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A review by spenkevich
The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye
4.0
‘The tiny journalist / will tell us what she sees,’ Palestinian-American poet and writer Naomi Shihab Nye writes at the start of her 2019 collection The Tiny Journalist. It is a haunting collection, one that delves into the Palestine-Israel conflict and the lives of Palestinians in ‘the world's largest open-air prison’ as they are displaced, detained and killed, but these poems also seek to capture the hope they will not let be snuffed out. The titular journalist, who’s work documenting the abuse and violence in Gaze and the West Bank is captured here in heart-wrenching poetic form, is none other than Janna Jihad Ayyad, to whom this collection is dedicated along with her cousin, Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, and ‘all young people devoted to justice and sharing their voice.’ At age 7, after two members of her family were killed, Janna began capturing the struggles of life in Gaza through her phone camera and sharing it with the world via Facebook, earning herself the distinction of the world’s youngest journalist (she continues to do so, now at the age of 17 in 2023). ‘Janna says the camera is stronger than the gun,’ Nye writes ‘”I can send my message to small people / and they sent it to others.”’ With this collection, Nye has passed her message along again, now in the form of poetry, and it makes for a deeply moving read bearing witness to horrific suffering,
Unforgettable
In the water is a poem
unwritten by grass.
No. In the land is a poem
unwritten by water.
Everything unwritten.
Not on your forehead,
not on the sky.
The fathers sailed away
planning to return,
not easily will they forget
a place that let us all
sorrow this much.
Naomi Shihab Nye has quite a legacy of work with over 30 volumes of poetry as well as many picture books and novels and from 2019-2022 she served as the Young People’s Poet Laureate. I’ve long been moved by her work, and many of you may be familiar with her much loved poem, Kindness (you can read it here). Though in recent years a poem from this collection has frequented social media, particularly around holidays rife with fireworks:
No Explosions
To enjoy
fireworks
you would have
to have lived
a different kind
of life
I’ve always questioned the act of setting off explosives on Memorial Day, though Nye is more specifically addressing the lives of those who have grown up and lived under constant bombardments. Growing up between Jerusalem and Ramallah, Nye writes that she has ‘witnessed many of the struggles firsthand, which have unfortunately only heightened and intensified in the succeeding years.’ Considering the recent events this autumn, Tiny Journalist is all the more critical of a perspective, particularly as it aims to boost the message of Janna Jihad who decided to use her voice when she say that the mass media of the world tended to ignore or rhetorically cover up the things she witnesses on a daily basis (‘I am mad about language / covering pain / big bandage’ Nye writes in a poem criticizing the passive language of newspapers). “Not a lot of journalists are sending our message from Palestine to the world, so I thought, ‘why not send my message … and show them what is happening in my village’,” Janna said in an interview with Aljazeera when she was 10 years old. Janna has faced death threats and intimidation for her work and there is always the threat of arrest looming over her (Amnesty International reports that 500 to 700 Palestinian children are detained and prosecuted by Israeli military courts every year) but she continues to use her voice to draw attention. Which is the goal of poetry as well so it is wonderful to see Nye take her perspective and turn it into poetry.
Her voice a library of kindness.
I hear pages rustling, hungry fingers
moving through stories. If you very alone,
you would want this voice to find you.
Grief is central to this collection. The poems chronicle life under occupation, such as arrests—many of which are done without a stated crime where even higher profile Palestinians are detained (earlier this week poet [a:Mosab Abu Toha|21940310|Mosab Abu Toha|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1635606992p2/21940310.jpg] was detained but later released)—violence and death. Writing from the United States, Nye confronts US readers with their complicity, such as poems titled ‘America Gives Israel Ten Million Dollars A Day’ or when she writes ‘sometimes I wonder what / 38 billion dollars could buy, instead of weapons aimed / against us.’ Nye pulls us into the perspective of those who feel cast aside or demonized simply for where they are born, further displaced from the world when the media ignores their perspectives (‘why don’t they write about us more?’) or launches readymade retorts at criticisms for such a thing. ‘Calling us anti-Semitic / when we are Semites too,’ she addresses multiple times in the collection, ‘no joke, no one is laughing.’ She asks us not to look away, and ‘Why can’t they see / how beautiful we are?’
‘This was our superpower, retaining imagination in our worst days.’
