18 pages • 36 minutes read
Naomi Shihab NyeThe Art of Disappearing
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Poetry of the Quotidian
Naomi Shihab Nye has been writing and publishing poetry since the 1980s with her first book, Different Ways to Pray: Poems (Breitenbush Publications, 1980). Her work often focuses on the “quotidian”—celebrating and bringing attention to everyday activities and objects. “The Art of Disappearing” is a prime example of a message that appears over and over in her poetry, especially in poems like “Famous,” in which she writes that she wants to be famous to “sticky children” (Line 17) rather than being famous to a large crowd. Much of her work focuses on appreciating small moments, having connections with people on a deeper level, and eschewing the limelight in favor of a more anonymous life of everyday encounters.
In interviews, Shihab Nye also underscores how her poems are almost all inspired by everyday events, stories she hears from other people, or snatches of conversations around her. In her poem “Valentine for Earnest Mann,” for instance, she writes that “poems hide” (Line 9). She then gives an example of a man who gave his wife two skunks for Valentine’s Day presents because he thought they had beautiful eyes. She concludes that poems were “hiding” in the eyes of the skunks, but because the man saw their beauty they came out for him. The poem therefore describes what motivates much of Shihab Nye’s poems. The poem itself, as she explains, is also a true story generated from a seemingly quotidian encounter. While teaching poetry at a school, a young student asked her to write a poem and mail it to him. It was Valentine’s Day, so she wrote “Valentine for Earnest Mann” for him.
Historical Context
Shihab Nye writes extensively about her father and the pain he felt at being an exile from his native country. The history of the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is one that has resonated through Shihab Nye’s lifetime, and the two major wars for the Israel territory framed her childhood. The 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli war occurred just four years before her father fled the country as a refugee, and the 1967 Six-Day War that forced her and her family to leave once again when she was 15 years old.
The State of Israel, and the Zionist movement that called for a Jewish homeland, were outcomes of the Nazi Holocaust and other antisemitic persecutions across Europe and parts of Asia. The territory along the west side of the Mediterranean was considered by most Jewish people as their ancestral home, dating back thousands of years, but it was occupied by Arab-Palestinians. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of Jews resettled into the area of what was then British-controlled Palestine as their new home. The Palestinians considered this a European colonial movement to force them out of their own land for good and fought with them bitterly. In 1947, Great Britain renounced the land and the United Nations split the country into two countries, with 56% belonging to the by-then 650,000 Jewish people and the city of Jerusalem internationally controlled by the UN.
The Israelis were content with this compromise, but the Palestinians were not, and tensions continued to build. Despite regular attacks by Palestinian forces, Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, establishing an official Jewish state. This was immediately followed by an invasion of Arab armies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt who all objected to the presence of the State of Israel on what they considered Arab soil. Fighting continued until a 1949 armistice agreement.
The war drove more than 700,000 Palestinians to become refugees across the Arab world, which itself was a cause of anger against Israel. After nearly two decades of resentment, accusations, and skirmishes, a border dispute escalated until Egypt moved troops into the Sinai Peninsula on Israel’s southern border. Israel launched a pre-emptive attack on those troops, starting the Six-Day War, a brief but bloody conflict. Before it was over, Israel had seized control over Sinai (which they later returned), Jerusalem, The Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. The last two have been the basis of the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian conflict ever since.
Ideological Context: The Personal as Political in Shihab Nye’s Poetry
Shihab Nye’s poetry often combines the personal with the political. Since her father is a Palestinian refugee, she is able to write in a familiar way about the conflicts in the Middle East, helping readers understand the impact on regular citizens. Her father and his family were exiles from their home in Palestine, yet her father advocated for peace and understanding between Palestinians and Israelis.
On 9-11, when the Twin Towers fell, Shihab Nye condemned the violence and continued to speak out about peace. Her goal as both poet and activist was to write poems that counteracted prejudice against Arabs and people of the Middle East.
Even when Shihab Nye is writing about personal events, they carry a political weight to them. What distinguishes Shihab Nye’s work from other political poets is her degree of tenderness and her focus on how tragedy shapes personal landscapes. In Shihab Nye’s poems, war often interrupts the celebration of everyday objects and events. As Shihab Nye says in an interview with Bill Moyers, “Poets are against war because war wipes out so many details, and poets love details” (Now with Bill Moyers). Much of Shihab Nye’s work pays reverent attention to little details of daily living, but because she writes about different cultures the poems also teach readers about quotidian life in other places. Her work humanizes people who might seem “foreign” to Americans, and makes readers see the similarities between cultures. In some poems that seem to be about family events or mundane encounters, Shihab Nye makes references to past wars, political conflict, or historical events because these shape her poetic landscape in a way that is unique to her experience.
Literary Context
“The Art of Disappearing” is something of a paradox. When the poem’s speaker says, “It’s not that you don’t love them anymore” (Line 12), the speaker is sincere. Shihab Nye told a group of high-school students at a reading that she was writing that poem to herself because she felt she needed some time away from others at the time. She clarified that at other times she might actually go to the parties, but that she was wanting more space. However, at one reading a woman from the audience was incredulous and asked the poet, after the reading, “you didn’t really mean that, did you?” Shihab Nye said, “Of course I did, at the time.” Needing privacy has nothing to do with not loving others. Separating from friends and loved ones is not a sign of disrespect or misanthropy. It may seem self-contradictory that in order to communicate deeply with others, a creator may need to isolate, but it isn’t. She advocates for “alone time” so people can focus on what matters to them. Presumably, what she needed to focus on at that time was the material of her poems, the details that are important and small.
By showing her appreciation for small things, the poet seeks to make readers aware of the value of everyday objects. Understanding the cultural context of “The Art of Disappearing” gives greater significance to the call for attention. It is a call for preservation. For example, in the lines, “remember something / too important to forget” (Lines 13-14), there’s an act of recreating something that may otherwise have been destroyed, either by war or the passage of time. It is a way of caring about the world in a way that requires mindfulness and concentration.
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By Naomi Shihab Nye
