Nye’s 19 Varieties of Gazelle (2002) is a collection of poems that deals with various aspects of in the Middle East, particularly Palestine. The poems touch on locals’ everyday life, food, family relations, connection with land, peace negotiation with the colonizer, and issues of Arab Americans who emigrated from Palestine after the Israeli colonization. Her more recent poem “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal” (2013) is similarly lavish with complex manifestations of identity.
In this post, I seek to explore the complex identity that Nye projects, considering her unique linguistic and ethic experience. Unlike the Arab American women studied by Witteborn (2004), Nye is a second-generation immigrant; she seems more fully absorbed in the American side of her dual identity since her mother is American, which is reflected in her linguistic repertoire as she admits that she lives "on the brinks of Arabic / tugging its rich treads without understanding / how to weave the rug / [she has] no gift. / The sound, but not the sense." (Nye, 2002, p. 91). However, as Sallabank contends, the signs of language loss doesn't have to eat at the heart of ethnic belonging (Omoniyi & White, 2006, p. 6)—at least in Nye's case. Despite linguistic limitations, her ethnic, national, and a particularly accentuated human senses of belonging are actually reflected in the themes of language and circles (both of which I will give snippets of here), as well as foods and community members (which I will further expand on).
My analysis here draws on the Hatcht et al.'s Communication Theory of Identity, which is based on that ‘‘identities have semantic properties that are expressed in core symbols, meanings, and labels’’ (Hecht et al., 2003, p.235). Thereby, I will be looking at the identity-related associations that themes of language, circles, foods, and community members allude to and give off to the readers in Nye's poetry.
Language
As evident in her poem, “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal,” Naome acknowledges her linguistic identity: rapports of belonging with a stranger, an old monolingual Palestinian lady at Albuquerque's airport, are cemented over the use of a common code—Arabic. A family value appears as a consequence of the joyous chance of sharing Arabic as a language: they start calling people who share the same code—as casually and randomly as one would feel comfortable to do with a family member.
The association of comfort also plays in: the fears of old lady—who was frantic standing amidst foreigners who didn't speak her tongue in a case of emergency airplane delay was abated by the arrival of someone who carried in their tone the mercy and solace of a mother tongue!
Circles
I think that the circles that Nye so flexibly moves between exhibit interesting identity-related associations. She sometimes seems to find a vent in letting go of a dual ascription of identity (either American or Arab) by swinging to a larger circle by re-proclaiming the human identity above all including all of its associations.
This identity and its associations are unfurled in several loci and dimensions of her poetry: she celebrates the common human identity that she witness in the airport incident, with its associations with empathy, compassion, and kindness, which are illuminated by the people's concern about the troubled old lady—despite their inability to help—, her ma'mul gifts powdered with her simplicity and friendliness, and their grateful acceptance of it.
Several poem in 19 Varieties of Gazelle echo the same jump in circles—moving from local foods and faces (explored below) to universal commonalities, thus drawing her Western readers in. A good illustration of that is the poem "Arabic." An Arab man associates the Arabic linguistic identity exclusively with the effect of pain, yet at the end of the poem Nye reclaims the affect of pain with the human identity regardless of tongue: she calls "pain!" and the taxi answers in all tongues (p. 91). It's also almost as if she saying to that man: why equate Arabic with pain? According to Burbano-Elizondo's second-level indexicalities—i.e. they ways in which people can rationalize their associations with language are so wide and diverse to limited to a negative translation of emotions (Omoniyli & White, 2006, p. 3).
The main poem in the book, "19 Varieties of Gazelle," re-emphasizes the liberation from dual identity restrictions: in a gazelle reservation, a sign reads "KEEP TO THE PATH." She wonders how one would expect a gazelle to stick to simplistic, defined path; "humans have voices / what have they done to us?" (p. 73).
These poems illustrate not only Nye's pursuit of deconstructing the limitations of the emphasis of national and ethnic identities that society imposes but also her pursuit to move in circles in the associations that many Arabs insist to attribute to their linguistic/ethnic identities.
