In her compilation of poetry 19 Varieties of Gazelle Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye addresses the experience of being human, by challenging the assumptions of her readers and asking that they explore the societal issues they are so often reticent to discuss. Among many themes, Nye addresses the idea of hope; in Two Countries and 19 Varieties of Gazelle, in particular, she intimates that hope is born of and sustained by movement, physical or otherwise.
I first encountered the idea that hope cannot exist without movement in the writings of Frances Moore and Anna Moore Lappé, a mother daughter team. In the 1970’s, Moore wrote Diet for a Small Planet, a work that goes beyond politics to reveal that the maldistribution of resources is the root cause of dietary inequalities. Nearly twenty five years after the original was published, Moore and her daughter co-authored Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. In this book, Moore and Lappé argue that hope for an improvement of the human condition remains only when and because individuals act upon their ideas for change.
While Nye is not directly addressing the geopolitics of food, she describes hope similarly, as a phenomenon that cyclically motivates individuals to move forward and then keeps them going. In in the introduction to her book, Nye says that “…we are some kind of energetic gazelle leaping toward the horizon with hope spinning inside us, propelling us…” (xii). Meanwhile, in Two Countries, Nye addresses hope directly, when she writes, “skin had hope, that’s what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road” (104). In this poem, and the introduction, hope and movement are inextricably linked. Beneath the literal words about leaping animals, roads, and paths to be traveled, these poems are filled with references to subtle action, not loud speak, as the vehicle for this movement. In the titel peom 19 Varieties of Gazelle, the animals themselves represent how human actions could speak if the voices of media and stereotypes could be quieted. In Two Countries, however, Nye writes about the small, everyday behaviors that sustain a person; she does this by representing the skin as a part of the whole, moving with the larger body, and as a means of physically encountering another person.
One of Nye’s motivations for writing these works was to foster connections between peoples and societies that are literally and figuratively worlds apart; because only movement across distances can close that gap, hope must remain alive. Nye’s active hope is, in fact, her own writing, for it is only in questioning that we can take steps forward to change our state of being. And, as Moore and Lappé model in their research related travels, an individual must not be afraid of the distance between the present and the time at which they achieve what they hope for. As Nye insinuates in 19 Varieties of Gazelle when she writes, “Don’t bother to go there…it’s too far. But we were on a small sandy island, nothing was far!” (88), anything worth seeing is never out of reach if we are willing to move towards it.
No comments:
Post a Comment