Naomi Shihab Nye’s Tender Spot
Born in Missouri in 1952, Naomi Shihab Nye grew up between the United States and the Middle East, moving from St. Louis to Jerusalem and from there to St. Antonio, Texas, where she currently resides. An errant poet, Nye has traveled across North, Central, and South America; Europe; and Asia, condensing in her poems her most intimate impressions and touching memories of her travels around the world. Besides being a poet, Nye is also an essayist and a short-story writer and has experimented with a variety of literary genres, always with the aim of fostering intercultural exchange and understanding.
Whether she writes about small-scale scenes of daily life in Palestine or praises the wide, breathtaking views of US rural landscapes, Nye accentuates often unnoticed, neglected aspects of the everyday that have revealed themselves to her in bright clarity thanks to occasional encounters with fellow travelers or improvised road trips to unfamiliar places. As she herself admits, “The primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.”1 I argue in this chapter that it is precisely this careful attention to the overlooked, the marginal, and the unnoticed that opens her poetry to a much wider, almost philosophical investigation of worldly concerns such as, among others, the painful experience of racism and social exclusion in the United States and abroad, violence as a vicious cycle, the fragility of human life and of affective bonds more generally, and the difficulty of finding one’s way, particularly in a new country.
The chapter opens with an analysis of what I call, together with Robert Bonazzi, Nye’s “domestic poems,” which have so far received little critical attention. I suggest that the poet makes readers reencounter the everyday in unusual ways, prompting a re-vision of it as highly heterogeneous, intricate, and enchanting. The second part of the chapter is devoted to what I call Nye’s poems “on the road,” a group of compositions in which the speaker abandons the circumscribed space of her home and travels on board of a bus or a private car across the US landscape, making occasional encounters and crisscrossing unbounded flatlands.
Although utterly unpretentious, Nye’s poems foreground the vibrant and vital character of the everyday, thus promoting a reconsideration of this usually underappreciated site as charming, animated, and therefore worth engaging with. Rita Felski, among others, has underlined the transformative potential of accentuating the extraordinary within the everyday through defamiliarizing aesthetic strategies. As she writes, “The everyday must be rescued from oblivion by being transformed; the all too prosaic must be made to reveal its hidden subversive poetry. The name for this form of aesthetic distancing is of course defamiliarization.”2
Nye’s Palestinian background, with its legacy of struggle conducted steadily on the ground through concrete daily actions and quotidian items, is at the core of this subversive aesthetics firmly rooted in the everyday. Among others, poets Fadwa Tuqan and Mahmoud Darwish together with visual artists Mona Hatoum and Khalil Rabah have employed ordinary objects (i.e., suitcases, pieces of furniture, shoes, soap bars, olives, spools of thread, candles, nails) in their poems and installations to set readers and viewers at odds with their familiar milieu and shake them out of their habitual comfort zone.3
Similarly destabilizing, Nye’s poetic art is precariously located on a tightrope stretched out between the United States and Palestine, the domestic and the planetary, the intimate and the public. As a skilled funambulist, the poet moves with agility back and forth between these two opposite poles, connecting them in unexpected ways.
Nye’s interest in the everyday and her attempt to awaken readers to the wonders but also iniquities it hides under its surface are evident in “Valentine for Ernest Mann.” The poem opens with the speaker’s disclosing a secret to the reader: that poems are elusive, bewitching, and furtive “things” that hide in the most unexpected places and elude our capacity to take hold of them. Finding a poem thus requires a special disposition, an “acuity of perception,” as Felski would say, which allows one to perceive the everyday as enchanting.4 This is how the speaker shares this confidence with the reader:
You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.
Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.5
Poems are reconfigured here as animated, slippery entities that sleep in shoes, drift across ceilings, and nestle in unlooked-for places the moment one wakes up. By accentuating their marvelous animation, anthropomorphic vitality, and cheeky playfulness, Nye changes the reader’s perception and orientation toward them from indifference to recognition.
