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Never in a Hurry

Name: Never in a Hurry
Author: Naomi Shihab Nye

Essays on People and Places

Naomi Shihab Nye

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260 pages
English
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eBook - ePub

Never in a Hurry

Essays on People and Places

Naomi Shihab Nye

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About This Book

From the acclaimed poet and National Book Award finalist, "a sparkling book of travel and childhood: born on the bridge between two cultures" (Paulette Jiles, New York Times –bestselling author). In Never in a Hurry the poet Naomi Shihab Nye resist the American inclination to "leave toward places when we barely had time enough to get there." Instead she travels the world at an observant pace, talking to strangers and introducing readers to an endearing assemblage of eccentric neighbors, Filipina faith healers, dry-cleaning proprietors, and other quirky characters. A Palestinian-American who lives in a Mexican-American neighborhood, Nye speaks for the mix of people and places that can be called the "American Experience." From St. Louis, the symbolic "Gateway to the West, " she embarks on a westward migration to examine America, past and present, and to glimpse into the lives of its latest outsiders—illegal immigrants from Mexico and troubled inner-city children. In other essays Nye ventures beyond North America's bounds, telling of a year in her childhood spent in Palestine and of an adulthood filled with cross-cultural quests. Whether recounting the purchase of a car on the island of Oahu or a camel-back ride through India's Thar Desert, Nye writes in wry, refreshing tones about themes that transcend borders and about the journey that remains the greatest of all—the journey from outside to in as the world enters each one of us, as we learn to see. "The generous gift of a writer at the top of her form, a book jammed with vivid sights and pungent tastes and wonderful stories." —Marion Winik, author of Above Us Only Sky

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Information

Publisher

University of South Carolina Press

Year

2020

ISBN

9781643361253

Topic

Desarrollo personal

Subtopic

Viajes

WORLD GIFTS

One Village

It is fifteen years since I have seen my grandmother. I feel some guilt about this, but her face, when we meet in the village, betrays no slant of blame. She is glad to see me. She blesses me with whispered phrases, Mohammed this, Mohammed that, encircling my head with her silver ring. Later she will ask, “Why didn’t you ever write a letter?” and the guilt will return, unabsolved by fact: She can’t read. Who would have thought she’d want a letter? I had forgotten she is so small, barely reaching my shoulder as I hug her tightly, kissing both cheeks. I am stunned with luckiness; so much can happen in fifteen years.

The village smells familiar—a potent soup of smoke, sheep wool, water on stone. Again it is the nose retrieving memory as much as eyes or ears—I poke into courtyards, filled suddenly with lentil broth, orange blossom, olive oil soap. Whole scenes unfold like recent landscapes; a donkey who once entered the room where we were eating, a dusty boy weeping after a wayward kickball knocked him on the head. I was a teenager when last here, blind in the way of many teenagers: I wanted the world to be like me. Now there is nothing I would like less. I enter the world hoping for a journey out of self as much as in. I come back to this village remembering, but it is more like I have never been here before. This time I am awake.

“What do you do every day?” I ask my grandmother. She replies in Arabic, cod. Every day I sit. What else would you want me to do?

But I will find this is not quite true. Each morning she prays, rising at 4:30 to the first muezzin’s call. It seems strange that the sun also rises this early. The days stretch out like gauze—we are pulled up from sleep by too much brightness.

Each morning my grandmother walks across the road to the cow, singular, to carry home a teakettle of fresh warm milk. Take me with you, I say. And she will take me, laughing because I like this black and white cow enough to touch it on the head and thank it, Shookrun, haleeb. She speaks to cows, my grandmother will say later, pointing at me. This is a girl who speaks to cows.

Every day she lights the oven, fat stone mound heated by the dung of sheep and goats, taboon for bread cooked on the black rocks. She enters barefooted, her headdress drifting about her. “Could be dangerous,” says my father, “I don’t think she should light it anymore,” but it is one of the ways she remains a vital part of her corner of the village, one of the things she does better than anyone else.

Her face is deeply mapped, her back slightly bent. Three years ago she made a pilgrimage to Mecca, became a Hajji. For a year afterward, she wore only white. Today she alters this slightly, wearing a long white dress embroidered with green over black-and-white pajamas. It is cool here in the West Bank in late May; people think of the whole Middle East as a great hot desert, but here in this high, perched village the days feel light and breezy, the land a music of terraced hills.

