Naomi Shihab-Nye's Political Poetry

Joyce Nower

Here are some examples, more or less contemporary, of poetry that deals with controversial issues or historical moments:

Steve Kowit in "Romero" (The Dumbbell Nebula , The Roundhouse Press, 2000 ) writes about a migrant laborer whom he befriended: "I pulled to the curb. It was where he would sleep. /In the morning, a truck cruising Magnolia/would take him to Fresno, /where la migra was scarce & plenty of guys like himself, /without papers, were working construction. ... /... we gave each other a long, final abrazo. Country / of endless abundance & workers with nowhere to sleep. "

In the poem "Ese' " (a slang expression for "fellow" or "brother") by Ray Gonzalez (Cabato and Sentora, BOA Editions, Ltd., 1999), the poet identifies the main character of the poem with images of violence - "broken beer bottle/in your heaving chest" - and proclaims his deep estrangement from this aspect of Chicano life: "You were hung on the wall/as a brown shadow/I gave up long ago."

Lucille Clifton's poem "jasper texas 1998" is about a black man dragged to death roped to a good-ole-boy's car bumper. The head of the corpse asks "why and why and why/ should i call a white man brother?" (Blessing the Boats, BOA Editions Ltd., 2000)

Denise Levertov's Vietnam War poem "What Were they Like?" observes, "Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,/ but after the children were killed/there were no more buds."

And Linda Hogan writes in "Tear": "remember the women./ Tonight they walk/out from the shadows/with black dogs.../I am the tear between them/ and both sides live" (The Book of Medicines, 1993), drawing on the two pronunciations and meanings of "tear" to focus her poem about the Chickasaw march into exile.

Moving farther back in post-World War II American literary history, we encounter the Beats. To rattle the minds of suburban America, as well as the more formal poetry of the Forties and early Fifties, diverse writers, such as Alan Ginsberg ("Message": "Since we had changed/rogered spun worked/wept & pissed together/I wake up in the morning...but you are gone in NY...") struck down the boundaries of "appropriate" poetic diction. Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder ("Praise for Sick Women": "The female is fertile, and discipline/[contra naturam] only/ confuses her/Who has, head held sideways/Arm out softly, touching,/A difficult dance to do, but not in mind." An editorial gr-r-r-r here!), to name only two, converted free verse into the obligatory mode of writing and set forth a new realism of physicality, drugs, homo-erotica, spirituality, and mobility - a "public" combination potent long before Time Magazine picked up on it.

But love poems too can be political. For example, in Poem #1 of her "Twenty-One Love Poems" (The Dream of a Common Language, 1978), Adrienne Rich observes, with a scowl at the then prevailing mores, that "No one has imagined us," meaning herself and her woman lover. And in Poem #8, she writes about sexual love between women: "Your traveled generous thighs/ between which my whole face has come and come... ." Lesbian love, erotica, female body parts - were(and still are) "controversial issues" and, therefore, political.

Labeling the diverse topics noted above "political" seems a bit obvious when we realize that we've read about them in history and sociology books, or in the newspapers and magazines. We can also see that what's thought of as "political" and what isn't, depends to a large extent on the time period, and on what is then conventional and unconventional, or what "has been done before" as opposed to "what is new." "Political" in this sense is directly related to shifts in alignments within a society: the outs move in, the unconventional turns more conventional, the shocking dissipates into the banal, the current event becomes history, and so on.

Naomi Shihab-Nye is a poet whose political lyrics arise naturally from her life as an American of Palestinian background. Her imagery converts what we read in the newspapers about this "new" part of the world - American newspapers and readers tend to be parochial - into poetry. Her political poetry, of course, comes from the same source as her more personal poems, and thus they don't sound formulaic or didactic: her political poems are personal.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Shihab-Nye moved with her family (her father is Palestinian) to Jerusalem at age 14 where she attended high school for a year. After returning to the U.S. her family settled in San Antonio, Texas. She currently lives there with her photographer husband and a son. Shihab-Nye has published prize-winning poetry anthologies for children, as well as essays, and several volumes of her own poetry, the latest of which, Fuel (BOA Editions, 1998), is the source of the poems discussed here. Her awards include Pushcart Prizes, the Jane Addams Award for Social Justice, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1997-1998. She has also traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency as a goodwill ambassador.