The speaker’s secret confidence is followed by a bizarre anecdote concerning an earnest man with a terrible fascination for skunks:
Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.6
Intrigued by the beauty of the skunks’ eyes, the “serious man” at the center of this poem reinvents as a valentine an animal that is commonly despised. Nye’s poem praises the man’s capacity to see the beautiful in what is normally constructed as menacing and ugly, his ability to disrupt common sense and subvert ingrained beliefs through sincere affection. From a personal anecdote about the negative consequences of narrow-mindedness, Nye sparks a reflection on the ways in which hatred against Others is deeply embedded in our society and leads to nefarious consequences.
In order to alert readers to the damages produced by stigma and blame, Nye uses the creative force of poetry to expose and criticize the construction of Others as ontologically different and therefore as intolerable within the contours of one’s worldview.
The serious man portrayed in this poem appears as a rather eccentric subject. He indeed has the “spunk” to resist common sense and think in nonconformist ways; his “queer”—that is to say nonnormative and nonaligned—attachment to the skunks is subversive, since it muddles strictly defined categories such as human/animal, beautiful/ugly, lovable/dreadful, and the hierarchies attached to them.
Like the “serious man,” who reinvented the skunks as valentines, so the poet (and, more in general, each ordinary person,) should think, Nye seems to suggest here, outside the box and liberate the everyday from its harmful stereotypes, mistaken beliefs, and biased views.
Edward Said, among others, has explored the many ways in which Arabs (especially Muslims) have been historically the object of a denigrating and vilifying gaze.7 More recently still, Alfred Hornung and Martina Kohl have shown that, with the rise of Islamophobia and the implementation of racist policies following the 9/11 attacks, Arabs and Muslims have been “lumped together in first reactions” and constructed homogeneously as enemies of the nation.8 “Valentine for Ernest Mann” subtly anticipates these sociopolitical tensions.
In the closing lines, the speaker openly invites readers to perform, in Michel de Certeau’s own words, acts of “clandestine creativity, evasion of the law, inventive ruses and subterranean refusals” to liberate Others and ourselves from the oppressive, invalidating perspectives that imprison us all.9
Perception in this context becomes a performative action; seeing Others as lovable and charming rather than threatening and nasty may indeed change one’s orientation and attitude toward them while also promoting the desire for things to be different. As the speaker suggests in the closing lines:
Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.10
Nye’s re-vision of the everyday as a common ground and a fertile terrain to introduce change in one’s orientation and attitudes is particularly evident in “Daily.”11 This time, Nye magnifies minuscule acts of survival and elevates shared, domestic activities to the status of sacred rituals, capable of reconstructing a sense of community among subjectivities who, at first glance, may appear to be poles apart:
These shriveled seeds we plant
corn kerneldried bean
poke into loosened soil
cover over with measured fingertips
These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares
These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl
. . .
The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world12
Ordinary, domestic activities, such as folding a T-shirt, slicing a tortilla, and scrambling an egg, are elevated here to dignified, almost sacred, yet in the end extremely profane because totally mundane, acts. By sprinkling smoothly flowing lines with minuscule entities (“corn kernel”; “dried bean”; “measured fingertips”), Nye emphasizes how light touches enable even tiny grains to reach full growth. The poet connects the microscopic and the macroscopic, the intimate and the cosmic, the personal and the political, particularly when the speaker mentions the repetitive act of washing and hanging clothes, as a shared activity that gives birth to a common “we”: “This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again / like flags we share, a country so close / no one needs to name it.”13
Simple, poor objects, such as an egg or a T-shirt, and quotidian rituals, such as slicing a tortilla, are represented here as the kernel around which a flourishing collectivity germinates—not one that finds its foundation in the narrow nationalism expressed by the flag, but one that performs a core of shared human activities that are considerate, careful, and nourishing.
I claim that Nye sees in the secular/sacred everyday extraordinary political potentialities, since this is a dimension that holds together utterly heterogeneous elements in a setting that is perceived as common. Still, one should not forget that the everyday and the domestic space, celebrated by Nye as the site of sheer variety and concerted action, has historically been and still is for many women horizon-less and burdensome. In Alice Kaplan and Krish Ross’s words: “Everyday life has always weighed heavily on the shoulders of women.”14 Not only imposed repetitions but also desolate confinement and violent abuse can transform the home into a nightmare.
