Refusal as caretaking: Lyric poetry and the War on Terror

Abstract This article follows the post-9/11 poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye and Solmaz Sharif’s ‘LOOK’ to understand how poets with proximity to the so-called Muslim World language a critique of imperial war. Specifically, I am interested in how lyric poetry betrays the neoliberal imperative to represent Muslims post-9/11 and instead becomes a space of rupture/disruption against what Sunaina Maria refers to as ‘imperial statecraft’. By beginning with Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Flinn, On the Bus’ from her 2002 collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle, the article begins with untangling what is framed as the necessity to represent ‘good Muslims’ in the United States post-9/11. I discuss how the representation of Muslims as a coherent group within the West is fraught. Moreover, 19 Varieties of Gazelle leaves the United States’ terms of engagement with Muslims and the so-called Muslim World unquestioned and, thus, reifies them. By her 2005 collection You & Yours, however, Nye abandons the representational project in favor of critiquing the rhetoric of the War on Terror. Here, she begins to engage in what Sharif refers to as ‘the caretaking of the language.’ She begins to question the state’s terms of engagement. The article then moves to Solmaz Sharif’s ‘LOOK,’ which refuses the state’s gaze altogether and instead insists upon questioning the state’s language. Ultimately, the article works to track the emergence of an insurgent poetics in the post-9/11 work of Muslim* poets in the United States.