2.1 Nye and Family Traditions Naomi Shihab Nye’s earlier poetry, Tattooed Feet (1977) Eye-to-Eye (1978), and followed by a collection, Different Ways to Pray (1980), explores the similarities and differences between Southwestern American cultures from the United States to Mexico. These early publications make Gregory Orfalea think that Nye deals with topics other than her Arab origin; topics like the Hispanic southwest and Latin America where she lives and travels,
of 155 poems in her three published collections, only 14 have a recognizably Arab or Palestinian content—less than 9 percent. More deal with the Hispanic Southwest where she lives, and Latin America, where she has traveled extensively, than the ancestral homeland of her father.16
However, with the publication of I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You
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She succeeds to bring Arab culture and heritage into the sphere of the United States in a deeply humanistic style. From her earliest publications, Nye suggests that Arab-American identity is not something to be preserved, denied, escaped, or romanticized: it is just another way of being human. By using clear language that is readily accessible to the mainstream readership of the United States, she creates spaces in which Arab and Arab-American experiences can be articulated, voiced, and expressed not through nostalgic retrieval, but by honoring the diversity of Arab people experiences. Nye believes in the “gravities of ancestry” and the sense of “raptures homecoming.” She observes that bicultural writers are not only interested in heritage but also in building a bridge between worlds, which is very much like “a pulse.”20 What matters to Nye, in Suhair Majaj’s point of view, is heritage and family traditions because they tell not only who the Arab-Americans are but also what they do to discover their
Despite the prejudice, hate and violence that seem to be so deeply entrenched in America's multiracial culture and history of imperialism, Takaki does offer us hope. Just as literature has the power to construct racial systems, so it also has the power to refute and transcend them. The pen is in our hands. Works Consulted -. Takaki, Ronald.
The female, adolescent speaker helps the audience realize the prejudice that is present in a “melting-pot” neighborhood in Queens during the year 1983. With the setting placed in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, the poem allows the audience to examine the experience of a young immigrant girl, and the inequality that is present during this time. Julia Alvarez in “Queens, 1963” employs poetic tools such as diction, figurative language, and irony to teach the reader that even though America is a place founded upon people who were strangers to the land, it is now home to immigrants to claim intolerance for other foreigners, despite the roots of America’s founding.
Naomi Nye was born to a German-American mother and a Palestinian-American father. However, she normally writes from her Palestinian-Arab perspective. In several of her poems within The Heath Anthology—“Ducks,” “My Father and the Figtree,” and “Where the Soft Air Lives”—Naomi Nye reminisces about her Muslim heritage and childhood as it correlates to her present identity. In addition, she incorporates the effect of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on herself and on Arab culture in her work. Ultimately, Naomi Nye’s poetic work should remain in The Heath Anthology as her style demonstrates how historical events and a deep-rooted heritage can enrich a sense of identity and culture.
Torres, Hector Avalos. 2007. Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers. U.S.: University of New Mexico press, 315-324.
Critics have already begun a heated debate over the success of the book that has addressed both its strengths and weaknesses. The debate may rage for a few years but it will eventually fizzle out as the success of the novel sustains. The characters, plot, emotional appeal, and easily relatable situations are too strong for this book to crumble. The internal characteristics have provided a strong base to withstand the petty attacks on underdeveloped metaphors and transparent descriptions. The novel does not need confrontations with the Middle East to remain a staple in modern reading, it can hold its own based on its life lessons that anyone can use.
Joyce, James. “Araby”. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Eds. R.V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. Shorter Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. 427 - 431.
Joyce, James. “Araby.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, Shorter Eighth Edition. Eds. Jerome Beaty, Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, and Kelly J. Mays. New York: W.W.Norton.
September 11, 2001 will be replayed and remembered in the minds of this American generation as one of the greatest tragedies on domestic soil. In one day, the world was dramatically altered; but in the days that followed, no group of Americans was affected more intensely nor uniquely than Arab-Americans. Once in a Promised Land, the 2007 novel by Laila Halaby, depicts the real world aftermath which assaulted one fictional Arab couple. Halaby's work accurately portrays the circumstances Arab-Americans found themselves in after the 9/11 attacks, highlighting several themes relating to patriotism, fear, and shame through her accessible characters and narrative stylings.