Nye’s interest in the everyday—at least as I see it—does not open the way to a forgetful and superficial naivete, one that neglects gendered forms of inequality and oppression or economic disparities, nor to an idealist or elitist form of escapism that eschews the political. Rather, the poet’s emphasis on collectivity and her desire to accord full dignity to ordinary individuals who cultivate care, sustainability, and ultimately hope for the future represent a form of counterpolitics that is action-oriented and generative, one that gives prominence to those strata of the population—the common everyday men and women—that politics in its current formulation tend to neglect or dismiss as unimportant. Nye’s crucial shift from aesthetic to politics will become clearer in the next section, as I retrace Nye’s gradual yet decisive transition from private feelings to public affects.
In “The Attic and Its Nails,” Nye shares with the reader the widespread experience of going up in the attic to look for a much-needed thing. Without warning, readers find themselves involved with the speaker in a feverish search for a thing that is nowhere to be found:
It’s hard up there. You dig in a box for whatever the moment requires: sweater, wreath, the other half of the walkie-talkie, and find twelve things you forgot about which delay the original search, since now that you found them you have to think about them.15
The unexpected encounter of the speaker with a group of forgotten things stored away in the attic functions as a kind of shock; the material, concrete presence of the things and their proximity to the speaker make a claim on her and require that she takes responsibility for them, now that they are in front of her. The proximity of the speaker to the things found in the attic, in other words, changes the ways in which she perceives them; now that they are close, she feels almost compelled to reconsider her relation to them in more attentive ways.
In Queer Phenomenology (2006), Sara Ahmed draws a connection between location, perception, and orientation, arguing that our location vis-à-vis a thing influences the ways in which we perceive and orient ourselves toward it. To quote Ahmed: “We are turned toward things. Such things make an impression upon us. We perceive them as things insofar as they are near to us, insofar as we share a residence with them. Perception hence involves orientation; what is perceived depends on where we are located, which gives us a certain take on things.”16
What had previously been considered by the speaker as useless, superfluous things are now perceived as worthy of attention. The white ceramic cup, in particular, refuses to be dismissed as junk and makes a claim on the speaker; its singularity emerges out of the casual assemblage of things and demands to be taken in charge.
The world of the attic gradually emerges as an “interworld,” to use Rosalyn Diprose’s term, an “open circuit” where human and nonhuman entities—the speaker, the box with the twelve things, and the glazed ceramic cup—share the same space on equal grounds and have an enhanced sense of their mutual connection and implication.17 Things, in this particular case, appear to be vital, willful, and insubordinate agents that exert a certain power on the speaker. The latter is indeed outlined as an affective subject in Kathleen Stewart’s sense of the term, a receptacle of intensities, a “thing” herself drenched in the everyday and enchanted, affected—moved by the things she encounters and the sensations they trigger in her. Accordingly, in the following lines, the speaker appears to be following a capricious and urgent drive, which is released by the things themselves:
Your search takes on an urgent ratlike quality as you rip paper out of boxes, shredding and piling it. Probably by now you’ve stood up too fast and speared your head on one of the nails that holds the roof shingles down. They’re lined up all along the rafters, poking through, aimed. Now you have to think about tetanus, rusty nails, the hearty human skull. A little dizzy for awhile, you’re too occupied to remember what sent you up into the dark.18
A banal, everyday activity, such as looking for a thing stored in the attic, becomes the occasion for Nye to open up a much wider scenario, which extends from the circumscribed space of the home to include the planet at large.
