Naomi Shihab Nye

Poet, novelist, editor, and political activist Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952) is the daughter of a Palestinian father and American mother. Nye grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, visited Jerusalem for the first time when she was fourteen, and currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. Her works for children include the picture book Sitti’s Secret (1994) and the novel Habibi (1996). Her poetry collections include Different Ways to Pray (1980), 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), and Transfer (2011). She has won many awards and fellowships, including four Pushcart Prizes (for best work from small presses), the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, and the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Nye, who has been a visiting writer all over the world, describes herself as “a wandering poet.” An advocate for peaceful solutions to conflict, she often writes about miscommunications caused by disregarding or misusing language, as in the following two poems from her collection You and Yours (2005).

Besides the fact that your event

is coming up in three weeks

on the other side of the world

and you just invited me now,

your fax contained the following phrases:5

action-research oriented initiative;

regionally based evaluation vehicles;

culture should impregnate all different sectors;

consumption of cultural products;

key flashpoints in thematic areas.10

Don’t get me wrong, I love what you are doing,

believing in art and culture,

there, in the country next to the country

my country has recently been devastating

in the name of democracy,15

but that is not the language I live in

and so I cannot come.

I live in teaspoon, bucket, river, pain,

turtle sunning on a brick.

Forgive me. Culture is everything20

right about now. But I cannot pretend

a scrap of investment in the language

that allows human beings to kill one another

systematically, abstractly, distantly.

The language wrapped around 37,000,25

or whatever the number today,

dead and beautiful bodies thrown into holes

without any tiny, reasonable goodbye.