Ours is an increasingly global world, and the question of personal and cultural identity, and the struggle it poses for immigrants in particular, haunts the daily life of many. Identity is a central theme in Naomi Shihab Nye’s 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poetry of the Middle East. Among others, Nye uses water as a recurring symbolic element to describe this battle; while it classically represents cleansing and new beginnings, here water is a paradox unto itself, as a symbol of what cannot be washed away and the distance it can put between two people.
There are three poems—The Clean Rinse, A Definite Shore, and The Olive Jar—in which water plays a particularly significant role, directly and indirectly. In The Clean Rinse, Nye, using the laundering process as a metaphor, urges immigrants, individuals adrift in a foreign land, to retain their sense of self, or their original colors. Water is referred to only once, directly; however, being that it is the vehicle through which items of clothing bleed their color in the wash, it is clearly representative of the forces at play that threaten individuals adapting to their new homes. And yet, embodying the paradoxical nature of Nye’s use of water, the poem is not written in a hopeless voice. When, at the end, she writes, “after awhile, you will have/ nothing more they can take” (24), she conveys not a sense of emptiness but one of resolve. Water may change colors, make them slightly less reminiscent of their original hue, but because “Each time you go through this you lose a little less color” (24), life in a new place cannot wash away a person’s identity, if he or she resolves to maintain it.
The Olive Jar, meanwhile, demonstrates that water, in the form of an ocean, is that which puts so much distance between two people, two places, two parts of one’s self. And yet, at the same time, it can be the vehicle that brings them back together. In this poem, olives are the main character; they represent a piece of the Arab identity, as figs often do in the poems about Nye’s father. They are a food always present, always ready for the meals consumed by an Arab family; like certain parts of relationships, they are a constant. The author, in her own voice, also plays a protagonistic role, and it is she who claims, “O space of ocean waves, how long you tumble between us, how little you dissolve” (81). When she returns to Israel to visit her relatives, crossing the vast Atlantic to find that some things do not change, the olives are there, and so are her people.
As is indicated by its title, A Distant Shore also incorporates the symbolism of a vast ocean. The primary message of this particular poem is that so many displaced people are simply desiring “to land safely again” (102), safe from the “hungry Atlantic” (102) that “pushes and pulls/ its waves across the earth” (102). O the surface this is simply a reference to the common desire of the traveler—to have solid ground below his or her feet. However, finding a place in which to feel anchored in one’s identity is a challenge; immigrants feel torn by their allegiances to family in their new homes and the customs of their old homes, and the physical distance between old and new deepens this crevice.
And yet, I believe it can be argued that Nye is sending a strong message: as water ebbs and flows, as an angry river or a roiling ocean, so too does the resilience of the human spirit.
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