In opposition to the media’s often shocking coverage of the so-called event19—a sublime, overwhelming accident or a prepackaged, catastrophic scene—Nye accords central stage to a series of “non-events,” small-scale scenes of daily life and to quotidian incidents that can happen to anyone.20 By recounting a fact of life that both the speaker and the reader share, Nye involves the latter into a microcosm of fluid affects and powerful things, in which the boundaries between human and nonhuman, animated and inanimated things appear to be blurred and the human is decentered and returned to the world of material existence. Nothing is heroic or sublime here; the poem indeed centers on a rather commonplace search, which happens in the attic and ends with the speaker being hurt by the strange touch of the nails hanging from the roof. It is precisely this painful and uncanny encounter with the nails (things that had so far passed unnoticed) that functions as a kind of revelation, contributing to bring them back to life. As Ahmed explains: “To re-encounter objects as strange things is hence not to lose sight of their history but to refuse to make them history by losing sight. Such wonder directed at the objects that we face, as well as those that are behind us, does not involve bracketing out the familiar but rather allows the familiar to dance again with life.”21
The transition from the private to the public sphere is best exemplified in “Yellow Glove.”22 Once again, in this poem, Nye delves into a shared human experience—childhood, with its little joys and big dramas—to weave a larger meditation on today’s dramatic political situation. The poem opens with an enigmatic question, “What can a yellow glove mean in a world of motorcars and governments?,” to which the speaker answers by narrating an episode that goes back to her childhood years.23 The whole poem is structured on the dichotomy between a private, intimate world, which gravitates around a yellow glove and is identified, at least initially, as being typically feminine, and an external, public world of cars and governments, identified as typically masculine. These two apparently distant spheres will later overlap, promoting what Samina Najmi has called a “countersublime of benevolence and global connectivity,” in which affects such as care, mourning, and responsibility break out of the intimate and circulate on a global scale to change an affective and political atmosphere dominated by clamor, terror, and mutual distrust.24
This is how the speaker recalls and narrates the precise moment in which she first encountered the yellow gloves:
I was small, like everyone. Life was a string of precautions: Don’t kiss the squirrel before you bury him, don’t suck candy, pop balloons, drop watermelons, watch TV. When the new gloves appeared one Christmas, tucked in soft tissue, I heard it trailing me: Don’t lose the yellow gloves.25
By recovering a childhood memory, with its innumerable prohibitions and warnings, Nye brings readers in close proximity to the speaker and implicates them within a world they recognize as their own. Childhood is a crucial point of reference for Nye for another reason, too. As Judith Halberstam notes, childhood represents a queer—in the sense of nonnormative—universe, which follows a set of values and priorities that deviate most of the times from the ones that govern the world of adults.26 This is why in “Yellow Glove” the loss of a small, apparently meaningless thing provokes in the child a deep sense of turmoil and is experienced by her as a real catastrophe:
I walked home on a desperate road. Gloves cost money. We didn’t have much. I would tell no one. I would wear the yellow glove that was left and keep the other hand in a pocket. I knew my mother’s eyes had tears they had not cried yet, I didn’t want to be the one to make them flow.27
The loss of the glove triggers in the child the awareness of her own and her mother’s vulnerability. Theorizing matter as being animated by a certain force, Jane Bennett writes, “The relevant point for thinking about thing-power is this: a material body always resides within some assemblage or others, and its thing-power is a function of that grouping. A thing has power by virtue of its operating in conjunction with other things.”28 The child-glove bond is powerful yet unusual, since it transgresses the classical distinctions human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate matter, foregrounding an affinity between two entities that seem to have little in common. Yet the glove in this poem appears to have power precisely by virtue of this weird connection to the child, the mother, and the other glove, which is referred to as “its sister.” Once again, Nye returns readers to the material, everyday dimension to foreground a world in which all things, regardless of their status, are inextricably bound to each other and feel the power of this entanglement.
The girl’s grief suddenly dissolves in a summer afternoon, when she sees her yellow glove reemerge from the river near her house: “The yellow glove draped on a twig. A muddy survivor. A quiet flag.”29 The apparition of the stranded glove fills the child with wonder. The little girl now in her adulthood and in a much different context, dominated by uproar and bank rates, interrogates herself on the meaning of that bond, on the significance of that loss, and on the unexpected joy that followed the glove’s unexpected “return.” From an exquisitely personal and intimate recollection, from a reflection turned both inward and backward, the poet now moves forward and reflects on the present situation:
Where had it been in the three gone months? I could wash it, fold it in my winter drawer with its sister, no one in that world would ever know. There were miracles on Harvey Street. Children walked home in yellow light. Trees were reborn and gloves traveled far, but returned. A thousand miles later, what can a yellow glove mean in a world of bankbooks and stereos?
