Naomi Shihab Nye's "Fundamentalism"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2021
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
Naomi Shihab Nye (Arabic: نعومي شهاب ناي; born March 12, 1952) is a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother. She began composing her first poem at the age of six and has published or contributed to over 30 volumes. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels.[1] Although she calls herself a "wandering poet", she refers to San Antonio as her home. She says a visit to her grandmother in the West Bank village of Sinjil was a life-changing experience. Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer,[2] and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.[3]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, August 23rd. And today I'm going to read for you a poem by poet Naomi Shihab Nye. She was born in 1952. She's a prolific writer. She's either published or contributed to over 30 volumes. She's a poet and novelist and essayist and a songwriter. And she's of mixed descent. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother is an American of German and Swiss descent. And she addresses the issues of this collision of cultures very directly in her poetry. |
| 0:41.3 | And today's poem is called Fundamentalism, and this is how it goes. |
| 0:47.3 | Because the eye has a short shadow, or it is hard to see overheads in the crowd, |
| 0:53.3 | if everyone else seems smarter, but you need your own secret? |
| 0:58.3 | If mystery was never your friend? |
| 1:02.3 | If one way could satisfy the infinite heart of the heavens? |
| 1:07.9 | If you liked the king on his golden throne more than the villagers carrying baskets of lemons |
| 1:13.8 | if you wanted to be sure his guards would admit you to the party the boy with the broken pencil |
| 1:22.4 | scrapes his little knife against the lead turning and turning it as a point emerges from the wood again. |
| 1:31.2 | If he would believe his life is like that, he would not follow his father into war. |
| 1:38.4 | This poem was written in 1998, and I chose the poem because the dating of the poem reminded me that we're always dealing |
| 1:48.4 | with the title and the content of the poem, fundamentalism. And it's, of course, particularly |
| 1:54.1 | relevant right now in which there's all kinds of fundamentalism raging all around us. And that's |
| 2:00.5 | probably always been the case. But right now, |
| 2:03.2 | we are certainly seeing it in the public square. And as the title suggests, this is a poem about |
| 2:11.8 | fundamentalism. And there's all kinds of ways to be a fundamentalist. You could be a religious |
| 2:17.1 | fundamentalist, political, fundamentalist, moral, all kinds of ways to believe that there is one fundamental way to live a human life. |
| 2:28.8 | And the narrator of the poem seems to be challenging that. |
| 2:32.0 | How? |
| 2:32.7 | Through a series of six questions which make up the first |
| 2:36.4 | part of the poem. And the narrator is asking these questions to a fundamentalist. And the questions |
| 2:44.7 | at heart seem to be asking why, right? That's the question behind the questions. Why? Why? Fundamentalism. And the question |
... |
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