Naomi Shihab Nye's Aesthetic of Smallness and the Military Sublime

Naomi Shihab Nye's voice is among the most passionate, tender, and instructive for our times. Yet a surprising gap exists between Nye's national and international popularity among high school teachers and young adult readers and the dearth of academic attention to her work. The few critics who focus on her writings do not comment on her overtly political post-9/11 poetry, despite the fact that Nye's voice assumes an urgency as it speaks to our twenty-first-century world—one in which fear, divisions, and violence threaten the human community. In particular, Nye's collection You & Yours (2005) contains some of her most poignant poetical responses to violence in the Middle East such as the US invasion of Iraq and Israel's offensive against civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. With this volume, Nye joins the ranks of contemporary American women writers of Arab and Asian descent who engage with, subvert, mold, and transform the theme of war in mainstream US literature. Articulating her political vision through a feminist "aesthetic of smallness" that positions itself against the aesthetic of the sublime, Nye counters the ideology that undergirds mainstream visual and verbal representations of war in the Middle East. The paradox is that in deploying an aesthetic of smallness to counter the military sublime, Nye's poetry articulates a countersublime of universal human connectivity for our times.

Nye draws on varied cultural traditions that acknowledge her multifaceted identity; as Texan, Arab, and American, she is positioned to discern the connections among disparate groups of people. As Theresa Johnston notes, "These days, [Nye] feels an added sense of responsibility…. Nye has decided it's her duty to help American youngsters see the good side of the Middle East and to help kids in other lands see the good side of America" (20). While Nye places great hope in the world's youth, her self-imposed task also focuses on the rest of us. A year after 9/11, she stated: "All of us who have a loving connection to the Middle East have a responsibility to represent parts of the culture … to counter the bad news." She adds, "All of us, whoever we are, we're all in positions as human beings to bridge things" (qtd. in Ackerman-Haywood A4). This desire to be a human bridge, brokering empathy among cultures and understanding among nations, informs Nye's literature for children and adults and assumes a political edge in the post-9/11 era.

Nye considers poetry an especially apt vehicle for such brokering: "We must keep reading poetry with renewed vigor, for courage and hope. Poetry, the most intimate form of expression, gives us a deeper sense of reality than headlines and news stories ever could" (qtd. in Woolley 14). When the current war with Iraq loomed as a possibility, she told one reporter, "I think the U.S. and Iraq should have a poetry symposium for about a month. If you recognize each other's humanity, you change things" (qtd. in Ackerman-Haywood A4). Her belief in the power of poetry and art to enable empathy has fueled such projects as her edited volume This Same Sky (1996), an anthology of international poems for young people. Further, she recognizes the need not only to listen to others, but also to articulate the poetry within and around us. In an article titled "Abilene, Oh Abilene," Nye protests budget cuts that have resulted in fewer art lessons for school-children. She asks, "If we don't have encouragement learning how to express what we feel, how will we feel?" (11). The question implies what she has stated explicitly elsewhere: that art and poetry preempt destructive emotions and physical violence.¹

Nye's poetry connects cultures and countries through emphasis on the small and the ordinary, insisting on the mundane and the everyday to stress human connections. A sense of shared humanity enables empathy, which renders violence against one another irrational, homicidal, and self-destructive. Thus Nye's aesthetic of smallness operates politically to bring together different groups of people. Although...