19 pages • 38 minutes read
Naomi Shihab NyeThe Words Under the Words
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
“The Words Under the Words” paints a portrait of the poet’s grandmother, who lived her entire life in the Old City north of Jerusalem and was a devout Muslim. The poem makes reference to the grandmother’s religious beliefs as well as the way changing political and social structures changed around her during her lifetime.
Nye’s grandmother was born in 1888 in the country that was, at the time, known as Palestine, a predominantly Arab, Muslim country. In 1947 Great Britain renounced the land and the United Nations split the country into two, with 56 percent belonging to the by-then 650,000 Jewish people and the city of Jerusalem internationally controlled by the UN. Due to this split many Palestinians lost homes and land they had lived on for generations. Nye’s father’s family lost their home and much of their money. Nye’s father’s family lived through the war that broke out in 1947 and lasted until an armistice agreement in 1949.
Ultimately Nye’s father left the region for the United States, but his mother and other family members stayed behind. As his mother became older and needed more help, the family moved back to the region to tend to Nye’s grandmother. This year of living north of Jerusalem had a profound impact on the young poet, who wrote about this experience in two other books for young people, Habibi and Sitti’s Secrets. Life was still dangerous in this region. When Nye was 15, only a year after arriving, she and her family again decided to leave to escape the escalating tensions that broke out in the 1967 Six Day War. From there they settled in San Antonio, but the poet continued to write about her Palestinian family and their experiences, marking her as a poet who could speak personally to the effect the conflict had on regular people in both their political and private lives.
The effect of the conflict can be seen in "The Words Under the Words" in Nye's observations of her grandmother as she continues the everyday business of her life—baking bread, pressing olives for oil, checking for letters from her distant son—while still surrounded by struggle and tragedy. Though grandmothers are often seen as wise and experienced, this grandmother has acclimated not just to the ebb and flow of life in general but also to the shocks and dangers of war. In addition to the standard childhood scrapes and bruises, she can handle the "shotgun wound and the crippled baby" (Line 18) thanks to living through the most dangerous times in the history of her country. While her son and granddaughter live in relative safety far away, the grandmother remains bolstered by her faith despite her life including such strife and danger.
Literary Context
Nye calls herself a “traveling poet.” She says her first impulse to write a poem hit her when she went to the city of Chicago at the age of six and saw all the astonishing and wonderful things in that city that she had never seen before. She was so excited and moved that she had to write a thank you note to the city before she could fall asleep. Since then, she has been writing about things she sees when she travels, and she has made traveling and teaching a central part of her life and work. She says she uses her work to build bridges between cultures and people.
Many of her poems focus on quotidian objects and experiences, or stories she hears from other people. As a part Arab American she is especially interested in telling stories and writing poems about people of the Middle East. She is intimately familiar with the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis and with the prejudices that extend beyond the region itself. In one interview Nye says a woman told her, “I had never thought of people in the Middle East as being children,” but Nye’s poems made her see that region of the world differently.
After 9-11, when extremists from Afghanistan hijacked American planes and crashed them into the Twin-Towers in New York, there has been an uptick in fear of and violence against Arab Americans. Some have proliferated stereotypes that all Muslims are terrorists. This kind of prejudice is not new in America, but Naomi Shihab Nye has used her position as a traveling and teaching poet to counter those stereotypes. After the terrorist attacks, Nye released a book called 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books 2002).
Both before and after 9-11, Nye’s work has included poems and books that explore her family’s history in the Middle East. She has written reverently about her grandmother, who lived to be 106 and who played an important role in the poet’s life even though they lived worlds apart. In 1994 Nye published a picture book, Sitti’s Secrets (Aladdin Picture Books), about the experiences of a young girl forming a bond with her grandmother even though the two do not speak the same language. In 1997 Nye published a Young Adult Novel, Habibi (Simon & Schuster), about a 13-year-old girl moving to Jerusalem to live with her grandmother. It is semi-autobiographical, drawing on her own similar experience as a young adult.
“The Words Under the Words” is a strong representation of Nye’s work. It gives insight into the love she has for her family, and it helps to dispel some of the prejudice around Arabs and Palestinians. It gives readers an insight into what a more common Arab household looks like, including both the kindness and sorrow Nye’s grandmother displays as she lives her day-to-day life. It also depicts a Muslim woman as a devout practitioner, who takes great comfort from her faith as it helps her to grapple with life’s difficulties. This helps dispel the prejudice that all Muslims are violent extremist or that Islam is a religion of violence.
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By Naomi Shihab Nye