"The Small Vases From Hebron" takes us across the world to Hebron, Israel, and the disaster of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as experienced by children. It illustrates the best in the unpretentious political lyric because it springs from real people and things, and yet makes the commonplace strange and the strange tragic. We enter a classroom where Palestinian school girls are bent over their copy books. Their fragile selves are alluded to in the small shapely vase in the center of the table holding a sprig of flowers " which could have lived invisibly/ in loose soil beside the road."

Tip their mouths open to the sky.
Turquoise, amber,
the deep green with fluted handle,
pitcher the size of two thumbs,
tiny lip and graceful waist.

Here we place the smallest flower
which could have lived invisibly
in loose soil beside the road,
sprig of succulent rosemary,
bowing mint.

They grow deeper in the center of the table.

Here we entrust the small life,
thread, fragment, breath.
And it bends. It waits all day.

As the bread cools and the children
open their gray copybooks
to shape the letter that looks like
a chimney rising out of a house.

Counterpointed to this picture of gentleness and industry - writing the small letters carefully - is the image of the big letters of the headlines - "And what do the headlines say?" - telling about the death of the "men and boys, praying when they died,/" who "fall out of their skins," "the whole alphabet of living" destroyed. (Women and men do not study or pray together in many parts of the world.) And what do the headlines say?

Nothing of the smaller petal
perfectly arranged inside the larger petal
or the way tinted glass filters light.
Men and boys, praying when they died,
fall out of their skins.
The whole alphabet of living,
heads and tails of words,
sentences, the way they said,
"Ya'Allah!" when astonished,
or "ya'ani" for "I mean" -
a crushed glass under the feet
still shines.
But the child of Hebron sleeps
with the thud of her brothers falling
and the long sorrow of the color red.

Sudden and violent death mars life, especially young life. Beauty, delicacy, poignancy, and violence mingle. The poet characteristically metamorphoses this world of sharp contrasts into a comprehensible and poignant lament.

"Darling" moves between the Middle East and Texas, the poet's home state. In Part One, the poet pays homage to Lebanon: "I break this toast for the ghost of bread in Lebanon," then observes "Someone's kettle has been crushed./Someone's sister has a gash above her right eye." And the political anguish in Lebanon (the site of armed struggle between Lebanon, Syria and Israel) affects the sweetness of tea and the freshness of a strawberry in Texas, and "overnight each apple grows a bruise." Part One creates an autobiographical context for the moving drama of Part Two in which a father and son, in Lebanon, sharing a glass of water and "Not thinking about it deeply/ though they might have, had they known," are, by chance, killed. The third part of the poem refers to a Turkish friend who calls language "a darling," small, delicate, easily scared, but "Nothing else will save us now./The word 'together' wants to live in every house." The autobiographical "I" and the third person narrative are set within the larger drama of language as the channel of human feelings and the last hope for reconciliation. Each part of the poem is written in a straightforward manner, easily comprehensible in part and as a whole, proving once again that clarity is a virtue.

In the poem "Fundamentalism," the poet does something daring: she ponders the origins of religious fundamentalism in children, in particular, boys. This, you might think, is more a topic for a prose essay, but the poet's narrative skills and use of detail come to her aid. Fundamentalism, simply stated, is the rigid belief that your beliefs are the only right ones, and that everyone else is a nonbeliever. World events make us think immediately of Islam, and the context of the poem is indeed Islam, but it could really be about any absolutist ideology, religious or secular. The poem is written as a series of questions that imply the prior question: "What makes a child a fundamentalist?" The questions harbor the reasons.

Perhaps fundamentalist rigidity is the result of feeling not as smart as others, and so "you need your own secret." Perhaps you need clear-cut rules and regulations because "mystery was never your friend." Perhaps you think that only "one way could satisfy/the infinite heart of the heavens." Perhaps you preferred "the king on his golden throne/more than the villagers carrying baskets of lemons?" The poet then uses an image of a boy sharpening his pencil point to describe how life, from the poet's point of view, is a gradual unfolding, not a predestined mold. While not one of my favorite of Shihab-Nye's poems (yet who else has written a poem on this subject?), it illustrates well her ability to convert complex political material into the lyric mode.