Foods and Faces
Addressing a Western audience in an age that is rife with Orient-Occident conflicts, Nye--with a keen eye for particular details of the Eastern rhetorics of belonging (as exemplified in food and community members)--challenges some widely accepted stereotypes and help Western readers see the humanity of the vague Middle-Eastern nations, which are typically seen as the abstract other filtered through media. Much like Norman Rockwell who supported the civil rights of African Americans by simply painting the simple details of their everyday lives (Gallagher & Zagacki, 2013, p. 175), Nye achieves “energia”: she uses particularity with details about food and people to achieve a visibility of the humanity of the East, which is a rhetorical technique that defies the Western colonial gaze and the sweeping stereotypes of the “terrorist other.” Indeed, this rhetorical technique subtly draws attention to the humanity both nations of the East and West share. It also somehow represents Nye’s attempt to sort out the two seemingly contrasted sides of her Arab American identity.
For one thing, Nye’s details about local food show the common human connection with land, which is the natural source of food. Moreover, food imagery is particularly significant since food is one of the most remarkable forms of the gift that is passed down to generations forming a bond of communal identity. In my personal travels around the West, I found a lot of people who are familiar with Middle-Eastern food, such as the long-loved tabbouleh, hummus, or falafel, yet this knowledge was typically only acquired through a capitalist, consumerist institution that commercializes that food and sells it to the public. Middle-Eastern food, much like food from any other culture, can unfortunately often be thought of without due reverence; it can take a capitalist, culture-appropriative turn and become deformed in the minds as a mere “commodity,” which is clearly distinguished from an identity-reverencing gift: “The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion … without the benefit of inner nourishment” (Hyde, 2007, p. 12). Nye, however, reclaims some examples of the ingredients of food in the Middle-East (e.g. locals’ tomatoes, olives, and figs-- restoring them to their reverent meanings that the minds of “otherers” tend to strip them out of.
Abu Mahmoud and his relationship to his tomatoes both represent identity in locals’ relationship with land. It is a relationship that is based on reverence and awe. Nature, especially land in this case, can easily strike us as humans with awe since we do not have clear ideas about what it is: Is there a soul to it? How does it respond to us? Can it really feel our bond of love and belonging and love us back? Therefore, locals like Abu Mahmoud express their awe and try to sort out this sense of the land’s vague, sublime transcendence through personification. Trying to put the reverence he feels for land and its gifts in simpler terms as a human-to-human relationship is how Abu Mahmoud try to make sense of his identity in relationship to land. For instance, he addresses land saying, “I know you,” and he speaks passionately about his “darling tomato.”
Examining Abu Mahmoud’s relationship to land helped me recognize an interesting gift system that feeds the circle of local communal identity: Abu Mahmoud, much like the rest of locals, gives a special type of gift to land: he knows how to preserve it and take care of it and as “a result of this knowing,” “earth crumbles rich layer” (p. 21), which is the land’s gift to the table of the family—to the young and hungry in the community.
As for olives, imagery based on them recurs wildly throughout Nye’s poems. Olives are a famous Mediterranean produce that helps Palestinians survive. It is also more than that; it is a symbol for identity—for a safe place of belonging that locals identify themselves with: for instance, Nye identifies locals as “olive gatherers” (81). The following lines felt to me as a beautiful description of how olives, as a part of the physical nature, can enter the psychological realm that sustains locals’ identity: "The olive’s dusky gray-green shadow / won’t leave a single one of its people alone / It follows them inside their own shadows / It loves them when they think there is no more loving" (33).
Having olives as a part of their identity, locals reaffirm their human affinity with their land as they are facing the Israeli threat of colonization: of seeing their land, which provides them with such a dear sense of belonging, lost to colonial urbanization. In my mind, olives evoke the myth of Noah: after the flood, the sign of finding land, a safe place to belong to and thus a sense of settlement and psychological peace, was an olive branch carried by a dove. Therefore, I think that Nye uses the symbolism of olives artistically with witty consciousness of its connotations to locals and to many of her readers.
Thinking of olives as a metaphor for locals’ identity in relationship to their land hails my mind with other examples of how land and nature structure our understanding of belonging. For instance, when we finally identify with someone as similar to us in their attitudes towards some concepts, we say that we found a common “ground” with that person. We think of our extended web of genetic belonging as a “family tree.” And when we feel like we belong somewhere, we “put down roots.”
