Autobiographical Statement
It wasn't whether you were rich or poor, but if you had a big life, that's what mattered. A big life could be either a wide one or a deep one. It held countless possible corners and conversations. A big life didn't stop at the alley or even the next street. It came from somewhere and was going somewhere, but the word better had no relation, really. A big life was interested and wore questions easily. A big life never for one second thought it was the only life.
Something was in the closet, besides our clothes, which might or might not be friendly. A branch scratched a curious rhythm on the dark window. I told my brother it was talking to us. Our father came from Palestine, a beloved land from across the sea. Some people call it the Holy Land. Both my parents seemed holy to me. At night our father sat by our beds curling funny stories into the air. His musical talking stitched us to places we had not been yet. And our mother, who had grown up in St. Louis, where we were growing up, floated us to sleep on a river of songs: "Now rest beneath night's shadow . . ." She had been to art school and knew how to paint people the way they looked on the inside, not just the outside. That's what I wanted to know about, too. What stories and secrets did people carry with them? What songs did they hold close inside their ears?
Reading cracked the universe wide open - suddenly I had the power to understand newspapers, menus, books. I loved old signs, Margaret Wise Brown, Louisa May Alcott, Carl Sandburg, the exuberant bounce of sentences across the page. I remember shaping a single word - city, head - with enormous tenderness. "Songs of Innocence." Reading gave us voices of friends speaking from everywhere, so it followed that one might write down messages, too. Already I wrote to find out what I knew, and what connected. Sometimes writing felt like a thank-you note, a response to what had already been given.
My German-American grandmother gave me a powder puff, which, when tapped thirty years later, still emits a small, mysterious cloud.
My Palestinian grandmother gave me a laugh and a tilt of the head.
My great-uncle Paul gave me a complete sewing kit a hundred years old and one inch tall.
My family moved to Jerusalem when I was fourteen, to live near our Arab relatives for a year. Remembering that experience inspired my book, Habibi, though it is set later in history. I consider it a book of fiction, but my family disagrees with me. Later we came to Texas, where neither of my parents had any history at all. Texas offered so much breathing room! Libraries still felt like sanctuaries. I could name so many "favorite writers" of any era of my life - Henry David Thoreau got me through high school and Jack Kerouac through college. The poems of William Stafford have deepened my life since I was fifteen. The poems of W.S. Merwin give me daily inspiration. I constantly read poems and stories by great men and women and young writers of the world, and feel suspicious of writers who say they don't read much. How could we trust them?
Now I live with my husband, photographer Michael Nye, and our son, Madison, who loves golf and wishes his name had not become a popular name for girls. We share a one-hundred-year-old house in old downtown San Antonio, near the quiet little river. More cranes and herons have been congregating at the river recently. I saw a large snake swimming up the river with a fish in its mouth.
Becoming an anthologist surprised me, but it has been a pleasure to collect wonderful poems to share with other people. I think of my anthologies as international dinner parties, feasts of rich voices. You are all invited.
In this time when too many people in the world still consider violence a form of "communication," it is crucial for the rest of us to share meaningful language whenever we can. If we may help one another find authentic ways to say things, if our words may comfort or console or inspire, if they may help link us wherever we are, this matters.
Rarely have students looked at my picture book Sitti's Secrets, about my Palestinian grandmother who lived to be a hundred and six, and said, "She does not look like my grandmother." Instead they have said, "She reminds me of someone I love too. I also have a far-away grandmother." Believe in the power of connections. At this point, they may be the most saving grace we have.
Naomi Shihab Nye's poems and stories have appeared in many books. Her awards include two Jane Addams Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress.
Selected Works by Naomi Shihab Nye
Dont Forget Space; The Flag of Childhood: Poems from the Middle East; Habibi: A Novel; I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You (with Paul Janeczko); Sitti's Secrets; The Space Between Our Footsteps:Poems & Paintings from the Middle East; This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World; The Tree Is Older Than You Are:
A bilingual Gathering of Poems & Stories from Mexico with Paintings by Mexican Artists
