Talk to the mountain - "Negotiations with a Volcano" by Naomi Shihab Nye
BogiReads brings you the daily speculative reading recommendation of editor Bogi Takács.
Today's recommendation -
Author: Naomi Shihab Nye
Title: “Negotiations with a Volcano”
Venue: Words Under the Words – Selected Poems (Far Corner, 1995) (Amazon US / Bookshop.org associate links if you’d like to buy it; I recommend it)
Type: Poem
Themes: Fantasy, anthropomorphism, mountains, the land
Where to read: Text free online
Sonia Sulaiman has an amazing list of Palestinian speculative fiction and poetry (I really recommend it, found so many great reads there) and I was wondering this past week what other poetry I could suggest. I feel like I’ve read a lot more poems that were speculative but weren’t published in a speculative context, especially from earlier writers. But those can be harder to find, so I went looking.
I just started reading Words Under the Words by Naomi Shihab Nye, which collection was originally recommended to me by Rasha Abdulhadi (who also made the point that all Palestinian literature is speculative!) and it had a poem right at the very beginning that was about talking to a volcano. That’s certainly speculative! From one standpoint at least, but from another it’s just life. To be honest, that’s how I feel about SFF in general, it allows for expressing all manner of things expunged from Western “realistic” fiction.
So read this poem with that in mind – it’s careful, it’s gentle, it’s about living together and also about something more. You can read as much metaphor into it as you wish.
Take care,
Bogi.