Poet Naomi Shihab Nye Discusses What It Was Like Growing Up in Palestine and Ferguson

Naomi Shihab Nye, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and an award-winning writer, grew up in two of the most frequently discussed conflict zones in the news today. In a recent piece for The Washington Post, Nye talks about the lessons she learned while living in lands that are still divided by racial tensions.

The Washington Post:

My father and his family became refugees in 1948, when the state of Israel was created. They lost everything but their lives and memories. Disenfranchised Palestinians ended up in refugee camps or scattered around the world. My dad found himself in Kansas, then moved to Missouri with his American bride. He seemed a little shell-shocked when I was a child.

Ferguson was a leafy green historic suburb with a gracious red brick elementary school called Central. I loved that school, attending kindergarten through sixth grade there. All my classmates were white, of various derivations – Italians, French-Canadians, etc….At 12, I took a berry-picking job on “Missouri’s oldest organic farm” in Ferguson. I wanted the job because I had noticed that the other berry-pickers were all black boys. I’d always been curious about the kids living right down the road whom we hardly ever got to see…

Summer 2014, the news exploded…Of course, we wished Hamas would stop sending reckless rockets into Israel, provoking oversized responses. Why didn’t the news examine those back stories more? Oppression makes people do desperate things. I am frankly surprised the entire Palestinian population hasn’t gone crazy. If the U.S. can’t see that Palestinians have been mightily oppressed since 1948, they really are not interested in looking, are they? And we keep sending weapons and money to Israel, pretending we’d prefer peace.

We send weapons to Ferguson, too.

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And here are a few lines from Nye’s devastating poem “Blood”:

Today the headlines clot in my blood. A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page. Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root is too big for us. What flag can we wave? I wave the flag of stone and seed, table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news. It is too much for him, neither of his two languages can reach it. I drive into the country to find sheep, cows, to plead with the air: Who calls anyone civilized? Where can the crying heart graze? What does a true Arab do now?

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And a few more from her poem “Jerusalem”:

I’m not interested in who suffered the most. I’m interested in people getting over it…

A child’s poem says, “I don’t like wars, they end up with monuments.” He’s painting a bird with wings wide enough to cover two roofs at once.

Why are we so monumentally slow? Soldiers stalk a pharmacy: big guns, little pills. If you tilt your head just slightly it’s ridiculous.

There’s a place in my brain where hate won’t grow. I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds. Something pokes us as we sleep.

It’s late but everything comes next.

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—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata