe that it could," Nye says.

Can she imagine politicians reading her poems?

"Why not?" Nye asks. "They're short."

While I am not sure if politicians allow themselves the sensitivity towards life that Nye expresses in her poetry, I hope that they do. I hope they consider that moments of understanding can arise if one starts with the small things.

I ask Nye her opinion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "What people have to remember," she says, "is the daily justice."

"I'm talking about all the small justices people take for granted when they say to me 'violence committed by Palestinians…' –– I disapprove of all violence committed by Palestinians. But then when you think about our country and the billions of dollars worth of aid that has been given to Israel in the form of weapons, I don't think that's right at all. You have to consider the daily oppressions Palestinians have lived through. The mainstream media will not let you know about that." Nye refers to examples from curfews and checkpoints to the uprooting of a Palestinian's orchard by the Israeli army. "A sense of daily justice is critical," Nye says, acknowledging that it is not lost on everyone. "There are so many Jewish and Muslim people who know this. I always feel hope when I talk to them. There are so many people who would prefer to live in an equitable society." Nye points out the various organizations, like Seeds for Peace, that step back from the politics and towards interaction and progress. "We're just little writers here, what we can do?" Nye asks herself. She finds encouragement from projects like Wahat al-Salaam (Neveh Shalom in Hebrew), a village in Israel that is deliberately half-Arab, half-Jewish. "I just wish we could follow their wisdom. How can we keep engaging with one another as opposed to opposing one another?"

Nye believes we have to read each other's poetry and recognize the details of each other's lives to fully understand each other's real stories. She herself looks up to several writers, including Mahmoud Darwish, William Stafford, Yehuda Amichai, and Edward Field, a Jewish writer who Nye describes as "a wonderful poet and writer of prose, a great human being and a great spirit." She discovered him in high school, finding in him what I have found in Nye. She tells me, "I think I wrote him a fan letter and he was sweet enough to answer."

Nye also admires the great literary figure Sala Khadra Jayyusi, who heads PROTA, the Project for the Translation of Arabic. Through the program, Jayyusi made accessible to English speakers many books of Middle Eastern literature. Many of her anthologies have been published by Columbia University Press.

At base, Nye allows her readers to trust in faith, to trust in the possibilities, how:

Now, while we are fresh.
While the century is still a wide-open page.
Now, a new story to be made
and everyone, with their fragrant nouns

and muscular verbs
to write it.

When Nye writes "fragrant nouns" and "muscular verbs" she endows words with humanity that people can deny of other people.

I am struck by the parallel between Nye and the late Yehuda Amichai, Israel's national poet, whom I have recently discovered. In his poem "Tourists," Amichai writes:

Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial.
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on the top of Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust over our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.

Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, "You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family.

Like Nye's poetry, "Tourists" evokes Amichai's unapologetic reassertion of visiting people, not places. His decision to move away from being the tourist marker is brazen but right. He makes of himself evidence that it is the details, the man sitting next to two heavy baskets of fruit, that matter. This conviction is what makes the conversation between Nye and Amichai, poets from seemingly opposing worlds, possible.

Once you can see the poetry in that, the humanness underneath the words, I think it must be difficult not to appreciate a place where there are people with the capacity for such love. I suspect it's something like the wonder that grabs you when you lift a stone and discover an entire colony of ants.

SUMAIYA AHMED is a first-year at Columbia College. She has been a writer, illustrator, and photographer for the Spectator and The Blue and White.