There is still hope burning brightly even in all the sorrows of this collection. ‘Our magic is that we are / still here and we're always here,’ she writes. And she champions those who do speak up and speak out, like Janna, and ensure their voices will not be silenced or discarded into oblivion. This is a powerful and rather painful collection, mostly told through a fictionalized perspective of Janna as she holds her camera up for the world or addresses people via social media, and one that asks for your attention and understanding. I would highly recommend checking out Tiny Journalist, it may not be an easy read but it is an important one.
⅘
People think of us differently.
We may be in prison, but we still love beauty.
We may be oppressed, but we are smart.
We may think we don't need glasses, but the big E
for equality has been lying on its back
for a long time now
kicking its legs in the air like an animal
that needs help to get up.
Unforgettable
In the water is a poem
unwritten by grass.
No. In the land is a poem
unwritten by water.
Everything unwritten.
Not on your forehead,
not on the sky.
The fathers sailed away
planning to return,
not easily will they forget
a place that let us all
sorrow this much.
Naomi Shihab Nye has quite a legacy of work with over 30 volumes of poetry as well as many picture books and novels and from 2019-2022 she served as the Young People’s Poet Laureate. I’ve long been moved by her work, and many of you may be familiar with her much loved poem, Kindness (you can read it here). Though in recent years a poem from this collection has frequented social media, particularly around holidays rife with fireworks:
No Explosions
To enjoy
fireworks
you would have
to have lived
a different kind
of life
I’ve always questioned the act of setting off explosives on Memorial Day, though Nye is more specifically addressing the lives of those who have grown up and lived under constant bombardments. Growing up between Jerusalem and Ramallah, Nye writes that she has ‘witnessed many of the struggles firsthand, which have unfortunately only heightened and intensified in the succeeding years.’ Considering the recent events this autumn, Tiny Journalist is all the more critical of a perspective, particularly as it aims to boost the message of Janna Jihad who decided to use her voice when she say that the mass media of the world tended to ignore or rhetorically cover up the things she witnesses on a daily basis (‘I am mad about language / covering pain / big bandage’ Nye writes in a poem criticizing the passive language of newspapers). “Not a lot of journalists are sending our message from Palestine to the world, so I thought, ‘why not send my message … and show them what is happening in my village’,” Janna said in an interview with Aljazeera when she was 10 years old. Janna has faced death threats and intimidation for her work and there is always the threat of arrest looming over her (Amnesty International reports that 500 to 700 Palestinian children are detained and prosecuted by Israeli military courts every year) but she continues to use her voice to draw attention. Which is the goal of poetry as well so it is wonderful to see Nye take her perspective and turn it into poetry.
Her voice a library of kindness.
I hear pages rustling, hungry fingers
moving through stories. If you very alone,
you would want this voice to find you.
Grief is central to this collection. The poems chronicle life under occupation, such as arrests—many of which are done without a stated crime where even higher profile Palestinians are detained (earlier this week poet [a:Mosab Abu Toha|21940310|Mosab Abu Toha|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1635606992p2/21940310.jpg] was detained but later released)—violence and death. Writing from the United States, Nye confronts US readers with their complicity, such as poems titled ‘America Gives Israel Ten Million Dollars A Day’ or when she writes ‘sometimes I wonder what / 38 billion dollars could buy, instead of weapons aimed / against us.’ Nye pulls us into the perspective of those who feel cast aside or demonized simply for where they are born, further displaced from the world when the media ignores their perspectives (‘why don’t they write about us more?’) or launches readymade retorts at criticisms for such a thing. ‘Calling us anti-Semitic / when we are Semites too,’ she addresses multiple times in the collection, ‘no joke, no one is laughing.’ She asks us not to look away, and ‘Why can’t they see / how beautiful we are?’
‘This was our superpower, retaining imagination in our worst days.’
There is still hope burning brightly even in all the sorrows of this collection. ‘Our magic is that we are / still here and we're always here,’ she writes. And she champions those who do speak up and speak out, like Janna, and ensure their voices will not be silenced or discarded into oblivion. This is a powerful and rather painful collection, mostly told through a fictionalized perspective of Janna as she holds her camera up for the world or addresses people via social media, and one that asks for your attention and understanding. I would highly recommend checking out Tiny Journalist, it may not be an easy read but it is an important one.
⅘
People think of us differently.
We may be in prison, but we still love beauty.
We may be oppressed, but we are smart.
We may think we don't need glasses, but the big E
for equality has been lying on its back
for a long time now
kicking its legs in the air like an animal
that needs help to get up.