When I was fourteen, my Palestinian father stood before a tall, gauzy white-curtained hotel room window in Cairo reading Mahmoud Darwish aloud, translating line-by-line. His gentle cadence breaking, he declared, “This is the voice of our people.”
How many voices? How many people?
For those who grew up with a homesick parent or two, someone who left a country of origin due to being displaced (a refugee, sometimes called a newcomer now), we always felt a little off to the side, observers, no matter which country we were in. We belonged nowhere and everywhere. This wasn’t a bad thing. Never meeting another youngish Arab American writer till I was in my twenties was okay. I had books and poems to bank on and library cards wherever we lived.
For years, the belief that poetry is here to help us traveled with me everywhere, tucked into the pockets of suitcases, backpacks. William Stafford, a most enduring life mentor, used to describe poetry as a “portable practice” – something invaluable, slim, easy to access – once we made it our habit. In hard times, a single line might save you. A word, a turn of phrase … you learned that poetry, whether read or written, often rang truer than conversation, transmitting a calming air of reclamation. To feel at home in a phrase or line was as meaningful as carrying a friend’s address.
Early in life, my mother at bedside in Ferguson, Missouri, read Emily Dickinson’s poems aloud. This had awakened something new in a child's mind: words could be refuge. A poem neither argued nor explained. To hold “I’m nobody, who are you?” inside, as if the phrase enabled anyone to join a pool of other voices swimming together in an understood space, felt comforting.
Reading poems throughout childhood—Robert Louis Stevenson, Carl Sandburg, Christina Rossetti, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Blake, Rabindranath Tagore—offered backdrop, context for all the other hours. Poems didn’t argue or explain. They carried us out of our own spaces, suggesting wider horizons, even if we didn’t understand every word. “Those are the words you look up,” our second-grade teacher insisted. “They become your own vocabulary list.” My mom’s lifelong friend artist/writer Ashley Bryan used to tell kids to start building their “own home libraries” very early. In a way, poetry did that inside our brains.
Later when I worked in schools through the Texas Commission on the Arts’ Writers-in-the-Schools project, it seemed helpful to tell kids that poetry might not solve things, but it would surely shine some light on them. Perhaps we could navigate better then or see our lives from different angles, or be better friends with other perspectives. In Geographies of Light, Lisa Suhair Majaj wrote, “If they ask you what you are,/ say Arab. If they flinch, don’t react, just remember your great-aunt’s eyes.” Arabs? Jews? Who cared? Let’s go with humans. My father said mutual respect was always the curative. Another person’s view felt as genuine to them as yours did to you. Poetry offered meanings, metaphors which helped us wade through delusions of domination to find glimmers of hope—a truly democratic field, our passport, our country.
When October 7, 2023 happened, no one aware of injustice in Palestine/Israel every day of our lives would say the slaughters started the conflagration that would follow in Gaza. Many of us didn’t question what created extremists – lives of brutal treatment and grief created them. Palestinians who suffered daily theft, oppression, harassment, extreme anxiety, and continual imprisonment responded in different ways. Most maintained equilibrium, developed astonishing resilience, kept trying to live normally. Extremists eventually did not. If the cruel actions of Hamas were disgusting and reprehensible, what about thirty or more times that horror? Paid for by us? Levels of vengeance unleashed by Israel in response felt impossible to absorb. Even worse was the endless support of the United States in such a nightmare. As the Texas journalist Molly Ivins once said about the wars in Iraq, “Why are we not all out in the streets banging pans?”
Very few Palestinians would ever have described Israel as a democracy. Democracy means everyone receives equivalent due process and possibility, for one thing. We’d seen with our own eyes our eleven-year-old cousins pulled naked from showers and beaten till blood poured from their noses; our gentle cab drivers assaulted after being stopped by roadsides for nothing at all; our sweet grandmothers tear gassed in their own living rooms at the age of one-hundred. My father’s best friend, age twenty, was murdered by a Zionist while sitting on a bench right next to him– a horror that stained my father’s whole life. In a real democracy grounded by mutual respect, anyone would be held accountable for such vile crimes. But Israelis often were not.
My Sitti/Palestinian grandma used to say that Israelis only did these things to Palestinians because “they didn’t know their stories.” This generosity of spirit kept her going till age 106. But I question the truth of it today. Thanks to social media and worldwide communication, can‘t we all more easily imagine one another’s stories? We see them happening before our eyes. Palestinian films win international awards. Poems and novels continue to be translated. Is it any accident that Israeli bombs keep killing journalists in Gaza? Journalists are telling the stories, alongside poets.
