Naomi Shihab Nye's Poetry

Decent Essays
The poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye is a great source to explore the basic principles in Arab-American literature. Her poetry contains many aspects of the Arab and American cultures, she uses poetry to narrate her own experience and thoughts about these two worlds. Nye's poetry focuses on three major concepts: identity, multiculturalism, and coexistence. Nye clarifies identity in post 9/11 in the poem "Blood", and relates the incident to her personal experience. The poet shows the relationship between her grandparents in "Grandfather's Heaven", who have different identity and she captures their perspective of each other's nation. Arab-American literature is a multicultural …show more content…
Social and cultural background influence the thoughts, beliefs, and works of the writers, so, many poets have expresses their own thoughts through poetry. Naomi Shihab Nye as a Palestinian-American poet, illustrates her experience and feelings about Palestine, while living in America through poetry. The turning moment in Nye's life is when she visits Palestine at fourteen, then she begins to expound on the capacity to connect the two cultures. Visiting her grandmother makes Nye realizes the gap between American and Arab societies, so she determines to gather them through poetry. Naomi Shihab Nye has exposed the affirmation of the Arab-American identity in "Blood", and "Grandfather's Heaven", the influence of her multiculturalism in "Half-and-Half", and "Two Countries", and the need for coexistence in "Arabic Coffee", and "Hibernate" from 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of Middle East, Words Under The Words: Selected Poems, and

Related Documents

  • Great Essays

    Sayed Kashua’s collection of newspaper columns, Native, tells the story of Kashua’s life living in a divided Israel as an Arab. The Arab-Israeli conflict occurring in Israel has created unmasked tension between the Arabs and Jews who are sharing the land. This has created a culture of each group wanting to garner support and sympathy for their “side” of the conflict. As an Arab writing to a Hebrew audience, one might assume Kashua uses his newspaper column to promote the Arab side. While Kashua does partake in telling stories pertaining to the conflict, such as stories of the discrimination he faces as an Arab, his stories appear to be of real-life experiences without any built-in Arab propaganda.…

    • 1788 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The video begins us with being introduced to Katharina Grosse in her studio in Berlin, Germany. She is seen photographing a poem by Ernst Jandl for a christmas card, and while she talks about how she’d always loved language, she tells us that the moment she learned about painting a new love began. Katharina points out the strong contrast between poetry and paintings. She discusses how while a poem follows “a certain order system” which makes it quite “linear,” painting possesses a certainly more abstract quality yet is equally as fascinating.…

    • 316 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Poets express their concerns about the Nazis and Jews through the use of poetic devices in order to create a response in the reader. The poets, Lily Brett and Trish McCallister, crafted these poems to express the poor living conditions, the barbaric nature of the Nazis and the suffering Jews inside the camps. Through the use of poetic devices such as imagery, irony, repetition, personification and onomatopoeia, both poets are able to portray their concerns to the reader about the Holocaust. Through the use of poetic techniques, the reader is left feeling antagonised and empathetic.…

    • 1193 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Leanne Simpson and friends set Simpson’s poetry from Islands of Decolonial Love to song. Listen to the selected songs, select a passage you found especially impactful, and reflect on the affective differences between reading and listening to this passage. Explain why Simpson would choose this artistic medium for delivering her work in connection with Sylvia McAdam’s account of nehiyaw…

    • 1623 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    R As a person in the world we call home, that we see as an extraordinary yet cruel planet, questions constantly are asked about our own human race around us why they do what they do; with knowledge the answers can come as close as we allow them to. When I take my time to look at my family or, other people 's family anywhere I take place not only do I recognize a body structure with fascinating features created but, I also very much so take my deepest effort to see what lies inside beyond that form. Hannah Senesh and, Elie Wiesel are enlightening, willing fighters who bring about answers, they give ourselves reason of how just one person can touch your heart with unbelievable stories. Throughout their lives they took on internal and external…

    • 1118 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Through her poems, the author makes the reader feel confused and ignorant of her culture, and consequently allows her readers to feel…