Chick critiqued Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing by advising that it is a collection of fourteen essays and poems. It talks about Cofer’s adolescence and how she did not achieve the expectations for her to become a traditional Puerto Rican woman (AEW 381). Initially, Mamá is portrayed as an authority figure because she keeps her family in control just by the use of storytelling. With Chick’s point of view, I cannot disagree since it is accurate. Cofer, also disagrees with becoming the traditional Puerto Rican woman from receiving an education and going on her own path to becoming a writer. It is interesting how some of the characters are perceived, although they are considered as fiction since their identities are hidden. Cofer achieves her storytelling by being half fiction and auto-biography since it is written by herself. She reevaluates how women should be known as, but specifically the means of the life of a Puerto Rican
The significance of representing such a history is that it may open William Beckford’s narrative of the Arab Muslim woman to a new analysis and judgment. It may, as well, help in “allowing us to see them [Arab Muslim women] not as "culminations" of a natural truth, but "merely the current episodes in a series of subjugations" (Foucault 1977, 148)” (mohja), and to differentiate between them as represented in Western texts whose feet never touch earth, and the real –flesh and blood–ones whose “feet touch earth in Hamah or Rawalpindi or Rabat.”( MOHJA)
James Joyce's use of religious imagery and religious symbols in "Araby" is compelling. That the story is concerned somehow with religion is obvious, but the particulars are vague, and its message becomes all the more interesting when Joyce begins to mingle romantic attraction with divine love. "Araby" is a story about both wordly love and religious devotion, and its weird mix of symbols and images details the relationship--sometimes peaceful, sometimes tumultuos--between the two. In this essay, I will examine a few key moments in the story and argue that Joyce's narrator is ultimately unable to resolve the differences between them.
Najarro.Adela. "Angles in the Kitchen:Latino Poets and the Search for Identity." Adela Najarro's Website. 24 Oct. 2002. 16. Sept. 2003
The omnipresence of the American and European culture in the countries of the Middle East is a universally recognized phenomenon. The culture, thoughts and status quo of the people have been and continually are being changed and challenged due the mass spread of American goods and ideas. The American national culture largely revolves around the wants, needs and goals of the individual. As the one of the greatest superpowers of the time, its influence on the global community towards the focus on the individual is nothing short of inevitable. The movies, clothing and new age mentality of America are sending all people regardless of age, upbringing and locale, into a grand scale social transition. The Arabs and Muslims beliefs, traditions and entire state of being are no longer as they were 20 or 30 years ago. The women of the novels, Nadia, Fatima, Umm Saad, Maha, Asya, and Su’ad, each living in various Arab countries with unique situations of their own, all are united on the common ground of American introduced idea and concepts of individualism through such venues as feminism, capitalism, sexism and consumerism which adversely affect their society.
Pat Mora was born on January 19, 1942 in El Paso, Texas. She is a Mexican-American poet, and writer of children’s books and non-fiction. Pat graduated with a degree from Texas Western College in the year of 1963. As a popular presenter, she was awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Buffalo State and North Carolina State University, and she is also an honorary member of the American Library Association. Pat Mora is the author of the very interesting and intriguing poem “La Migra.” La Migra displays the very contrasting views of two very different people. In this poem there are two speakers in a seeming battle against each other. They are both seemingly in a struggle for power, a show of dominance, and this poem displays a serious issue that
In the book, she condemns the atrocities committed during the conquest of New Spain, and in her essay, especially within “Chronicles of the Veil”, she speaks out against stereotyping and generalizations associated with Muslims and Muslim women in particular, in both political talks and literature (Lalami). Her discourse can be seen as the continuation of Edward Said’s book Orientalism. In this book, he argued that colonization was preceded by the set of stereotypical preconceptions, which all claimed that Muslims were to be regarded as inferior, irrational and retrograde. Meanwhile their women, who are suffering from what can be described as the Stockholm syndrome, are not even free enough to realize that they are oppressed at the hands of their tyrannical husbands, brothers and fathers, can only be liberated by their Western “saviors”