Similarly, fig trees can be considered as Nye’s metaphor for a hybrid identity. First, we see the Middle-Eastern fig tree, the one that generates folktales as a generation-to-generation gift that maintains identity: The writer mentions the tradition that, in the evenings, the father “sat by our beds/ weaving folktales like vivid little scarves/ they always involved a fig tree/ once Joha was walking down the road and saw a fig tree/ Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep/ Or, later when they caught and arrested him, his pockets were full of figs” (p. 6). Once children grow up, they “gift” the same stories to other children in the community—which I have personally experienced as folktales inspired by nature are passed down from my grandfather, to my father, to me, and then to my nieces and nephews! The Middle-Eastern fig tree in this case inspires the oral tradition that ties the Middle-Eastern, Palestinian community in its different generations together.
One the other hand, I was amused to see the fig tree appear again in Nye’s poems as representative of the American side of her identity. We see Nye’s father later lovingly take care of a fig tree in Dallas, Texas, while humming a song—which is another form of folklore and thus another form of gift that this American fig tree has inspired him with (p. 6-7).
After going over the locals' identity as interwoven with land and its food gifts and the similar fig tree metaphor that Nye uses for the hybrid Arab American identity, we can take a look at the character of the grandmothers to understand the relationship between certain local characters and hybrid identity. I have long seen grandmothers deemed as the heart of the local. Their depiction in Nye’s poems makes them akin to the archetypical Mother Figure, which is characterized by both affectionate caring despite pain, so they end up having to allow the child to go through change no matter how hard it is for them. Similarly, in Nye’s poems, grandmothers—representing the traditional and the local—feel pain to see the hybrid identity of their Arab American grandchildren—the fact that they for example “don’t pray.” Yet, they end up having to let them be shaped by their unique cultural experience as all they can do as elders is just pray for them (p, 5).
Drawing on the rhetorics of place and belonging through language, circles, and symbols of food and community members, Nye accentuates the humanity that the reader share with Eastern nations. With a beautifully flowing language that my heart dances to, Nye elucidates the Eastern rhetorics of belonging: this complex net of Middle-Eastern identity—whether local (Palestinian), hybrid (Arab American), or universal (human)— reflected in people like Abu Mahmoud, the elders of the local community, the airport lady; and the gift systems within this community (such as folktales and food).
Indeed, the first few pages of 19 Varieties of Gazelle, by Naomi Shihab, welcomingly received a few warm tears that welled up in my eyes while quizzing their lyrical beauty: rarely have I read anything like these poems--these poems are “me” on paper, and my “Where I am From” poem could possibly fit seamlessly if tucked into the pages of this book:
I'm from Aladdin's magical lamp.
I'm from the golden sand,
The courageous veins,
Spreading in the dunes of land.
But I'm also from the loud fears,
The wars and tears,
The crumbles of bread,
The rubble you tread,
And every lost shred,
Of a child's dream.
But I'm also from the euphony,
The fusion, the harmony,
The chant of a mosque marrying
The bells of a church.
I'm from the threads of my scarves,
Or maybe,
the assumptions one blindly carves?
But I'm also the smoldering allure of Arabian incense,
The welcoming aroma of Arabian coffee,
And the fluttering mane of a free-souled Arabian horse.
References
Gallagher, Victoria, and Zagacki, Kenneth. "Visibility and Rhetoric: The Power of Visual Images in Norman Rockwell's Depictions of Civil Rights." Quarterly Journal of Speech: 175. Web. 1 Dec. 2015.
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. 25th Anniversary Ed. 2nd Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage, 2007. 10-12. Print.
Hecht,M.L., Jackson,R.L.,II, &Ribeau, S.A.(2003).African American communication(2nded.).Mahwah,NJ: Erlbaum.
Nye, Naomi Shihab. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East. New York: Greenwillow, 2002. Print.
Witteborn, Saskia (2004) Of Being an Arab Woman Before and After September 11: The Enactment of Communal Identities in Talk, Howard Journal of Communications, 15:2, 83-98, DOI: 10.1080/10646170490448312
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