Part of the difference between floating and going down.30
“Yellow Glove,” as it appears clear now, is only apparently a childish and naive poem; its candid style hides in fact a serious and timely meditation on deep-seated problems regarding material and human precariousness, the force of relationality and interdependence, individual and collective mourning, the difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of making sense of loss. By setting the speaker’s intimate and hushed inner world in contrast to the unemotional, profit-oriented, and cacophonous world governed by banks and stereos, Nye poetically replaces a world that follows the logic of self-interest with one in which the dignity and value of even the smallest thing is acknowledged and protected. By narrating an episode belonging to her childhood and by circulating private affects that reveal themselves inexorably as public, Nye alerts readers to notice and take actions to counter the spreading disaffection, devaluation, and political disinvestment.
From marginal, liminal spaces—such as childhood and the attic—Nye succeeds in short-circuiting official narratives, which most of the time are disenchanting, terrifying, and hopeless. Nye supplants the current downhearted, atomized, and death-driven political with one that is effervescent, vital, and sustainable, since it is based on beneficial affects, such as recognition, care, and mutual responsibility. This political yet-to-come finds its force in and resides on unorthodox forms of connection, coalition, and mobilization that do not follow the usual patterns.
In Nye’s domestic poems, the everyday emerges in all its ambiguity, with its coercive routines and unexpected wonders, its platitude and transformative potential.31 By highlighting the polydimensionality of the everyday, Nye poetically reconfigures it as a messy, intricate bundle, where interspecies crossings and atypical collective formations take place. Nye does not only awaken readers to the intermittently beneficial and harmful aspects that the everyday hides under its surface; she further calls attention to those small, ordinary things and lives that may be worthy of respect, yet commonly pass as lives that do not count.
Moments of defamiliarization and shock open the way to powerful re-visions that enable readers to reencounter things and humans as significant and enchanting again. This complex aesthetics, which breaks expectations, triggers wonderment in the reader, and has the ability to “move the soul” and render the familiar strange, has a long tradition. Its ramifications stretch from the twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism, whose members used art to modify perception with the aim to shock, amuse, and revolutionize conventional views and behaviors, to premodern popular and anecdotal literatures as well as to the “wonder-evoking” poeticity (shi‘riyya) of Arab poets emerging around the turn of the eleventh century, as Lara Harb fascinatingly argues in Arab Poetics.32
A “true poet” in André Breton’s sense of the term, Nye manages to transform through her poetic art “the mediocrities of daily life into a zone of illumination and poetic infusion.”33 In line with her Surrealist predecessors, she employs the everyday life paradigm “to relate the particular to the general, locate the concrete in the universal, and to grasp the wider socio-historical context within which everyday practices are necessarily inscribed.”34 Nye further weaves in her poems stories-inside-stories, populating them with animated, marvelous things that leave the reader spellbound.35 In their capacity to clear human fear, anger, and hatred through enchantment, Nye’s poems represent-like Scheherazade’s tales—some sort of white magic simply because, as Naguib Mahfouz writes with reference to the Nights, “they open up worlds that invite reflection” and, in doing so, momentarily suspend and infinitely postpone the calamity of violence, oppression, and loss.36
Nye’s representation of the everyday as a utopic common ground and an intricate tangle is not limited to her domestic poems but extends to include what I call her poems “on the road.” Supplementing the compositions analyzed so far, the ones included in this final section focus on outdoor rather than indoor activities and present a woman traveler who leaves the circumscribed space of her home to embark on road trips.
“Flinn, on the Bus”—the first poem in this category—is effervescent enough to suggest an idea of inauguration, adventure, exploration.37 The Irish name of the protagonist, Flinn, meaning “son of a man with red hair,” indeed conveys stereotypically an idea of innocent wrongdoing, innocuous mischievousness, and joyous escape.38 Readers thus expect to encounter in this poem a cheerful local boy, riding a bus for the first time and roaming freely across the country.
The opening lines, however, bend the initial euphoria and dramatically divert the readers’ expectations. The first line, in particular, which mentions the collapse of some familiar buildings, opens a crack in the poem; it sends shivers of fear and troubles the readers’ first positive assumptions. A liminal figure, half-boy and half-grown-up, Flinn’s representation in the poem shifts unevenly between that of a gentle-eyed man and that of a renegade.