Throughout all the terribly hard years since 1948, the poets kept writing. A need to create safe spaces of memory and honor described with sensory richness was a necessity. How else to keep the worlds alive? Mahmoud Darwish would come to be celebrated and translated in many countries. The Lannan Foundation gave him their Cultural Freedom Award. Taha Muhammad Ali, a Nazareth shopkeeper/poet translated by Peter Cole, Gabriel Levin and Yahya Hijazi, became a U.S. poetry festival fan favorite.
Decades ago, poet Samih al-Qasim wrote in “Excerpt from an Inquest,” “And what do you call this country? / My country./ So you admit it? / Yes sir, I admit it.” He didn’t care how he would be remembered or if his poems would persist. All he wanted was for people to be free. I could not forget my encounter with the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai who insisted he would never have taken my father’s home or lived in a stolen Arab home. He wrote a poem dreaming of “wildpeace” springing up in the fields around everyone. Poetry bonded us where news separated us.
Where does violence come from and where does it go? Kim Stafford writes in “Bad Math,” “If fifty died to save me, if sixty died, if hundreds, what am I here to do?” Fady Joudah, in his introduction to Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems by Ghassan Zaqtan, has described “a recurrent apparition of absence and dispossession.” There have been hostages on the other side for so many years, nearly never receiving profiles or headlines. Remi Kanazi in Before the Next Bomb writes
“Palestine is not Ferguson/not South Africa, not Jim Crow/not Emmett Till, not an earthquake/ tsunami, the Holocaust […] it is not everything, but it is so much of/something.” Something as intimate and precious as finding the water, cooking the soup and rice - humble, usually unsung activities which belong to everyone. If only daily life and care could be seen as the sacred common denominator all over the earth, what struggles would be spared?
The young Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha, author of Things You Might Find Hidden in my Ear (City Lights Books, 2022), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, wrote a few years ago, “In Gaza,/ breathing is a task […] trying to survive/another day, is coming back/ from the dead.” William Stafford once said every war has two losers and by now, too many other people have said and unfortunately lived this too. And poets keep documenting what happens, as Janna Jihad Ayyad of the West Bank has been documenting with her mother’s camera since she was seven. In 2019, I wrote a book called The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions) for and about her and all children whose lives are ripped apart by violence not of their own making. If poets are witnesses, what else can we do? It’s our job. Adults should all be witnesses. Why is everyone so scared of getting in trouble for sharing their opinions? It’s a democracy, remember? The students who demonstrated coast-to-coast on their campuses acted as the chorus of conscience. Recently Janna, now age 18, spoke on a live Instagram story in her cheerful voice, urging us to remember “Hope is a form of resistance.”
After October 2023, so many people sent me Rabbi Irwin Keller’s poem “Taking Sides.” “Today I am taking sides," Keller wrote. “I am taking the side of Peace.” Clipping it together with Palestinian writer Ibtisam Barakat’s “Tea Invitation,” “I write/for my heart/has become/a country/and I want/all people/to live in it” offered solace. It felt like the world we were missing. Similarly it has always seemed crucial to bond with Jewish poets or give public readings together, representing the large Semitic family. (Anyone who continues to call Palestinians anti-Semitic needs more information.)
In late 2023, the haunting poem by Gaza’s Refaat Alareer, “If I Must Die” went viral, “If I must die, you must live, to tell my story…” Instantly translated into more than 40 languages, people all over the world met Refaat, professor, father of 6, storyteller, editor of Gaza Writes Back – Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine. To me, he felt and looked like a relative. People who knew him said he had been the gentlest friend. The death of Hiba Abu Nada, a “brilliant” 32 year old nutritionist and prize-winning writer, also hit hard. She had written, “There is a new Gaza in heaven/without siege/taking shape now.” Thanks to Smokestack Books in England, poems were gathered in a collection called Out Of Gaza which popped into print very quickly. Did poetry help anyone see “another side” or comprehend that something better might have happened next? Had the word “dialogue” gone underground forever?
Years ago, in the Lake District of England, a dapper gent at a literary dinner asked, “So what do Palestinians really want anyway?” I felt as if he’d slapped me with the pie server. I’ve no recollection of what I said on the spot, but later wrote him a poem:
What Do Palestinians Want? (excerpts)
The pleasure of tending, tending
something that will not be taken away.
A family, a tree, growing for so long,
finally fruiting olives, benevolence of branch,
and not to find a chopped trunk in return.
Confidence in a threshold…..
Not to dominate. Never to say we are the only
people who count…
the chosen, more holy or precious.
No. Just to be ones who matter
as much as any other, in a common way, as you
might prefer…
Reprinted from the Fall-Winter 2024 issue of American Poets, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets. Copyright © 2024 by Naomi Shihab Nye.