Naomi Shihab Nye’s Sitti’s Secrets: Poetics of Homeland

Sitti's Secrets (SS) was published in 1994, one year after the Oslo Accords, which saw the Palestinians sign peace agreements with Israel. The Accords, which led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, an interim entity to govern the West Bank and Gaza, “promised much, though in reality delivered very little that was tangible” (Hastedt & Lybeck, 2014,p. 71). But Nye was writing at a time when the Accords still exercised a hold on the global imagination with the promise of lasting peace in the region. This paper seeks to examine the story as an affective articulation of Nye's vision of the past and the future of her fathers homeland. Nye uses the story to create an affective-discursive landscape that enunciates an essentialist, one might even argue reductionist, vision of Palestine, but such essentialism is deployed strategically to serve a political message about Palestinian rights, history and rootedness, and the hope for peace.