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Sessions # 1 and 2

Naomi Shihab Nye, Toni Morrison, and the problematics of the minor

Syllabus:

Shihab Nye, Naomi. 19 Varieties of Gazelle. New York: HarperCollins, 2005, plus other poems from other collections. These will be handed out.

Excerpts from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and other novels. Don’t need to read the whole novel. We’ll be working on excerpts.

[…] the “minor” artist can be defined as a social operative (“un opérateur du corps social”, as Anne Sauvagnargues, a Deleuze specialist, has rightly put it), whose work is necessarily “responsible” in the social arena. Toni Morrison once stated: “I suppose all artists have either to bear witness or effect change—improvement—, take cataracts off people’s eyes in an accessible way. It may be soothing; it may be painful, but that’s his job—to enlighten and to strengthen. […] So now I think novels are important because they are socially responsible. I mean, for me a novel has to be socially responsible as well as very beautiful.” (Morrison, Conversations with Toni Morrison 183)

Thus, in this seminar, the emphasis will be placed on the interaction between what can be called a social necessity, which is at the same time a testimonial necessity, and the multidirectional work of desire in the text, that unveils the fertile ambiguity of the intimate, the very core of poetic writing. As poetess Naomi Shihab Nye has it, “why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A larger disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name.” (19 Varieties of Gazelle, p. xvi)

Paul Klee: “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible”.

Joseph Conrad:

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

Chimanda Adichie, “The danger of telling one story about any person or place is that it becomes a stereotype”:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg&feature=emb_title&fbclid=IwAR3ZvyLxYn7bS5saHckCLMBfWTNEJnUR4RSBqzQyRdZgDD88X6DEiRXIBwA

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Introducing Naomi Shihab Nye

- Some useful biographical facts

Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1952; San Antonio, Texas The Old City of Jerusalem 1967: settled in San Antonio, Texas, BA in English and world religions from Trinity University, Texas. Husband: Michael Nye, a photographer and lawyer.

- Her work

[…] Years before, a girl knocked, wanted to see the Arab. I said we didn’t have one. After that, my father told me who he was, “Shihab”—“shooting star”— a good name, borrowed from the sky. Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?” He said that’s what a true Arab would say. (« Blood », 19 Varieties of Gazelle, 2002)

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I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body, skins and moles and old scars, secret and public hair, crooked toes. I support those who have done nothing large, sifter of lentils, sifter of wisdoms, speak. If we have killed no one in the name of anything bad or good, may light feed our leafliest veins. […] (« Those Whom We Do Not Know », Red Suitcase, 1994)

William Stafford

“Kindness”: Listen to NSN reading “Kindness”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UF3NolGSHg

For a detailed analysis of this poem see: https://www.encyclopedia.com/places/africa/niger-political-geography/kindness

[Naomi Shihab Nye’s] work is faithful to the minute but essential tasks of our lives, the luminous in the ordinary. Gregory Orfalea, Angeleno Days: An Arab American Writer on Family, Place, and Politics. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2009, 197. I visit the grocery store like an Indian woman of Cuzco attends the cathedral. Repeating words: butter, bread, apples, butter bread apples. I nod to the grandmothers muttering among the roots. Their carts tell stories: they eat little, they live alone. Last week two women compared their cancers matter-of-factly as I compare soups. How do you reach that point of acceptance? Yes and no shoved in the same basket and you with a calm face waiting at the check-out stand. We must bless ourselves with peaches. Pray to the eggplant, silent among her sisters, that the seeds will not be bitter on the tongue. Confess our fears to the flesh of tomato: we too go forward only halfway ripened dreaming of deeper red.

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The primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks. Naomi Shihab Nye, in Contemporary Authors.