Written in the form of a spontaneous conversation that rises impromptu between two occasional travelers, “Flinn, on the Bus” rewrites, by following an aesthetic strategy we have now grown familiar with, Flinn’s personal story within a larger sociohistorical and political framework. It is precisely through a minor event—the speaker’s occasional encounter with Flinn—that Nye chooses to illuminate the wider catastrophe of 9/11, as the date written in italics at the end of the poem clearly suggests.
Writing on Paul Celan’s simultaneously luminous and obscure poetic art, Jacques Derrida describes the date he includes in his poems as a “noch” or an “incision that the poem carries in its body, like a memory”;39 he further compares it to a “singular wound.”40 Derrida’s figuration has led me to read as a scar Nye’s inscription of the date—September 11, 2001—at the end of the poem. At the same time particular and universal, the date incised in the poem points to a very specific, national trauma. This scar, however, is also losing its singularity and extending its meaning to signify human vulnerability to violence and suffering on a global scale. To borrow Derrida’s own words: “Once [the date] is read, whether it makes reference to the calendar or not, it is immediately repeated and, consequently, in this iterability that makes it readable, it loses the singularity that it keeps. It burns what it wants to save.”41 Likewise, the date inscribed at the end of the poem is both saving a traumatic memory yet also burning its exceptionality.
The chance encounter between Flinn and the speaker on a bus that crisscrosses the green fields of Oklahoma thus becomes the occasion for Nye to discuss pressing issues, including life’s precariousness, rebirth from cinders, the difficulty to preserve peace and cultivate hope for the future in a present plagued by violence, which have a planetary resonance. It follows that the reference to Oklahoma is not casual. As we all know, Oklahoma City was in 1995 the setting of one of the greatest domestic terrorist attacks to hit the United States; the media had initially hypothesized that the bombing had been undertaken by Islamist terrorists, so attacks to Muslims and people of Arab descent were reported in the aftermath of that event.42
Despite its fresh tone and crystalline style, “Flinn, on the Bus” thus points to a cluster of dark themes such as homegrown violence, inter/national terrorism, the deleterious effects of prejudice and racism, which are both locally and globally relevant. By alluding to the story of a young man who has been in troubled waters, has lost his way, and has ended up in prison, the poet further challenges the promise of the American dream and the myth of the United States as a safe haven.
The encounter between Flinn and the speaker is at the same time fortuitous and miraculous: Flinn’s naive enthusiasm, exemplified by the young man looking in wonder “at his free hands,” touches the interlocutor with intensity, healing in a certain sense the desperation and hopelessness that had overwhelmed her after she had heard the news.43
At first glance then, “Flinn, on the Bus” describes a chance meeting between two strangers who entertain themselves with small talk; after a more careful analysis, however, we soon realize that the poem actually opens up a completely different, much wider scenario. Nothing seems to happen on this bus, the fulcrum of the poem being apparently a simple, broken, and spontaneous conversation between two travelers. It is precisely around this nonevent, I claim, that Nye weaves a splendid, evocative tapestry in which the life stories of these two strangers meet and get entangled. As in Scheherazade’s famous cycle, there is a story beneath the story that hides under the apparently transparent and clear surface of the poem. Flinn’s story, in other words, refracts and diffracts the larger history of the US nation and of the contemporary world more generally, that we perceive perhaps for the first time in all its tragedy and dissonance. The image of the bending trees, which the poet describes as a light deflection, suggests that something is out of joint, that the time in which we live, as Derrida once wrote with regard to the legacy of Marx in a neoliberal age, “is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down [traqué et detraqué], deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is off its hinges, time is off course, beside itself, disadjusted.”44
One of Nye’s greatest gifts then, is precisely her capacity to help readers see more clearly amid the general turmoil, to extract little drops of wisdom out of this disjointedness. Affects such as sorrow, caution, and apprehension surface the poem together with the luminous surprise of a fissure that cracks the darkness open, the promise of a possible way out despite the traumatism.
