BOA Editions, Ltd, 2019
Author of and contributor to dozens of volumes ranging from
fiction to children’s books and anthologies, Naomi Shihab Nye was recently
named as The Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate for 2019-2021.
Her background as a Palestinian American who grew up in Jerusalem and San
Antonio, Texas gives her an intensely empathetic vantage point through which
she sees the trauma and bravery of the Palestinian people, as expressed
vividly, and passionately, in her latest book The Tiny Journalist, which
was written in honor of Janna Jihad Ayyad and her cousin Ahed Tamimi, one of
the most recognizable faces of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli
occupation.
If we are fortunate enough to live in circumstances where turning
away is an option, too often this is precisely what we do. The Tiny
Journalist is a plea to do the opposite, to look and consider what it is to
be Palestinian, to be effectively stateless, and to be “Scattered around the
world like pollen”. Despite their being almost absurdly outmatched by the
intersecting power structures of Israel and America, Palestinians endure. A collection of eighty poems
split into two sections, The Tiny Journalist is a testament to this
endurance.
Now thirteen, Ayyad, who began recording protests with her
mother’s iPhone at the age of seven and posting the footage on Facebook,
Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube, has been called by some the world’s youngest
journalist. The word tiny, though diminutive, expresses Nye’s reverence for the
capacity of one so young to affect change, at the same time that she laments
Ayyad’s loss of innocence resulting from her precocious citizen journalism in
the book’s opening poem “Morning Song”:
The tiny journalist
will tell us what
she sees.
Document the moves,
the dust,
soldiers blocking
the road.
Yes, she knows how
to take a picture
with her phone.
Holds it high
like a balloon.
Yes, she would
prefer to dance and
play,
would prefer the
world
to be pink. It is
her job to say
what she sees, what
is happening.
From her vantage
point everything
is huge—but don’t
look down on her.
She’s bigger than
you are.
For many adults, children needn’t be taken seriously, yet we
ignore the young at our peril: it’s they who are inheriting the earth, and
their voices are perhaps the most important of all. Beyond the credentials of
the professional adult journalist whose positions might be quashed by
gatekeeper media, through the ubiquity of social media, the tiny journalist may
bear witness and speak on behalf of her generation. As Ayyad says, “Journalism is my only weapon to show the world what the
children are going through in Palestine.”
It seems Nye’s intent in The Tiny Journalist is to use the power of
poetry to amplify the vitality of the young defending the young, namely, to
bring the bravery of Ayyad’s message to the widest possible audience, including
children.
As we discover in the author’s note, The Tiny Journalist is
written in a mix of voices: Ayyad’s, Nye’s father, who was himself a
Palestinian refugee and journalist, and her own memories of and reflections
upon Palestine. Since this spectrum of voices makes it hard at times to place
the speaker(s) of the poems, the voices are reminiscent in some ways of the
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms; fraught with contradictions he
couldn’t resolve, Pessoa found himself writing in distinct voices through which
he could express disparate viewpoints.
Like Pessoa, whose heteronymic voices ranged from work of a more
critical nature to piercingly simple, plain work, Nye’s poems fluctuate from
powerfully direct statements that appear to have been written in her own voice
to pieces that could have been written for children, echoes of which we can
glean in the passage above from “Morning Song”. This is also discernible in
both the title of “Exotic Animals, Books for Children,” and in the speaker’s
shift in tone, which muses on the fact that “Armadillo means / ‘little armored
one.’ / Some of us become this to survive in our own countries.” It’s as if Nye
is speaking to Ayyad as the child she is, noting that Ayyad must have the
necessary armor to live under occupation, just as Nye must have armor as an American
who’s lived through the dark times of the post-9/11 years and is still
navigating ongoing waves of anti-Muslim sentiment, which are by no means
limited to Israel. Perhaps part of these arguably heteronymic vocal shifts
result from Nye’s identifying as a “wandering poet,” although she remains a
Texas-based poet whose local reference to the armadillo conflates Texan fauna
with Middle Eastern politics, employing this metaphor as a vehicle of
transcontinental and multi-generational solidarity.
In the poem “Janna,” the voice shifts from a kind of narratorial
one to lines that are likely a dramatized version of Ayyad’s voice. The poem
starts with these lines:
At 7, making
videos.
At 10, raising the
truth flag.
At 11, raising it
higher,
traveling to South
Africa,
keffiyah knotted
on shoulders,
interviews in
airports,
Please could you
tell us . . .
