Speaking of your father, he figures often in your poems and interviews. Could you talk about his experience upon arriving in America as a student in 1951? And his view on your writing poetry?

Does the Land Remember Me?
A Memoir of Palestine
BY Aziz Shihab
(Syracuse University Press, 2007)

My father loved writing of all kinds, so he was a most encouraging dad for a poet to have. He loved language, words, journalism, and investigative reporting, and worked as a radio news broadcaster for the BBC when he was still in his teens. I just found his scrapbook from his first years in the United States, which I never saw before in my life. He was actively writing letters to many U.S. newspapers as a brand-new immigrant — about balance in reporting, about how the story of Israel and Palestine was being told in various skewed ways, about the troubling involvement of other countries which was not respecting people equally. He felt very concerned that more people weren’t seeing the larger story, or people were neglecting his own community when they told the sweetened stories of Israel’s founding etc. He was always wounded by phrases like “the Israelis made the desert bloom.” He’d say, we made it bloom too! But they wanted to erase our blooms! He said so many things. I urge any readers who are interested to find his book Does the Land Remember Me? A Memoir of Palestine by Aziz Shihab (Syracuse University Press) which came out only months before his death in 2007. In his scrapbook he even had a letter from Eleanor Roosevelt because he kept writing to her. She said she didn’t know if there could ever be an independent Palestine side-by-side with an independent Israel, or if Jerusalem could ever be an international city — the same things being struggled over today, 50+ years later. She also said, wrongly, that all Palestinian homes had been destroyed, so why would they want to go back there? Many homes were destroyed but certainly not all of them.

Your poem, “The Indian in the Kitchen” reveals a wonderful ability to cut through many cultural/social lines simultaneously. It suggests an openness and humanity that everyone should practice. How did it came about? What would you advise someone who wished to become more open and tolerant?

Spend more time with people not your own age. With people from backgrounds which do not mirror your own. With anyone you might consider an “other” — even urban people need to spend more time with small-town or rural people, etc.

We were always travelers in my family and being bicultural gave me an appetite for mixtures and for the world behind any given scene — it is always so large and there is always so much we have not imagined. I wrote that poem in Guatemala. But in so many countries, there has been some kind of Indian in the kitchen. Even our own. In high school in Texas, working on the school newspaper, I remember wanting to feature interviews with the behind-the-scenes cafeteria crew on the “Features” page and some of my young colleagues were less than enthusiastic. We did it — they had so much to say. Also, I have always been in the kitchen myself!

What awaits you now on your reading table?

Benjamin Alire Saenz’s Last Night I Sang to the Monster (a novel for young adults) and Joe Sacco’s Palestine — I’ve been a little slow to get this one, but have always felt grateful for what he does.

Thank you for listening.