Feelings crowd in on me; maybe this is what it means to be in your genetic home. That you will feel on fifty levels at once, the immediate as well as the level of blood, the level of uncles, of weeping in the pillow at night, weddings and graves, the babies who didn’t make it, level of the secret and unseen. Maybe this is heritage, that deep well that gives us more than we deserve. Each time I write or walk or think, I drop a bucket in. Staring at my grandmother, my Sitti, as she sits on the low bed, rocking back and forth in time with conversation, tapping her fingertips on her knees, I think, this is the nectar off which I will feed.

“Does he beat you?” she asks of my husband, back home in Texas. “No? Ah, good. Then he is a good man.” It is simple to define things here. If God wills it, it happens. A bird poops on my head in the courtyard. “That means you will soon have a boy.” Looking up, Sitti says, “It’s an impolite mother who didn’t put underpants on her baby.” Conversation stops. My uncle slaps his head and laughs. “She’s always saying things like that.”

It’s amazing what facts we have about each other. She knows I “write.” What does that mean to someone who never did? I know her husband had three simultaneous wives, but my Sitti was in some way “favored.” Her husband, my grandfather, died when I was five. We were living in St. Louis; my father lay in silence across his bed for a whole day. “Be kind to him,” my mother whispered. My grandmother had a daughter, Naomi, Naimeh in Arabic, then five or more babies who died, followed by two sons, of which my father was the last. Naimeh had two children, then died suddenly. My grandmother was having my father at the same time Naimeh birthed her second boy. My grandmother suckled her son and grandson together, one at each breast. I know these things, I grew up on them. But this trip I want to find out more: the large bird-like tattoo on her right hand, for example, from where?

“Many years ago, a gypsy passed through. She was hungry and offered to tattoo someone in exchange for food. She poked pins in me and the blood poured out like water from a spring. Later the skin came off five times and I was left with this. Beautiful, no?” She turns her hand over and over, staring at it. It is beautiful. It is a hand preparing to fly away. I want to hold on to it.

Across the valley, a new Jewish settlement sits, white building blocks shearing off the graceful green hill. At night the lights make a bright outline. No people are visible from here—just buildings, and lights. “What do you feel when you look at that?” I ask my grandmother. “Do you feel like those are your enemies?” In 1948 she lost her home in the Old City of Jerusalem to Israeli occupiers. She moved with her family back to this village. I’ve always heard that my father’s best friend was killed in his presence. My grandmother is a refugee who never went to a camp. My father was a refugee who moved to the United States and married an American. What does Sitti think about all this now, in a region the Arabs will only refer to as the West Bank via Israel? Does she feel furious or scared?

She waves at the ugly cats lurking in every corner of the courtyard. Most have terrible fur and bitten-off ears. She pitches a loquat pit at a cat with one eye, and it runs. “See those cats? One night last year an Israeli jeep drove into this village and let them all out. Everyone saw it. What could we do? I think about that. And I think about the good ghosts we used to have in the big room, who floated in the corners up by the ceiling and sang songs late at night after we were asleep. I used to wake up and hear them. Happy friendly ghosts, with warm honey voices, the ghosts of the ones under the ground who used to live here, you know? I tell you, they had parties every night. They were a soft yellow light that glowed. Then the Jews built that settlement across the valley and the ghosts were scared. They all went away. Now you wake up, you hear no singing. And I miss them.”

My uncle, a stately Arab in a white headdress, functions as mukhtar, or mayor, of the village. He is proud of his new yellow-tiled bathroom. It has a toilet, sink, bathtub, and shower, as well as the traditional hole in the floor—for my grandmother. He is planning a new kitchen under the stairs.

His wife, a good-humored woman with square, manly eyeglasses, bore twenty children; eleven survived. Her dresses are a rich swirl of Palestinian embroidery—blue birds and twining leaves, up one side and down the other. Her two daughters remaining at home, Janan and Hanan, are the ones who can sew. Of herself, she says, “I never learned how.”

Sitti lives with this family, our family, in one of the oldest homes in the village. My father estimates it at more than two hundred years. Stone walls and high arched ceilings grace the main room, where most of the visiting and eating take place. Sitti sleeps in her own smaller room off the courtyard. The rest of the family sleeps communally, parents on mattresses on the floor, guests on the beds. Everyone gets covered with weighty calico comforters stuffed with sheep’s wool. I swear I have come back to something essential here, the immediate life, the life without refrigerated food.