    • 1182 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In "Poetry Makes Nothing Happen" by Julia Alvarez, the speaker is implying that there is a much deeper meaning. Poetry can bring all kinds of feelings and emotions, like cheering someone up, encouraging someone, inspiring someone, even possibly giving someone a better outlook on life. Different characters in this poem use poetry to help them. "Listening to a poem on the radio, Mike Holmquist stayed awake on his drive home." (Alvarez, 704) From this, the reader can see that listening to poetry on the radio made Mike feel like he wasn't alone and helped him stay awake while driving.…

    • 275 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Natasha Trethewey’s poem Myth is an emotional piece, published in her prize winning poetry book, Native Guard, in 2007. Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, where she was raised with her mother and father, a mixed race couple who ended up divorcing when she was six years old. After the divorce, she moved to Georgia to live with her mother, and spent the summers with her father. During this period of her life was when she began to understand the complex life of her mother and father 's relationship of being an interracial couple married in the early 60’s. This was also when Natasha began to write, because of her father pushing her to do so.…

    • 1323 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Furthermore, ethnicity is a fundamental factor that governs an individual some way or another influencing one to ‘pick up the pen’ and write on the experiences associated. Reading is the backbone of knowledge, perspectives and values while writing is the ability to explore values and experiences that characterise an individual. Through reading, an individual is able to live vicariously through the composer, which develops sympathy, widens an individual’s perspective, to reduce the amount of injustices conquered around the globe. In the short story by Nam Le, “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” reinforces that culture can significantly impact the formation of identity which forms the context of the composer, influencing…

    • 1393 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The poem Blood by Naomi Shihab Nye emanates feelings of confusion and anger that people from many cultures in America have felt. This confusion settling in at the moment a young child realizes they are different and realizing that this difference makes them inferior. Why is that despite we are all humans beings, given life the same way, biologically structured the same way, and given the same fate in the end, that we are so different from one another? Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American born in St. Louis, Missouri to a Palestinian father and American mother.…

    • 1402 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the wake of World War II, American society reformed under values of conformity and strict conventions that stifled the individuality of the American people. Within the United States government, policy makers shifted their political agenda to promote consumerism within society in order to take advantage of the prosperous post-war economy. In response to the growing presence of corporations as well as rejection of individual identity within American culture, the Beat Generation movement was created by authors and poets to oppose these values through literary pieces. Around the same time period, the Civil Rights Movement rapidly gained momentum in the 1950s to 1960s among the African American people who struggled for social justice under the…

    • 862 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Brilliant Essays

    Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. Ed. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar. New York: Norton, 2008. 20-21, Print.…

    • 1944 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Brilliant Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A&P by John Updike and Araby by James Joyce are two very similar stories about a young boy’s experience with lust over a girl. The two boys are different ages and go to different lengths to impress the girl they want; however, each story has a similar theme, inciting incident, and final ending. A theme in both of the stories is immaturity, or ignorance. The narrator of Araby is an unnamed boy who is probably not yet an adolescent. Being a young boy in a dull town with little exposure to anything from the world outside of his, he is, by default, ignorant.…

    • 795 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Araby (An analysis on the changes the boy goes through in Araby) James Joyce 's Araby is a well known story about a boy who wants to impress the girl he has been obsessing over for a while now. Throughout this story the boy begins to change and have mixed emotions. The boy has mixed emotions within this story and begins to have feeling for this girl. The boy changes in Araby by not only gaining some maturity, but his emotions for his friends sister deepens as well, and he comes to a realization and faces reality at the end of this story. Araby is actually a short story from a collection of stories.…

    • 787 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The short story “Araby” was written by the Irish modernist James Joyce. In this short story, the narrator is a delusional young boy romanticizing about an older girl. The girl is not aware of his fantasies and infatuations, he gets angry with himself and he is forced to realize that she will never reciprocate his affections. The narrator put himself through some mental torture by obsessing about the girl day and night “ “At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read” (Joyce 282). He also put himself through unnecessary stress by going to the bazaar just to buy the girl a gift she never asked him for “If I go, I will bring you something” (Joyce 281).…

    • 764 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays