Transfer

Reflections on Transfer by Naomi Shihab Nye

I. Summary

This recent collection of poems is intended to be a sort of dialogue between Aziz Shihab, Nye’s dead father, and Naomi, so she herself says. The book is split into five sections, some of which are spoken by Nye herself, or her poetic voice, and others by the voice of her father, although all the poems are written by her.

The first section is a sort of exposition, a scene setting in which Nye’s voice establishes what I can only describe as a tonal context for the poems to come. The first poem, “History,” begins and ends with a scope as wide as the universe and our planet. The final poem of the section, “Storyteller,” evokes the distance and catharsis of storytelling, establishing the coming poems as a both a telling in itself and a telling about a teller.

The second section is entitled “Just Call Me Aziz” and is a compilation of 11 poems Nye wrote in the voice of her father. The poems, in a less than narrative way, tell of Aziz’s experience of leaving Palestine and becoming a refugee in the American Midwest. To offer a sample of this section, “My Life Before America Had No Toilet Tissue” presents the struggle for identity in the process of transplantation, and “We Did Not Have Drinking Water in the Middle of the Ocean” approaches the American dream from a refuge’s perspective.

Nye’s voice returns in Section III and carries through the end, through Sections IV and V. These poems are Nye’s part of the dialog that her father’s voice initiates in the previous section. As the sections progress, the poems seem to move farther and farther away from the international controversy that surrounded her father’s life, though it is never lost. As poems pass, the reader realizes that “Transfer” is about the loss of the father, and whatever political or cultural message infiltrates the collection is in connection with her father’s life and identity as a refugee.

II. Response

When I began reading Transfer, I expected the work to be much more political and much more ethnic. This was in part due to my unfamiliarity with Nye. I did not expect to find an intimate, reflective journey of memory, an almost whispered dialog between the author and the memory of her dead father. Because of this, the segments and poems I latched onto the most, the ones I felt that I understood the most, were those that addressed a postcolonial existence. I targeted these poems with a postcolonial reading, imposed that upon them. What I found were poems that didn’t care about my reading, poems that had nothing to do with a worldview beyond what the speaker experienced. Because I am reading this collection as part of a study of world literature, I felt obligated to search out as much political and cultural significance as I could, but upon a second reading, I think I would get more from focusing on how the speaker’s dialog with her father evolves across sections. Once I became more familiar with that aspect of the story, I suspect more of the history would be more meaningful  

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences

Transfer is the only collection of poems that I have read as part of this study, and consequently, it would seem that I have nothing with which to compare this work. One way to solve this problem would be to do research on other Palestinian-American and Iraqi-American poets and study how their works treat the same subjects and themes as Nye’s work. More generally, I could place Nye’s work in the context of any large-scale religious or political strife that has been expressed in literature. This would seem less appropriate, as Transfer offers a perspective on the Israel/Palestine conflict and American occupation in Iraq that would be opportune for teaching “literature of current events.” In other words, Transfer would be a great resource for teaching how current events become literature, and for teaching this collection of poems in contrast with the variety of other media – articles, newscasts, blogs – that address the same issues.

Transfer belongs in American literature. Transfer is the work of a woman whose father was a Palestinian refugee, whose mother was an American, who was born in St. Louis, and whose name is every bit from the Middle East. She writes entirely in English, and yet her subject matter (in Transfer) spans the cultures of America, Palestine, and Germany. Nye does not simply transfer her voice across cultures, she writes poems about what it means to transfer cultures, asking the questions “What is lost?” “What is gained?” “By whom? for whom?”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short stories were more intimate than Chinua Achebe’s novel, and Nye’s poems become infinitely more intimate than Garcia Marquez’s stories. If The Odyssey had been told in the form of page-length poems written by Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, Homer may have written a collection similar to Nye’s.  

IV. Teaching and Learning

What I would emphasize to my students about Transfer is the focus on Aziz, Nye’s father. From both a literary criticism standpoint and a creative-writing standpoint (although I see them as one in the same), I want students to understand that these poems, as a whole, are about a daughter and her father, just as Things Fall Apart is about a man, and The Odyssey is about a father and a son (and maybe a wife/mother), and The Epic of Gilgamesh is about two men that are closer than brothers. There are stories in Genesis that seem to be more about man and wife, or father and son, than they are about God. Even in The Qur’an, the most distant of the works I’ve read, contains passages recounting intimate stories between man and his God.

I would want to teach these poems after students are familiar with the postcolonial lens, perhaps after a Things Fall Apart unit. After students have had plenty of practice with postcolonial analysis, I would give them Transfer and challenge them to use the tools they learned how to use. I predict students would latch onto a small number of poems that do provide a fertile arena for those tools, poems like “Fifty Years Since I Prayed or Thought in Arabic” and  “Member of the Tribe” early on in the book. But as students progressed, they would find fewer and fewer poems that allow a strict postcolonial reading, and eventually, poems that refute such a reading. It might seem like I am trying to impose my own preconceptions about the book onto my students, but I do think the book is structured in a way that is more “postcolonial” toward the beginning, and more intimate in the end. One criticism of teaching critical lenses is that it narrows students’ reading, and teaching Transfer as a follow up to the postcolonial lens could show students how to not let themselves be restricted to a certain reading, or even worse, restricted to their own preconceptions of a work.