“How did this rice pudding get so cool?” I ask dumbly one morning, and Hanan leads me to the stone cupboard where food is kept. It is sleek and dark, like the inside of a cave. She places my hand against the face of stone and smiles. Goat cheese floats in olive oil in a huge glass jar. A honey-dew melon tastes almost icy.

One afternoon a breathless red-faced woman appears in the doorway with a stack of freshly-picked grape leaves. She trades them with my aunt for a sack of marimea leaves, good for stomach ailments, brewed in tea. I can see by their easy joking this is something they do often. The woman motions to me that I am to walk home with her, but I’m not sure why. Her Arabic is too jazzy for my slow ear.

Down alleyways, between houses where children spin tops on the flattest stones—as children our father taught us to pare the tops off acorns to make quick spinners—up ancient stairs, past a mosque with its prayer rugs and mats spread out, waiting. Where is this woman taking me?

I stand in the courtyard of her home. Pigeons are nesting in rusted olive oil tins nailed to the wall. Their soft songs curl on the air. The woman comes back with her hands full of square cakes of olive oil soap. She presses it upon me, saying, “Take this to America. You need this in America.” She says other things I can’t understand. Then she reaches into a nest and pulls out a small bird. She makes the motion of chopping off its head and I protest, “Oh, no! Please! I am not hungry.” She wants me to eat this teenaged pigeon today or tomorrow. I tell her I can’t eat it tomorrow either. She looks sad. It was a big gift she was offering. “I will take the soap to America,” I say. We kiss and stare at one another shyly. A line of children crouches on the next roof, watching us; they giggle behind their hands.

What is this need to give? It embarrasses me. I feel I have never learned how to be generous. In a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan last week, I was overwhelmed by offers of coffee and Pepsi showered on me as I passed. Would I ever do that in the United States? Invite a stranger in off the street, simply because she passed my house?

Here in the village, the gifts I have brought seem foolish when I unpack them. Pantyhose in rainbow colors, two long seersucker nightgowns for the older women, potholders, perfume. What else could I have brought that would better fit this occasion? A lawn of grass? A kitchen table, swoop of formica, so the girls might pare their potatoes sitting up at something, rather than crouched on the floor? Bicycles with sizzling thin wheels, so we might coast together down past the shepherd’s field, past the trees of unripe plums? But I unpack a tube of Ben-Gay for Sitti (someone told me she needed this), a plastic bottle of Ecotrin, and give her instructions, like a doctor. I want to make it very clear she should never take more than two pills at once. She nods gravely. She tucks these prizes into her bodice, the front panel of her dress left open at one side like a giant pocket.

“Is there anything else?” she asks. And I run back to my suitcase, unfold a gauzy white scarf bordered with yellow flowers—someone gave me this in Pakistan—I carry it toward her like a child carries a weed-flower tentatively home to mother.

Now she smiles broadly, rocks back on her heels. This strange slash of cloth is a pleaser. She and my aunt unfold one another’s presents, touching them and murmuring. This is the worst moment of all. I didn’t bring enough, I think. I gaze nervously toward my father, who is smiling shyly. He unpacked his own presents for everyone the day before I arrived. “It’s fine,” he whispers to me. “We’ll go buy them chocolates too. They like chocolates.”

In the corner of the room sits a large old wooden trunk painted green. It wears a padlock—this is where Sitti stores her gifts, opening the lock with a key from between her breasts. She places her small pile carefully on top of whatever else is in there, and pats it all down. Janan teases her, “Can we see your treasures?” Sitti protests, locking the trunk hurriedly. “Not now,” she says. “Not this minute.” I think of the burglar alarms in America, the homes of old silver, furniture, shiny appliances, and remember the way I complain when somebody steals my trash can at night. And it seems very right that a Palestinian would have a trunk in the corner of the room, and lock it, and look at it often, just to make sure it is there.

In this village, which used to be famous for grapes, most of the grapes have died. A scourge came ten years ago, they say, and withered the crop. It has never recovered. Now the vines produce only leaves, if people are lucky. A few fields show traces of the old days: arbors where grapes once flourished, small rock shelters built so the people who gathered the grapes could rest in the shade. I wan...