Words to Sit in, Like Chairs
By: Naomi Shahib Nye
I was with teenagers at the wonderful HollandHallSchool in Tulsa when the planes flew into the buildings on September 11, 2001. We were talking about words as ways to imagine one another’s experience. A boy had just thanked me for a poem about Jerusalem that enabled him to consider the Palestinian side of the story. He said he had never thought about that perspective before, so the poem was important to him.
The TV commentators were already saying the hijackers had been Arabs, which sent a deep chill into my Arab-American blood. I said to those beautiful students, “Please, I beg you, if Arabs are involved in this tragedy, remember there are millions of Arabs who would never do such a thing.”
They nodded soberly, “Of course,” they said, “We know that. This is Oklahoma.” Their kindness overwhelmed me.
Then a boy said, “I hate to ask this so soon after it happened, but do you think you will write about it?”
“It would not be my choice of topic,” I said, feeling sick, my head spinning, “but as writers, we are always exploring what happens, what comes next, turning it over, finding words to sit in like chairs, even in terrible scenery, so maybe I will have to write about I; maybe we all will. Because words shape the things that we live, whether beautiful or sorrowful, and help us connect to one another, this will be part of our history now.”
Then a boy gave me a “Collapse-It” laundry basket that his parents had invented. Made of some kind of modern, waterproof, heavy-duty cardboard, it folded flat when not in use. He seemed mournful, handing it over.
“I brought this for you as a small gift,” he said, “but after what happened today, it almost seems inappropriate.”
Collapse-It. All Fall Down.
I clutched it to my chest and carried it with me on the long bus ride (since the planes were not flying) home to south Texas.
I have used the neat little white basket every time I’ve washed clothes since then. What came to me on a day of horror and tragedy and terrible mess, accompanied by kind words, continues as a helpful friend in daily life. Just the way words can help us all not to be frozen in horror and fear.
Use words. It is the most helpful thing I have learned in my life. We find words, we select and arrange them, to help shape our experiences of things. Whether we write them down for ourselves or send them into the air as connective lifelines between use, they help us live, and breathe, and see.
When I felt the worst after September 11, I called people. How is it for you? What are you thinking about? Have you heard anything helpful lately? Many of you probably did that, too. Sometimes it seemed good, and important, to call unexpected people – people who were not, in any way, expecting to hear from us right then. Hello, I’m thinking of you. Do you have any good news? If I had heard a useful quote or story recently myself, I shared it. Talking with friends felt like a connected chain. We passed things on down the wire.
It was very helpful for me to talk with Arab-American friends who automatically shared the doubled sense of sorrow. A poet friend of mine in New York City, just blocks from the disaster, said his wife saw him staring at a wall in their apartment one day, and said, “Don’t withdraw! Speak!”
Sometimes we have to remind one another.
I also wrote sentences and phrases down in small notebooks, as I have done almost every day of my life since I was six. It is the best clue I know for how to stay balanced as we live. Bits and pieces of lines started fitting together again, offering small scraps of sense, ways out of the turmoil-of-mind, shining as miniature beacons, from under heaps of leaves.
Very rarely did I hang up from speaking with anyone or close my notebook feeling worse. Usually, that simple sharing of feelings, whether with another person, or with a patient page, helped ease the enormous feeling that the sorrow was too big to get one’s mind around.
War is too big to get one’s mind around too.
I keep thinking – if people was are angry, or frustrated, could use words instead of violence, how would our world be different? Maybe if enough of us keep in practice using our own honest words, that basic human act can help balance bigger things in the world.