Naomi Shihab Nye: The Arab American Struggle

1. Naomi Shihab Nye: The Arab American Struggle Aimee Freeman Annie Ludlow Casey Marx Lauren Murphy "Anyone who says,“Here’s my address, write me a poem,”deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: 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."

2. “Hidden” If you place a fern under a stone the next day it will be nearly invisible as if the stone has swallowed it. If you tuck the name of a loved one under your tongue too long without speaking it it becomes blood sigh the little sucked-in breath of air hiding everywhere beneath your words. No one sees the fuel that feeds you.

3. Common Patterns • Theme: Cultural struggle between two ethnicity groups. • Structure: Chronological order. • Style and content of poems: Experiences from real life. • Literary Devices: Imagery, personification, symbol, similes, and metaphors.

4. Making a Fist For the first time, on the road north of Tampico, I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear. I was seven, I lay in the car watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin. "How do you know if you are going to die?" I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, "When you can no longer make a fist." Years later I smile to think of that journey, the borders we must cross separately, stamped with our unanswerable woes. I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand.

5. Half and Half You can't be, says a Palestinian Christian on the first feast day after Ramadan. So, half-and-half and half-and-half. He sells glass. He knows about broken bits, chips. If you love Jesus you can't love anyone else. Says he. At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa, he's sweeping. The rubbed stones feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar across faces of date-stuffed mamool. This morning we lit the slim white candles which bend over at the waist by noon. For once the priests weren't fighting in the church for the best spots to stand. As a boy, my father listened to them fight. This is partly why he prays in no language but his own. Why I press my lips to every exception. A woman opens a window—here and here and here— placing a vase of blue flowers on an orange cloth. I follow her. She is making a soup from what she had left in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean. She is leaving nothing out.

6. Literary Criticism • NEGATIVE • “shihabnye’s inability to confront evil” • “provides an unrealistic portrait of human nature, addresses evil only at a slant, never directly” • “not very good with evil” • POSITIVE • “her poetry creates no bounderies.” • “engages her readers in the debate over war, peace, and tolerance”

7. Literary Criticism • We agree on: • “shihabnye’s inability to confront evil” • -poems are still light • “creates no boundries” • -poems are unique and explore different ideas

8. Literary Criticism • We disagree on: • “not very good with evil” • her letter to the terrorist • “Jerusalem” • Rid hatred and conflict

9. Jerusalem “Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed. Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.” —Tommy Olofsson, Sweden I’m not interested in who suffered the most. I’m interested in people getting over it. Once when my father was a boy a stone hit him on the head. Hair would never grow there. Our fingers found the tender spot and its riddle: the boy who has fallen stands up. A bucket of pears in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home. The pears are not crying. Later his friend who threw the stone says he was aiming at a bird. And my father starts growing wings.

10. Each carries a tender spot: something our lives forgot to give us. A man builds a house and says, “I am native now.” A woman speaks to a tree in place of her son. And olives come. A child’s poem says, “I don’t like wars, they end up with monuments.” He’s painting a bird with wings wide enough to cover two roofs at once. Why are we so monumentally slow? Soldiers stalk a pharmacy: big guns, little pills. If you tilt your head just slightly it’s ridiculous. There’s a place in my brain where hate won’t grow. I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds. Something pokes us as we sleep. It’s late but everything comes next.