Sitti’s Secrets
By Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American poet and is the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2019-2021. If you receive the Sunday New York Times or access it online, some of you may recognize her name because she has been selecting the weekly poems published in the Magazine section. Nye introduced me to a poem I have turned to over and over again during these days of the plague.
Small Kindnesses
By Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
Laméris’ poem is an ode to compassion; Nye extends this same compassion both in her poetry and in her children’s books. In Sitti’s Secrets, the relationship evoked between the grandmother and the child is particularly special in that it is not dependent on traditional language – it is based on a universal language they share where words are not of critical necessity; as Nye writes: “we invented our own language together.” I travelled for ten months with my then four-year-old and twelve-year-old daughters quite a number of years ago, and one of the greatest joys was watching my youngest communicate with other children. They did not share any verbal language in common, but found a way to communicate via play and signs. It was much harder for my older daughter and I to do this, and I remember feeling envious and delighted by how these young children, raised in various different cultures, nonetheless found a way to make themselves understood. Nye vividly captures this dynamic between grandmother and grandchild, where love is the primary tool of communication.
Nye gently broaches politics, e.g., when describing what separates the child and her grandmother beyond “miles of land and water,” there are also “presidents and clotheselines/ and trucks and stop signs and/ signs that say DO NOT ENTER/ and grocery stores and benches/ and families and deserts and/ a million trees.” It is a subtle nod to the borders between Palestine and Israel, but Nye (appropriately, I think, for a children’s book intended for all children, no matter their cultural background) does not expand on Middle Eastern politics beyond this. For people who have visited Israel or Palestine, those DO NOT ENTER signs are jarring on both the Israeli and the Palestinian side (Palestinians must pass through check-points to enter Israel; Israelis are forbidden to enter parts of the West Bank). This is not an overtly political book by any means. The girl’s letter to the president, “I vote for peace,” is exactly what one hopes to see represented in children’s literature by Palestinian and Israeli authors.
Nye introduces a taste of Arabic in this children’s book, Sitti being the name for grandma, and habibi meaning darling (a term used often by Israelis as well). I do wish that when Nye had listed all the other delicious words for grandma – like Tutu in Hawaiian, Yaya in Greek, Abuela in Spanish, to name just a few – that she had also included the Hebrew word Savta.
Nye evokes the power of food as a connector between people, and how often cultures are defined by food and the preparing of meals. As someone who has traveled often to Israel, the similarities between the food cultures of Israelis and Palestinians is often commented upon: pita, cucumbers, yogurts, lemonade with mint, almonds, apricots, etc. I am sure some of you are aware of the wonderful collaborative cookbooks of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, an Israeli and Palestinian who run restaurants together in London. In this piece from five years ago, Ottolenghi talks about food and its role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This article on a newer Palestinian cookbook goes even deeper into the conversation on reviving Palestinian food as an act of resistance, even as it expands on how similar many Palestinian and Israeli foods are.
But enough about food! Sitti’s attachment to the trees is an obvious metaphor for attachment to the land. But beyond the deeper political motif lies an opportunity in these particular days of climate change and the terrible fires, to engage with children on the importance of trees and cultivating a love and responsibility for the environment. Please visit OneTreePlanted to learn about this amazing organization where for $ 1, you can plant a tree, and teach your children about getting engaged in a very grassroots way with global reforestation (there are educational resources on the site that teachers can share with their classrooms). The lemon tree in Sitti’s Secret is a powerful metaphor. Perhaps some of you have read Sandy Tolan’s book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (2006). It tells the unlikely story of a friendship between a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman, and the resultant organization they co-founded that is dedicated to building peace between Palestinians and Israelis called Open House. In Boulder, where I live, some people read this book together in community, and started holding interfaith gatherings, and in 2014, they did their first Community Walk for Peace, which is now an annual event. This year, because of Covid, they instead held a virtual “day of action,” encouraging people to donate to local charities and causes helping people in need, including the following:
ACLU
Attention Homes (for homeless youth)
Black Lives Matter
Boulder Community Health Foundation
Bridge House (meals and shelter for the homeless)
Citizens Climate Lobby
Community Food Share
EFAA (Emergency Family Assistance Association)
Out Boulder (supporting local LGBTQ communities)
Rise Against Suicide
Organizations like these can be found in all of our communities. Nye’s message to your children is one of compassion. If you are able, please consider donating to similar groups where you live. Any amount can help – or just a dollar to plant a tree! Teaching our children to give back and support the communities in which we live is a true act of compassion and activism.
I’ll end as I began — with a poem — but this one is Nye’s own intense take on kindness:
Kindness
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.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.