The idea that the road—and, in particular, the occasional encounter with unknown strangers—may provide travelers with some kind of revelation is further developed in the poem “Going for Peaches, Fredericksburg, Texas.”45 This time, the atmosphere is much more encouraging and rosy. The poem describes an almost idyllic situation in which a heterogeneous group of people (the speaker, a young boy, two old relatives) drive across the Texas countryside to buy peaches. As it will soon become clear, this leisurely activity becomes for the travelers an occasion to express and exchange divergent ideas on the fragility of human life, the circulation of prejudice and stereotypes, and the facility through which animosity lurks in apparently innocuous everyday conversations:
Those with experience look for a special kind.
Red Globe, the skin slips off like a fine silk camisole.
Boy breaks one open with his hands. Yes, it’s good,
my old relatives say, but we’ll look around.
They want me to stop at every peach stand
between Stonewell and Fredericksburg,
leave the air conditioner running,
jump out and ask the price.
. . .
In Fredericksburg the houses are stone,
they remind me of wristwatches, glass polished,
years ticking by in each wall.
I don’t like stone, says one. What if it fell?
I don’t like Fredericksburg, says the other.
Too many Germans driving too slow.
She herself is German as Stuttgart.
The day presses forward wearing complaints,
charms on its bony wrist.46
Idiosyncratic personalities and oppositional ideas converge in this poem around a shared, common goal. The concerted action of finding the best peaches unites the car’s passengers despite their distinctive traits. The activity of going for peaches thus turns out to be a kind of ritual, in which knowledge is passed down from generation to generation and a novel sense of community arises, as the result of shared actions performed with the intention to reach a wider, common scope.
In an interview with Phebe Davidson, Nye confirms that for her small daily activities and minute details “have always been the doorway by which we approach and apprehend the larger things of the world, the larger truths, whatever they might be.”47 It follows that by buying peaches from “a scarfed woman,” who has ironically given up “teachin’ for peachin’,” one learns that “nature isn’t perfect,” that peaches can have slight bruises, that hands can be spotted too.48
The whole poem is traversed by an incredible vitality, a latent sense of wonder, a lightness of the heart that animate all the people involved in this unusual quest; their patience, their capacity to accept the slight flaws of nature, and their perseverance really strike readers, who sense that this rather frivolous activity hides in fact a political quality. The image of the old aunts, selecting peaches as if they were precious stones, loading and reloading their baskets, and exchanging views on the best way to preserve their treasured fruits, conveys an idea of dignity, gravity, dedication to a common cause, and, ultimately, steadfastness. In response to the claim that her poetry is not political, Nye explains that even dignity can be political, and that it is “a political act to do something with firmness.”49 “Going for Peaches,” in my opinion, is exemplary of such politics.
One cannot but evoke here Nye’s Palestinian heritage, particularly the countless hindrances that Palestinians experience daily in terms of restrictions to travel, to access their farmland, and to import certain goods.50 In an interview with Ken Kurson, Nye remembers laconically “a very big thing about whether a particular fruit could travel between Gaza and the West Bank”; this painful reminiscence sheds a different, darker light on this apparently airy and untroubled poem.51
Nye’s emphasis on collaboration within tension and on coalition within antithesis is further addressed in the third and last poem I analyze in this chapter, which takes us back to the United States, as the title “Kansas” clearly suggests.52 This time the speaker is traveling together with an unknown person, possibly her partner, across the plains of Kansas at midnight; they are having a conversation about regrets, lost occasions, and failed expectations. All of a sudden, the driver takes “the wrong road,” and without being aware of it, both travelers find themselves in the middle of an unknown territory, in an uncanny place that fills them with disorientation and fear:
Signposts appear and vanish, ghostly,
ALTERNATE 74.
I’m not aware it’s the wrong road,
I don’t live here,
this is the flattest night in the world
and I just arrived.
Grain elevators startle us,
dark monuments
rimmed by light.53
In the absence of recognizable landmarks to be used as a point of reference, both travelers in this poem feel vulnerable and lost. The darkness and remoteness of the place, its absolute flatness and monotony, its silence and total emptiness, are at the same time spectacular and spectral. When a wave of exhaustion and discouragement unexpectedly overwhelms the driver, his desperation seems to have reached a point of no return:
Later you pull over
and put your head on the wheel.
I’m lost, you moan. I have no idea where we are.
I pat your arm.
It’s alright, I say.
