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?