"The Palestinians Have Given Up Parties" is a poignant poem which recalls the daily life as well as festivities in Jerusalem: "Mountains of rice, shiny shoes,/a hurricane of dancing./ Children wearing little suitcoats/and velvet dresses fell asleep in circles/after eating 47 Jordan almonds." But now children are killed, and the door gets blasted off the school. Sorrow is conveyed through simple details, not through any vague generalities.

"Your Name Engraved on a Grain of Rice" is a surrealistic poem, a cross between Kenneth Patchen (pretty clear) and John Ashbury (not). It is not about the Middle Eastern connection. The poem is about the symbiotic relationship between the vulgarity of American mass culture and the opportunism and vulgarity of American political hacks, and the fact that there must be exceptions to this tightly woven web. Hence the carnival metaphor where the Ferris wheel "may or may not have the last pin/ properly placed." The poet assuming the careless amorality of a bystander observes: "Who cares, these days? You could die just eating." The images add up to a public culture gone mad: lack of discipline ("toddling boys who kick/the giant Coke cups pitched onto curbs"), consumption and sloth ("Soon they too would spend/ extra for what they usually pour from the big bottle in front of TV"), stupidity and political corruption ("Now our local headliners may watch their constituents flip upside down/for fun. How much have they done to lose our faith? See them reach their/people here, propellers of hair spinning out."), slobbery ("Dribble of itchy bits down the back/ of the shirt, who cares..."), empty glitz ("In this land of glistening ball gowns and floats of flashing girls,/everything shifts. Even if her waving hand is gone/ in two minutes"). It's not a pretty picture. But some things just don't fit, thank goodness. For example, at the carnival booth where someone writes your name on a grain of rice, certain long names won't fit, like Henrietta, or Marielena, or Dagoberto. And "what about Octavio Hernandez-Salvatierra and his 20 uncles and their 77 hopes?" or some sudden beauty like the beauty of roses in a gloomy yard or "something that swells and stays swelled,/ bubbling and softening, changing its life." The very last image is quite strange, possibly a fetus, possibly a plant. Hard to tell. But whatever it is, it doesn't fit into the ugliness depicted in this social/cultural critique. The necessity of finding more of these "things that don't fit" becomes more and more important in a pop culture that presses in on every side.

"Feather" is about a Mexican American neighbor in San Antonio whose being "slipped out of the old days like a feather./Floated here with her aluminum pot lids/ and blue enamel spoons tied to her wings." When she asks you how you are, you know you could tell her and she would really listen. A third person narrative, alternating with a monologue spoken by Mrs. Esquivel, gives the reader the flavor of her generous nature. And all in the neighborhood must have this impression of generosity because when Mrs. E. goes to call in the hens and cats for the night and "whoever/might be lost" in the tall grasses of the vacant lot next door to her home, "the people drifting slowly past/ in the slim envelope of light/answer softly, Here I am." We are not living exclusively any more in neighborhoods and families of one background, and our poetry reflects this fact.

The poems I have discussed here are understandable poems with a consistently humane, individualized, and public perspective, and they prove that political poetry does not have to be crude, obvious, self-conscious, and slogan-filled. Naomi Shihab-Nye's lyrics move across boundaries of nation, ethnicity, and class, arising from the crow's nest perspective of a poet who speaks out on whatever issue touches her soul. Furthermore, she employs a language which fits Wendell Berry's acute observation ("Standing by Words," 1981) that some poems "receive our belief and sympathy because they satisfy our sense of the complexity, the crossgraining, of real experience. In them, an inward possibility is made to open outward."

They also provide a good example of T.S. Eliot's observation in his essay "The Social Function of Poetry" (1943 ) that poetry in its social and psycho-social role expands our sensibilities to include reinterpreted and new subject matter, and that "this is the reason why we cannot afford to stop writing poetry." As Eliot might observe, Shihab-Nye's poetry reflects a shift in our social milieu and thus reflects the changing "personality" of America.

Although there are what one might call "personal poems" in this collection, the division between personal and political is erased by the techniques used in both kinds of poetry: narrative, characterization, detail, imagery, free verse phrasing. For this poet, the political is indeed personal.

Joyce Nower