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?
I believe the answer is a stage whisper. A stage whisper is defined as “a loud whisper uttered by an actor on stage, intended to be heard by the audience but supposedly unheard by other characters in the play.”
The Nun's
Priest's Tale is one of Chaucer's most amazing and nice tales, and on several
levels it functions. The tale is an outstanding example of the literary style
known as a bestiary (or a beast fable) in which animals behave like human
beings.
