Dear God, Dear Bones, Dear Yellow encapsulates the flinch before the dodgeball strikes. Holds the eyes of white curiosity and crushes them. Is the divine feminine’s wrath with no apologies, and yes, you should say thank you. Palestinian-American writer Noor Hindi is not only the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow (courtesy of The Poetry Foundation), but is also a prominent journalist, previously with Akron, Ohio’s The Devil Strip. Her writing is a wake-up call to the common ideologies behind Muslim culture, and White America’s tarnished view of it.
At its core, Noor Hindi’s collection is a necessary (and bloodied) finger at Israel in regards to the number of Palestinian deaths that continue to rise, even as you read this review. It peels back the reluctant eyelids of the average American reader and says: I am human too. More importantly, it spotlights the suffocative environment many women in her home country of Jordan face day-to-day and refuses to hold back the anger it ensues.
Her poem Dangerous Business does an astounding job at explaining the terror of being deemed “used up” or “unpure” in the eyes of her parents, detailing the shame of having to use a tampon before swimming in a friend’s pool, and juxtaposing that narrative poem with another one made up of excerpts from a newscaster recapping the experience of Muslim women going through hell and back to maintain a nearly unobtainable unwavering purity. As the poem progresses, the newscaster begins to speak of the absolute horror of the phenomenon of “honor killings,” or, “the murder of a person accused of bringing shame upon his or her family,” which makes Hindi’s voice in this poem all the more gut-wrenching as she writes:
“when my mother found a tampon wrapper she asked if I was a virgin I said yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes (47).”
Overall, Noor Hindi’s voice and cadence is like nothing else I’ve seen in the literary world because of how honest she is about not just her sadness, but her beyond justifiable anger. Poets who do not shy away from writing about the ugliness in this world deserve our utmost respect. We love the poems that make us feel like life is worth living for. We love the poems that sound pretty, look pretty, that encapsulates the beauty of humanity in a way that touches us where hands cannot. That being said, it is the poets who write about islamophobia, xenophobia, war, feminism (and a lack thereof), puberty, used tampons, and shame. Those are the poets who touch me. Dear God, Dear Bones, Dear Yellow is an unforgettable read.