Surely there’s a turn-off up here somewhere.
My voice amazes me,
coming out of the silence,
a lit spoon,
here,
swallow this.54
Reacting to the hopelessness and despair of her traveling companion with an unhoped-for act of faith, the speaker in this poem touches his arm tenderly and reaffirms her comforting presence by uttering a few gleaming words. Her voice communicates hope, the strength of regained confidence, and unconditional trust; her words function as “a lit spoon,” a curative potion and a luminous presence, one that offers warmth and consolation but also guidance and direction.
In her original reading of the elegy “Counterpoint: For Edward Said,” which Mahmoud Darwish dedicated to Said right after his death, Judith Butler notices that there is a strange, even surprising, reaffirmation of hope that Darwish makes Said pronounce toward the end of the poem. Words such as “Invent a hope for speech, / invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope. / And sing, for the aesthetic is freedom” sound so incredible to the reader’s ears, especially because they are pronounced by a dead person whose dreams and hopes have remained largely unfulfilled.55 As Butler indicates, the words pronounced by Said are simultaneously unimaginable and radically imaginative since they represent “a declaration of hope, but also of unfathomable confidence, given the threats to life, the slow sporadic, yet systematic erosion of everyday life under occupation.”56 In a similar vein, I suggest, the reassuring words uttered by the speaker in “Kansas” sound difficult to imagine yet extremely efficacious, since they succeed in lifting the driver’s mood, dissolving his desperation, and transmuting his weariness into hope. Her words invent a new possibility, a road to follow, and an illusion that serves precisely to extend hope.
First published in 1957, Jack Kerouac’s milestone novel On the Road narrated the restlessness, sense of disorientation, lack of goals, alienation, and ultimately dissatisfaction of a whole generation of postwar young people in the United States.57 One of the defining works of contemporary US fiction, the book chronicles the story of a series of cross-country road trips made by Sal Paradise between 1948 and 1950. In it, Kerouac counterpoints a rather brutal and unforgiving urban environment with a scenic, almost idyllic countryside; he further celebrates youth, deviation, freedom, and self-determination and clings to the belief that it is possible to experience moments of authentic affective connection, however fleeting, however incautious, with some of the people encountered on the road.58
Both inheriting and departing from the tradition of US travel writing, Nye keeps the memory of this literary past alive, while at the same time abandoning the beaten track and inaugurating something altogether new. She indeed directs her compass not toward the south or the west, as was usually the case, but toward the east—toward Palestine, more specifically—following a personal desire line, a trajectory that is unique in US travel writing, since it brings the United States in close proximity to the Middle East and throws the (American) self out of balance, moving it away from his fundamental cardinal point—the mythic West—and therefore from his center of gravity. By effect of this physical redirection and affective reorientation, the supposedly upright and self-sufficient (American) self is replaced with one who is inclined, dangerously pushed eastward, toward the outside and away from himself.
Developing a captivating feminist critique of rectitude across the disciplines of philosophy, the arts, and religion, in Inclinations (2016), Adriana Cavarero draws on Virginia Woolf’s critique of the English pronoun “I” as “straight, lone, self-sufficient, independent, domineering, deadly, and prevaricating” to celebrate instead a subjectivity that is “inclined, unbalanced, and pendent”—in one word, responsive.59 I see Nye’s poetics as cultivating a similar idea of the self as precariously inclined, relational, and receptive.
Whether retrieving a childhood memory or narrating an exciting road trip to buy peaches in the Texan countryside, Nye constantly solicits readers to lean forward, to abandon their solipsistic “I” and move past self-centeredness and insularity. When asked during an interview what poetry can do in the wake of catastrophe and death, Nye firmly responds: “Well, we need to keep extending imaginations, pressing, repeating, invoking, suggesting that other realities may exist, instead of the nightmares of war and hatred and conflict.”60 Nye’s poetry, although not providing readers with the comfort of a landing place, may nonetheless function as a guiding light, that fortifies our spirits with its intermittent light and indicates a new direction to follow amid total darkness. I believe that only by learning from Nye the fine art of inclined balance and the resourcefulness of a well-trained funambulist, we may be able to walk the tightrope of global despair and make it to the other side, toward hope.