There’s a clear shift from the narratorial reporting on Ayyad’s
background above to the first person lines below:
We are made of
bone and flesh and story
but they poke their
big guns
into our faces
and our front doors
and our living
rooms
The handling of this passing from a narratorial voice to a
dramatic one is not always consistently arresting. It hardly matters, though,
if the lines quoted immediately above are in Nye’s voice or Ayyad’s. We get the
idea, and there’s considerable power in how this scene evokes the intrusions of
state control breaching the threshold of the home, of guns staging the story of
Palestinian bodies.
In “ISRAELIS LET BULLDOZERS GRIND TO HALT,” Nye also appears to be
speaking in her own voice when she writes
I am mad about
language
covering pain
big bandage
masking the wound
Among these fluctuations in voice, what is ostensibly Nye’s own
voice often has greater lyrical force. These lines are haunting:
As if the
bulldozers had their own lives
and were just being
bulldozers
crushing houses
schoolrooms
clinics
art galleries
whole worlds
on their own time
no people involved
Years ago, when teaching English in Taiwan, I had a roommate from
Chicago, a quiet, thoughtful guy. We talked a lot about politics, as it was the
time of George Bush’s controversial rise to power, 9/11, and so on. When I left
Taiwan, I never saw him again, but later learned he’d joined a pro-Palestinian
group called International Solidarity Movement. With a cohort of several other
activists, acting as a human shield trying to protect Palestinian homes from
being demolished, my former roommate was present in 2003 when the American
activist Rachel Corrie was run over and killed by an Israeli bulldozer. In the face of such raw, brutal power, what
can words do? The Tiny Journalist compels us to recognize that though
they require courage, words do indeed have power.
Nye’s poems tell us nobody can completely take people’s power from
them if they have the tenacity to endure, as the Palestinian poet Dareen
Tatour, who was accused of support for a
terrorist organization and sentenced to five months in prison for publishing a
poem called "Qawim ya sha’abi, qawimhum," (Resist my people, resist
them).
Nye is often at her best rhetorically when her lines are simple and spare, as
in this brief poem for Tatour, quoted in full below:
Dareen Said Resist
And went to jail.
We were asking, What?
You beat us with butts of guns
for years,
tear-gas our grandmas,
and you can’t take
Resist?
Under
the heading “Poetry is Not a Crime,” the website of the Jewish Group for Peace
houses an extraordinary petition, a list of hundreds of writers, artists,
and intellectuals such as Claudia Rankine and Naomi Klein who rallied
behind Tatour’s right to use the written word to voice dissent. The petition
appears below another poem by Naomi Shihab Nye written on Tatour’s behalf,
positioning Nye as a major poetic voice arguing for a radical increase in
empathy towards Palestinians.
About
the need for greater empathy in light of Israel’s human rights abuses, it’s
relevant that the current administration’s first Secretary of Defense, James
Mattis, once
said
the
following:
If I’m in Jerusalem
and I put 500 Jewish settlers out here to the east and there’s 10,000 Arab settlers in here, if we draw the border to
include them, either it ceases to be a Jewish state or you say the Arabs don’t get to vote—apartheid. . .
That didn't work too well the last time I saw that practiced in a country.
Employing her father’s voice, in “My Immigrant Dad, On Voting,”
Nye writes
Jimmy Carter was
the only one I trusted
He saw us as human
beings
He wasn’t afraid to
say Apartheid which of course
it was and always
has been
He got in trouble
for being honest
I wrote him a
letter
Said he was the
best president I ever had
In the face of what major mainstream officials regard as
apartheid, The Tiny Journalist is a book about power, colonization, and
injustice, but also the power of imagination in the face of unremitting force,
as expressed memorably in these lines from “Positivism”: “This was our
superpower, retaining imagination / in worst days”.
It is a book that asks how Palestinians can lead normal lives in
the face of injustice, and about how the poetic imagination seeks the creation
of a new normal amidst the barrage of assymmetic power. “Separation Wall” is
replete with pathos, as Nye appears to consult memories of her grandmother:
I ask my
grandmother if there was ever a time
she felt like a
normal person every day,
not in danger, and
she thinks for as long
as it takes a sun
to set and says, Yes.
I always feel like
a normal person.
They just don’t see
me as one.
In “Losing As its Own Flower,” Nye writes “We lost our rhythm of
regular living”. Amidst the syncopations of conflict, diaspora, and exile,
Palestinians endure, but are never able to live consistently regular lives. In
one of the more remarkable poems in the collection, “America Gives Israel Ten
Million Dollars a Day,” the speaker reflects “But some people do not want
Palestinians to ‘lead normal lives’ ”. The last few stanzas of the poem
are particularly powerful, and worth quoting here in full:
I asked a rabbi
demonstrating against us
if his people could
imagine our sorrows.
