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.
Themes
Loss and Resilience
The grandmother of Nye’s poem experiences many instances of loss. Though the speaker of the poem does not state it directly, readers who know about Nye’s background will remember her grandmother lived through the shifting, violent disputes that gave Israel control over Palestine. She is a woman who has been displaced and who “lost” (Line 10) her son when he moved to America. The speaker also suggests the grandmother is losing her sight. The first line “My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes” (Line 1) suggests she is seeing the grapes through her hands because her eyesight is going or has already gone.
As the speaker delineates a picture of her grandmother, she lets the reader know she has lost her husband by saying “farewell to the husband’s coat / the ones she has loved and nourished” (Lines 22-23). She also notes that “nothing can surprise her” (Line 17), which suggests the grandmother has lived through losses too numerous to name. Still the grandmother remains resilient and an active member of her community. She tells others to bring her “the shotgun wound and the crippled baby” (Line 18). In the opening stanza the reader describes her grandmother helping to care for her when she fell sick with a fever. She continues to bake bread for her family even as strange cars circulate. She is not bitter but understanding about the fact that her son does not communicate with her as much as she would like. All of this shows the picture of a woman who remains resilient in the face of tragedy.
Faith
What sustains the grandmother is faith. This is made most apparent in the metaphor of the seeds that disappear into a “deep sky” (Line 24). Seeds are meant to sprout into new life. They are a rich symbol for hope, perseverance, and the continuation of life. If a seed flies away and the person watching it does not know where that seed will land, they can only predict the seed will “plant itself” (Line 25) based on their faith. They may never see the seed again, but they can imagine the seed will make its way into new soil and carry on its life in a new world, even if they never get to see it again. The “seeds” (Line 24) in this poem may be a direct reference to the speaker’s father, the son who is “lost to America” (Line 25). He is the offspring of the grandmother in the same way a seed is the offspring of a plant, and he has gone away to another country the grandmother cannot see.
Although this is the obvious implication of the meaning of the “seeds” (Line 24), by using a metaphor the poet suggests it can refer to other people and ideas as well. The grandmother has likely lost many people to war, displacement, and death. The next line after “They will plant themselves” (Line 25) is “We will all die” (Line 25). The juxtaposition of these two lines implies that the grandmother knows life is followed by death, and she has accepted and come to peace with the fact that even if those she loves do “plant themselves,” they will still die. Read another way, the “plant[ing]” (Line 25) may even refer to death itself, and the metaphor might imply those she loves have flown into the “deep sky” (Line 24), meaning heaven, and “plant[ed]” (Line 24) themselves in the afterlife. In the last stanza of the poem the speaker comments that her grandmother believes “Allah is everywhere, even in death” (Line 26). This is another example of faith: believing the spiritual world is not separate from the material world, and there is a continuity and connection between those who are alive and the ones they love, even after death. This belief is what helps sustain the grandmother even after she has experienced so much separation and loss.
Foolish Wisdom
The grandmother references “Joha and his foolish wisdoms” (Line 28) toward the end of the poem. “Joha” is a character from Arabic folktales who is naive but sometimes says things that are truly wise. He also offers a parallel to the grandmother of this poem, who shares some characteristics with Joha.
Throughout the poem the grandmother is characterized as being separate from modern life yet more sophisticated people around her. In the second stanza, she spends her days baking bread and does not understand the cars around her. She thinks they may bring her son but they “more often” bring “tourists / who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines” (Line 8-9). The grandmother seems to be living in a different age, one where you do not buy bread at the store but bake it at home. She is living in the Old Palestine, the one before the war. She does not understand the shrines the tourists have come to “weep” (Line 9) at because they do not belong to her old country, her religion, or her former way of life.
When a letter arrives, she “listens” (Line 15) to someone else read it. It is not clear from the poem whether this is because she has gone blind, she never learned to read, or because the letters might be written in a language she does not understand. Either way she is made out to be someone who is out of synch with the daily rituals of modern living. At the same time, in her separateness from the modern world she retains a kind of wisdom other people may not possess. Like Joha her seeming naivete is also part of what allows her to see a truth that others may not find. Spending her days baking bread, tending the orchard and the “new olive press,” she maintains a connection with her spiritual practice and listening to “the words under the words” (Line 31), i.e., the name of Allah and the teachings of Joha with his “foolish wisdom” (Line 28). The grandmother shows the speaker and the readers of the poem that being “foolish” (Line 28) by the standards of some may also be the cause of a different kind of wisdom and peace.
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By Naomi Shihab Nye
