Volume 24 95
she asserts that after recognizing the inevitability
of one’s own death and the universality of sorrow,
one will logically conclude that kindness is the only
mode of being that makes life bearable.
Here again, she personifies kindness, this time
as a force that animates people to go about their
daily tasks, as kindness “raises its head / from the
crowd of the world to say / It is I you have been
looking for, / and then goes with you everywhere
/ like a shadow or a friend.” In personifying kind-
ness, Nye describes it as a type of salvation and
emphasizes kindness as a crucial aspect of human-
ity. Rather than describing a simple act with no mo-
tives, she portrays kindness as the ultimate
companion against loneliness, a way of being that
abates the sense of helplessness and desolation we
would otherwise feel. She argues that by embrac-
ing kindness, and only by embracing it, we are
never alone.
Although the poet never spells out what kind-
ness is, she suggests that it is a mixture of all the
things she illuminates in the course of the poem:
the recognition of personal loss, the inevitability of
one’s death, and the magnitude of sorrow that re-
sults in empathy. She defines kindness not as self-
less act but rather as a rational mode of living, as
only generosity and gentleness toward others can
provide a sense of solace in our solitary journeys
through life.
Source:Anna Maria Hong, Critical Essay on “Kindness,”
in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.
Ibis Gomez-Vega
In the following essay, Gomez-Vega explores
how Shihab Nye uses storytelling in her poetry to
evoke themes such as family connections and
displacement.
When Naomi Shihab Nye says in “For Lost
and Found Brothers” that “Facts interest me less
than the trailing smoke of stories” (Words under
the Words), the essence of her work becomes clear.
As a poet she is, at heart, a storyteller, one who
focuses on the lives of everyday people, especially
her own relatives, to understand the world around
her. She is neither a “New Formalist” nor a “Lan-
guage” poet, the terms that define the work of
some of the most critically revered contemporary
poets. Instead, she writes free verse in what is, by
most standards, fairly accessible language. Like
most poets, Shihab Nye is enamoured of words,
but her free verse poems tell stories which seem
to emerge from that “boundary [that] becomes the
place from which something begins its presencing
in a movement not dissimilar to the ambulant, am-
bivalent articulation of the beyond” (5) that Homi
K. Bhabha defines in The Location of Culture.Of-
ten, the stories become a tool for survival, the only
way to make sense of difficult moments in a harsh
world, and nowhere is this more evident than in
“How Palestinians Keep Warm,” a poem about the
subtle changes that have taken place in the lives
of contemporary Palestinians who huddle together
in a war-torn city. The poet says, “I know we need
to keep warm here on earth / and when your shawl
is as thin as mine is, you tell stories” (Red Suit-
case26).
Naomi Shihab Nye’s first collection of poems,
Different Ways to Pray(1980), marks the begin-
ning of her exploration of what will become re-
current themes through the body of her work. Her
concern with family connections is the subject of
many of her poems because, as she states in Fuel
(1998), “If you tuck the name of a loved one / un-
der your tongue too long / without speaking it / it
becomes blood,” so “No one sees / the fuel that
feeds you” (“Hidden”). The family must be ac-
knowledged; it must be recognized, but so must the
fact that families have been torn asunder by the dis-
placement created by war. For this reason, the sense
of loss so prevalent in the work of exile or immi-
grant writers also runs through Shihab Nye’s po-
etry even though she is herself not an exiled poet.
Born to a Palestinian father and a mother of
European ancestry, Naomi Shihab Nye was born
and raised on a farm in St. Louis where she learned
to love animals and appreciate her father’s love for
the land. At the age of twelve, she spent a year in
Palestine getting to know her father’s family, an
experience that filled her with a deep sense of be-
longing and, thereby, displacement. Lisa Suhair
Majaj points out that Shihab Nye’s poetry “ex-
plores the markers of cross-cultural complexity,
moving between her Palestinian and American her-
itages” because Shihab Nye’s poems document the
differences as well as the similarities between two
very divergent peoples, although Suhair Majaj also
claims that Shihab Nye “is heir to an Arab essence
passed down across generations.” Regardless of her
“Arab essence,” Naomi Shihab Nye’s work lies
well within the American tradition of story-telling
poets like Robert Frost.
Whether she is writing about her father’s Pales-
tinian family or her own connections with people in
other parts of the world, Shihab Nye’s poems are
acquainted with the pain of displaced people. In
“Brushing Live,” she writes about an unexpectedKindness