The Traveling Onion

It is believed that the onion originally came from India. In Eqypt it was an object of worship – why I haven’t been able to find out. From Egypt the onion entered Greece and on to Italy, thence into all of Europe. –Better Living Cookbook

When I think how far the onion has traveled just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise all small forgotten miracles, crackly paper peeling on the drainboard, pearly layers in smooth agreement, the way knife enters onion and onion falls apart on the chopping block, a history revealed. And I would never scold the onion for causing tears. It is right that tears fall for something small and forgotten. How at meal, we sit to eat, commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma but never on the translucence of onion, now limp, now divided, or its traditionally honorable career: For the sake of others, disappear. (Yellow Glove, 1986) […] looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who [we] are so that [we] can more wisely build the future. Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Anyone who feels poetry is an alien or ominous force should consider the style in which human beings think. “How do you think,” I ask my students. "Do you think in complete, elaborate sentences? In fully developed paragraphs with careful footnotes? Or in flashes and burst of images, snatches of lines leaping one to the next, descriptive fragments, sensory details?" We think in poetry. But some people pretend poetry is far away. Naomi Shihab Nye, in The ALAN Review Online.

- In the name of the father

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All my life I thought about the Middle East, wrote about it, wondered about it, lived in it, visited it, worried about it, loved it. We are blessed and doomed at the same time. (“Introduction,” 19 Varieties of Gazelle XIII) I was born in the United States, but my father stared back toward the Middle East whenever he stood outside. Our kitchen smelled like the Middle East—garlic and pine nuts sizzled in olive oil, fried eggplant, hot pita bread. My father dropped sprigs of mint into our pots of hot tea. He had been happy as a boy in the Old City of Jerusalem with his Palestinian and Greek and Jewish and Armenian neighbours. But after the sad days of 1948, when his family lost their home and everything they owned, he wanted to go away. (“Introduction”, XII-XIII)

Aziz Shihab, A Taste of Palestine. Menus and Memories (San Antonio, 1993). Does the Land Remember Me: A Memoir of Palestine (New York, 2007).

One of the few foreign university students in Kansas in the 1950s, he was a regular customer at the local drugstore soda fountain in his new little town. “He always looked dreamy, preoccupied, like he could see things other people couldn't see,” the druggist told me twenty-five years later. Well yes, I thought. That's what immigrants look like. They always have other worlds in their minds. (“Introduction”, XIII) My father and my American mother invented new dishes using Middle Eastern ingredients. We were proud without knowing it. Travelers from the Middle East often sat in circles in our backyard sharing figs and peaches and speaking in Arabic. Arabic music played in our house. Our father told better folk stories than anyone else's father—he had a gentle wit and almost never got mad. So kids from the neighborhood would camp out on our screened-in back porch, and we would all beg my father to tell more funny stories. It was a rich world to be in that had nothing to do with money or politics. (“Introduction”, XIII) I got into the habit of writing little things down from the very beginning—not because they were more interesting than anyone else’s “little things,” but just so I could think about them. When I finally met some other Arab American writers (I was in my twenties by then), we felt we had all been writing parts of a giant collective poem, using the same bouquet of treasured images (was there anyone among us who had never mentioned a fig?). (“Introduction”, XIII-XIV) I kept thinking, as did millions of other people, what can we do? Writers, believers in words, could not give up words when the going got rough. I found myself, as millions did, turning to poetry. But many of us have always turned to poetry. Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name. (“Introduction”, XVI)

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Introducing Toni Morrison

- Some biographical elements (in brief)

African American writer (1931–2019). Born and grew up in Lorain, Ohio, The settings of many of her novels are located in Ohio. Howard University in Washington, DC; majored in English but studied the classics for her minor. Graduated from Howard in 1953; continued her literature studies in Cornell University.

Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner

- The focus and scope of her work

Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (published in 1987) and then the Nobel Prize for her whole work in 1993.

My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purpose of the work, becoming. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992, 4.

- The writer as a social operative

I suppose all artists have either to bear witness or effect change—improvement—take cataracts off people’s eyes in an accessible way. It may be painful, but that’s [her] job—to enlighten and to strengthen. But as a writer, I think that because things have changed

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so much and the communities seem to be so much in flux, or, if they are not, they are receiving a deluge of ideas from all parts of the world, it’s like being under siege and, you know. […] so now I think novels are important because they are socially responsible. I mean, for me a novel has to be socially responsible as well as a very beautiful. T. Morrison, “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” (1985). In Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danielle Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. 171-187, 183. Some time ago I did the best job I could of describing strategies for grounding my work in race-specific yet race-free prose. A prose free of racial hierarchy and triumphalism. T. Morrison, “Afterword” to The Bluest Eye, 211. I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from and in what disables the foray for purposes of fiction into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer’s imagination. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992, 4.