Poetry for Students

96 Poetry for Students

meeting between her father and a Palestinian man

in Alexandria.

In a shop so dark he had to blink twice

an ancient man sunk low on a stool and said,

‘You talk like the men who lived in the world

when I was young.’ Wouldn’t say more,

till my father mentioned Palestine

and the gentleman rose, both arms out, streaming

cheeks. ‘I have stopped saying it. So many years.’

My father held him there, held Palestine, in the dark,

at the corners of two honking streets.

He got lost coming back to our hotel.

(Red Suitcase)

The encounter is awkward and casual, but it taps

at the pain of the exiled, the displaced, the pain of

a people adrift in a violent world. Gregory Orfalea,

when asked to discuss the Palestinian connection

in Shihab Nye’s work, points out that “her work is

faithful to the minute, but essential tasks of our

lives, the luminous in the ordinary.”

Because so much of her work harks back to

her memories of the Shihab family home in Pales-

tine, a picture of her Palestinian grandmother, Sitti

Khadra, graces the cover and half title page of

Words under the Words,a volume that brings to-

gether three of her early books: Different Ways to

Pray(1980), Hugging the Jukebox(1982), and Yel-

low Glove(1986). The photograph was taken by

Michael Nye, Naomi Shihab’s Swedish American

husband, which seems appropriate because much

of Shihab Nye’s work focuses on the moments re-

covered from family connections. She writes in

Never in a Hurrythat when she visits Palestine,

“feelings crowd in on” her, and she reasons that

“maybe this is what it means to be in your genetic

home. That you will feel on fifty levels at once, the

immediate as well as the level of blood, the level

of uncles,... weddings and graves, the babies who

didn’t make it, level of the secret and unseen.” She

tells herself that “maybe this is heritage, that deep

well that gives us more than we deserve. Each time

I write or walk or think, I drop a bucket in.”

The influence of the Shihab family on the

Palestinian American poet evolves through the

years. In “My Father and the Figtree,” one learns

about the time when the poet, at age six, eats a fig

and shrugs, unaware of what the taste of a fig means

to her Palestinian father:

‘That’s not what I’m talking about!’ he said,

‘I’m talking about a fig straight from the earth—

gift of Allah!—on a branch so heavy it touches the

ground.

I’m talking about picking the largest fattest sweet-

est fig

in the world and putting it in my mouth.’

(Here he’d stop and close his eyes.)

(Words under the Words)

The six-year-old child, raised in a country where

figs are exotic, not as common as apples or even

oranges, fails to understand her Palestinian father’s

appreciation for the fruit, even if the taste of figs

functions in the poem like Proust’s madeleine to

bring back the past. The father’s longing for the

memory of the fig’s taste reiterates the poet’s con-

cern with her father’s displacement and her own

sense of inadequacy as a Palestinian who does not

share her father’s memories.

In “The Words under the Words,” Shihab Nye

remembers her grandmother, Sitti Khadra, who

lived north of Jerusalem and impressed her with

her silence and wisdom. Because she lives in a war-

torn country, “my grandmother’s voice says noth-

ing can surprise her. / Take her the shotgun wound

and the crippled baby. / She knows the spaces we

travel through, / the messages we cannot send”

(Words). For the grandmother, affected by war, the

one constant is Allah. Her “eyes say Allah is every-

where, even in death.... / He is her first thought,

what she really thinks of His name.” The grand-

mother reminds the poet to

‘Answer, if you hear the words under the words—

otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough

edges,

difficult to get through, and our pockets full of

stones.’

Her grandmother’s words remind her to look for

meaning in life, to look for the words under the

words, which is exactly what the life of this poet

is about, creating a context for understanding

through story telling.

Because meaning can only spring from what

she knows, Naomi Shihab Nye also writes about

what it means to be “different” in America. Her

most poignant poem on this subject is “Blood,”

published in Yellow Glovein 1986. In it, she re-

members how

Kindness

Often, the stories

become a tool for survival,

the only way to make sense

of difficult moments in a

harsh world,.. .”