Why can’t I forget the earnest eyes of the man who said to me in Jordan, “Until you speak Arabic, you will not understand pain”?

Question

3 years ago

11

Why can’t I forget the earnest eyes of the man who said to me in Jordan, “Until you speak Arabic, you will not understand pain”?

Ridiculous, I thought. He went on, something to do with an Arab carrying sorrow in the back of the skull that only language cracks. A few words couldn’t do it. A general passive understanding wasn’t enough. At a neighborhood fair in Texas, somewhere between the German Oom-pah Sausage Stand and the Mexican Gorditas booth, I overheard a young man say to his friend, “I wish I had a heritage. Sometimes I feel — so lonely for one.” And the tall American trees were dangling their thick branches right down over his head. —“Speaking Arabic,” Naomi Shihab Nye What is Nye’s purpose in her essay?

English