Volume 24 97
Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn’t have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,
‘Shihab’—‘shooting star’—
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, ‘When we die, we give it back?’
He said that’s what a true Arab would say.That she tells the girl that they “didn’t have” an
Arab in the house reiterates Shihab Nye’s own
sense of inadequacy. Although she shares her fa-
ther’s Palestinian ancestry, she does not recognize
it as a marker.
Although the child in the poem does not know
that she does in fact have an Arab in the house, the
adult poet refuses to forget him or her own con-
nection to his ancestry. In the same poem, Shihab
Nye confronts the disturbing news emerging from
the Palestinian struggle for self determination.
I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?The Arab American who can see both sides of the
story in the Israeli/Palestinian struggle is torn be-
tween her desire for justice and her love for her an-
cestral country. The struggle, however, leads the
poet to recognize her ethnicity and her own place
as an “other” in America.
In “Speaking Arabic,” a short essay in Never
in a Hurry,Shihab Nye ponders the need for eth-
nic identity as she wonders why she could not “for-
get the earnest eyes of the man who said to [her]
in Jordan, ‘Until you speak Arabic, you will not
understand pain.’” She considers his statement
“ridiculous” and remembers how he goes on to say
“something to do with an Arab carrying sorrow in
the back of the skull that only language cracks.”
As in the case of her father’s earlier longing for the
taste of figs, the man’s statement leads her to re-
member yet another man’s statement when,
At a neighborhood fair in Texas, somewhere between
the German Oom-pah Sausage stand and the Mexi-
can Gorditas booth, I overheard a young man say to
his friend, ‘I wish I had a heritage. Sometimes I
feel—so lonely for one.’ And the tall American trees
were dangling their thick branches right down over
my head.Words from a zealot and from someone who has
lost his heritage are juxtaposed in an attempt to un-
derstand what it means to have a heritage, to come
from a place so deeply ingrained in the mind that
figs savored in childhood retain their taste forever.
As an Arab American, Naomi Shihab Nye
writes in English even as she frets over her inabil-
ity to understand Arabic as well as she would like.
I thought pain had no tongue. Or every tongue
at once, supreme translator, sieve. I admit my
shame. To live on the brink of Arabic, tugging
its rich threads without understanding
how to weave the rug... I have no gift.
The sound, but not the sense. (“Arabic,”
Red Suitcase)
She associates speaking Arabic with her father and
with relatives who live far away, and, probably be-
cause she is a poet who values words, she wants
the gift of that language.
The power of words to renew and uplift the
spirit is another theme that runs through Naomi Shi-
hab Nye’s work, and it is manifested in her appre-
ciation for the work of other poets. Through the
years, she has written many poems to her mentor
and teacher, William Stafford, of whom she says
in “Bill’s Beans” that “He left the sky over Oregon
and fluent trees. / He gave us our lives that were
hiding under our feet, / saying, You know what to
do” (Fuel). Shihab Nye also maintains close rela-
tionships with many contemporary poets, In “You
Know Who You Are,” words from one of these po-
ets sustain her. She claims that “Because sometimes
I live in a hurricane of words / and not one of them
can save me. / Your poems come in like a raft, logs
tied together, / they float.” Then, after observing
the behavior of fathers and sons together and wan-
dering “uselessly in the streets I claim to love,” she
feels “the precise body of your poems beneath me,
/ like a raft,I felt words as something portable
again, / a cup, a newspaper, a pin” (Words under
the Words). Words move her, sustain her, connect
her to the world in ways that only words can ex-
plain, which is why she attempts to teach one of
her students in “Valentine for Ernest Mann” that
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.
(Red Suitcase)
For Naomi Shihab Nye, poems hide everywhere,
and her task as a poet has been to write ordinary
poems in an accessible language, what Vernon
Shetley calls the “colloquial free-verse lyric that
occupies the mainstream.” There is no “‘unread-
ability’” as “a goal in itself” in Naomi Shihab Nye’s
poetry. If anything, her work aims for clarity andKindness