Table of Continents

Abstract

photo : matt peyton 48 worldliteraturetoday.org Having the blessing to visit your home once, I stood in your office watching you work to the hum of a dryer, the clothes tumbling behind you like a storm of colorful emotions. Observing you, I thought: this is precisely what artists do—clean up the emotional messes of humanity, keeping the heart bright and able to go to the world again, looking loved and well tended. Writing near your washer and dryer, you reminded the world about many things—including stains on religion when a commandment such as “Thou shalt not kill” is not taken seriously by more than one faith. You take love, nurture, and kindness seriously. A mother of one son, and of hundreds of poems, you are committed to nurturing all that is wholesome. As a vegetarian, you believe in the sanctity of life for our fellow species, the animals. You play the guitar. You describe yourself as a “wandering poet,” as you have spent about four decades traveling, leading caravans of language, crossing deserts, in order to share the power and beauty of lines concerned with all of humanity, and engage a “con-verse-ation” around the world. You shimmer among the world’s poets with a distilled sense of empathy. In “Kindness,” from The Words Under the Words, you wrote: Before you know what kindness really is – you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know – how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. Anywhere your name is mentioned, audiences respond with a sense of gratitude for your warm, elegant, comforting, and far-reaching voice. Hope leaps from one poem to another like a gazelle that then leaps all the way to a horizon from which the reader can see the beauty of the world anew, even though suffering and happiness continue to coexist on the pages, and in life. In 19 Varieties of Gazelle, you wrote about “Different Ways to Pray”: There were men who had been shepherds so long They walked like sheep. Under the olive trees, they raised their arms – Hear us! We have pain on earth! We have so much pain there is no place to store it! But the olives bobbed peacefully in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme. At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese, and were happy in spite of pain, Ibtisam Barakat (www. ibtisambarakat.com) is a bilingual Palestinian American author and poet, translator, artist, and educator. Her memoir, Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood (FSG, 2007) won more than twenty awards and honors and is currently available in six languages. Al Ta’ Al-Marbouta Tateer, her book in Arabic, won a best Arabic literature prize in 2011. Her shorter writings have appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, and she is the founder of the Write Your Life seminars. Table of Continents Ibtisam Barakat to Naomi Shihab Nye The war broke me, gave me a map of myself like that of the continents of the planet – separate . . . calling each other foreign . . . Arab identity, woman identity, refugee, Muslim, immigrant, poor, even beautiful . . . identities . . . dent after dent . . . the water separating my continents is not tears . . . the sharks devouring my desires are not fish . . . they are feelings with dropped jaws hungry for the ordinary . . . not finding it . . . water is wasted time . . . water is wasted waves at good-byes water is the sweat of crossing from here to there, from there to there . . . and from here to hearing . . . I embrace my continents strongly . . . I say if Atlas could carry the globe, I can carry myself . . . I embrace my world, hard H and Ard . . . hard! to push the continents closer together but they stay far . . . I think it is the gravity of the condition . . . or maybe as a female facing the aftermath of war I do not have enough upper-body strength . . . to give the world a hug with my arms after the armies were here . . . each continent now has a climate, January–February 2014 • 49 because there was also happiness...