Naomi Shihab Nye's The Tiny Journalist Reminiscent of Pessoa

At periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, edited by rob mclennan, Mark Grenon reviews The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019), by Naomi Shihab Nye. "…[S]he sees the trauma and bravery of the Palestinian people, as expressed vividly, and passionately, in her latest book The Tiny Journalist, which was written in honor of Janna Jihad Ayyad and her cousin Ahed Tamimi, one of the most recognizable faces of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation," writes Grenon. More:

As we discover in the author’s note, The Tiny Journalist is written in a mix of voices: Ayyad’s, Nye’s father, who was himself a Palestinian refugee and journalist, and her own memories of and reflections upon Palestine. Since this spectrum of voices makes it hard at times to place the speaker(s) of the poems, the voices are reminiscent in some ways of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms; fraught with contradictions he couldn’t resolve, Pessoa found himself writing in distinct voices through which he could express disparate viewpoints.

Like Pessoa, whose heteronymic voices ranged from work of a more critical nature to piercingly simple, plain work, Nye’s poems fluctuate from powerfully direct statements that appear to have been written in her own voice to pieces that could have been written for children, echoes of which we can glean in the passage above from “Morning Song”. This is also discernible in both the title of “Exotic Animals, Books for Children,” and in the speaker’s shift in tone, which muses on the fact that “Armadillo means / ‘little armored one.’ / Some of us become this to survive in our own countries.” It’s as if Nye is speaking to Ayyad as the child she is, noting that Ayyad must have the necessary armor to live under occupation, just as Nye must have armor as an American who’s lived through the dark times of the post-9/11 years and is still navigating ongoing waves of anti-Muslim sentiment…

Check out the full review at periodicities.