Could they just
hold their own thoughts for a moment
and imagine what we
feel like?
He was quiet,
staring at me.
I made a rabbi
quiet.
Could he imagine
the pain of Ahmed Dawabsha,
only survivor of
his family terribly burned
when the settlers
threw a Molotov cocktail into
his house? No more
mother, father, baby brother,
Ahmed, once the
most beautiful little boy you can imagine,
Ahmed, now alone
with sorrow and scars and pain,
wrapping his
wounds. And this is what
the rabbi said: I
don’t know. I don’t know
if we can imagine
it.
And that is the
problem.
Not just in Israel and Palestine, but everywhere, including the
emotional arcs of our private lives, so much of our failed capacity for peace,
what we could build together as the real, the normal, the true, is contingent
on a failure of imagination. So it stands to reason that our potential
salvation lies in our capacity to imagine one another, or even to say we don’t
know, and to begin to imagine, from there.
In “Regret,” we read “This is normal here, the fathers say
/ grenades exploding / tourists stepping carefully over the grenades”. What
does the word normal mean when the abnormal is normalized? When there’s one set
of norms for some, and another set of norms for others, such as the
Palestinians, who are fundamentally othered into a permanent state of
emergency, expressed so incisively in the spare last five lines of “Regret”:
tear gas billowing
down our streets
Regular
Usual
SOS
We are so tired
This poem asks us how anyone could enjoy the usual things of life,
how people can work and breathe to a regular rhythm of living, when exhausted
by the poisonous cloud of regret in a perpetual state of emergency.
The Tiny Journalist is a book about the power of
imagination, but also paradoxically about the perceived powerlessness of
imagination against realpolitik, for to stand up to Israel is also to stand up
to its mighty partner, America, millions of whose citizens pay for / subsidize
Palestinian subjugation through taxation without understanding how or why.
Nye’s poetics are deployed in service of making the reader feel the bite, the
gnawing violence of day-to-day life for Palestinians, for whom justice is too
often arbitrary. At times, the aesthetic cohesion of the book becomes secondary
to its ethical arguments, a quandary that some artists deal with by retreating
to irony, distance, and abstraction, and ignoring politics altogether. Nye’s
ethically ambitious but overtly political risk-taking has led to perceptible
minor flaws in the book. Nevertheless, the call to invest our moral imagination
in the Palestinians’ experience as well as the witnesses who’ve experienced the
Palestinians’ situation firsthand is profound, as in “Harvest,” which tells of
a visit to Palestine by a group of American doctors:
The doctors say
they are shocked to see.
We don’t know
what it would feel like,
not having guns
pointed at us. Guns
have been pointed
at us all our lives.
America don’t act surprised, you bought them!
This is a recurrent argument: the reader must first imagine, and
second, the reader can act simply by asking if it’s justifiable that their tax
dollars are directly implicated in the persistence of this distant conflict,
albeit one that is traumatic for Palestinians and Israelis alike. One thing’s
for certain: what we accept as irreconcilable conflict is more likely to be
moderated by the imagination than by politics as usual, especially if the usual politics serve the atrophying of a
people through piecemeal colonization at gunpoint.
The book sets itself what many would take to be a seemingly
impossible task: to induce people unfamiliar firsthand with Palestinian
suffering to see and even to feel their plight. The Tiny Journalist is a
necessary book, for in spite of the daunting nature of this task, to seek it is
to embrace hope, to forge a visionary bridge between America and Palestine. So
how prescient it was that in the book’s penultimate poem, Nye quotes W.S.
Merwin, who passed so recently, “On the last day of the world / I would want
to plant a tree”. Perhaps hope is a delusion, but it is, in its
bittersweetness, the best tool we have to keep living, to keep faith in our
common humanity, and this is why we need the young, why we need tiny
journalists, so we can see what they see, and hear the ethical force of their
words.
Mark
Grenon's
poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Arc, The Antigonish
Review, carte blanche (Pushcart-nominated poem), Debutantes/Debbie,
filling Station, the Hamilton Review of Books, Matrix, the
Ottawa Arts Review, PRISM international, The Puritan, and Vallum.
His collaborative video poetry has been screened at the Visible Verse Festival,
the Rendez-vous cinéma québécois, the anti-Matter Film Festival, and the SIMULTAN Festival in Romania. Originally
from Ottawa, he's taught ESL in the Czech Republic, Taiwan, and Chile, and
lives in Montréal.
