Blood

American Palestinian poet Naomi Shihab Nye published her third collection of poetry, Yellow Glove, in 1986. The poem “Blood,” which appears in this volume, is a deeply personal reflection on the poet’s Palestinian father and her own Arab heritage. It explores issues of identity, culture, and resistance to oppression.

Shihab Nye wrote the poem a year before the First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israel, which lasted from 1987 to 1991. The First Intifada, which began in response to Israeli land expropriation and the construction of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was characterized by civil disobedience, strikes and riots. Around 2,000 people died during the uprising, mainly Palestinians.

The poem indicates there was unrest in Palestine even before the First Intifada—a result of the long history of territorial dispute in the region.

“Blood” is set in the poet’s home country, America, but explores how an American Arab should respond to the crisis in Palestine. Palestine may be far away, but the poet is connected by “blood” and cannot remain indifferent to the fate of that fragmented country. Her biracial heritage leads her to explore what it means to be tied to two countries with different political realities.

Shihab Nye’s work is rooted in her own life, domestic details, and everyday occurrences. She writes about her family life and the people she meets on her travels—she often accompanies her husband, documentary photographer Michael Nye, to areas around the world that have been affected by war.

Her work also focuses on the lived experiences of people in different parts of the world, from Mexicans in Texas—the poet’s home state—to Middle Easterners caught up in conflict.

“Since her earliest published work, Shihab Nye has composed elegies and homages for individuals around the world and meditative lyrics of home life,” Robert Bonazzi has written in the introduction to Tender Spot: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, published by Bloodaxe World Poets in 2008.

Poet Biography

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1952. Her mother, an American of Swiss-German descent, is married to a Palestinian refugee, whose family left their home in Jerusalem in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. Her mother was a Montessori school teacher, and her father worked as a writer, journalist, and editor.

Shihab Nye has lived between the US and Palestine—her parents moved to the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank in 1966 when her paternal grandmother fell ill. She attended high school in Ramallah, but her family moved to San Antonio, Texas in 1967, shortly before the third Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Six-Day War.

Shihab Nye wrote her first poem when she was six years old and is primarily known as a poet, though she also writes songs, young adult fiction, illustrated books and novels. Like her father, she has worked as an editor. She graduated from Robert E. Lee High School, where she edited the school’s literary magazine, and went on to receive a Bachelor of Arts in English and world religions from Trinity University in 1974.

She published two chapbooks in the 1970s, Tattooed Feet (1977) and Eye-to-Eye (1978), and her first full-length poetry volume, Different Ways to Pray, was published in 1980. Different Ways to Pray reflects on how people in different parts of the world express their religious faith. It includes a poem for the poet’s Palestinian grandmother as well as poems about journeying through South America. It sets the tone for future volumes with its fascination for storytelling, the country of childhood, travel, other cultures, and the grief of war.

Shihab Nye published On the Edge of the Sky in 1981 and Hugging the Jukebox in 1982. The latter won the Voertman Poetry Prize—the first of many prizes she would go on to win. This was followed by Yellow Glove in 1986, which dwells on war and dispossession. Shihab Nye has written and contributed to more than 30 volumes of poetry and was named the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate for 2019-21.

Poem Text

Shihab Nye, Naomi. “Blood.” 1995. The Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem begins in the world of the speaker’s childhood, where she first learns what it means to be “a true Arab” (Line 1). In the first stanza, her father astonishes a person he is visiting by being able to catch a fly in his hands; in the second stanza, the reader learns that Arabs use watermelon as a remedy for a skin complaint.

The third stanza indicates the speaker had no notion of what an Arab was until her father shared his many stories and homilies with her. By learning more about her identity—the origin and meaning of her name—she grasps her cultural heritage. She makes a comment her father says proves she too is “a true Arab.”

In the fourth stanza, the poem shifts to the present, where sobering news headlines have replaced folk tales. The speaker reads that a Palestinian child has been killed—she understands Palestinians are Arabs, and her Palestinian identity forms part of a “tragedy with a terrible root” (Line 18).

In the fifth and final stanza, the speaker contacts her father, the “true Arab,” to help her understand the tragic events she is reading about. Ordinarily wise and protective, her father can’t provide her with the comfort she needs.

The poem concludes with the speaker driving to the countryside, trying to make sense of the world in which she lives. She has more questions than answers about the situation, especially about what a “true Arab” should do in the face of war against her own people—her own “blood”.

“What does a true Arab do now?” she asks in the last line of the poem (Line 29), leaving the reader with a conundrum over which to mull.