Habibi

Bibliography

Nye, Naomi Shihab. 1997. HABIBI. New York: Simon Pulse. ISBN 0689825234

Summary

When Liyana’s father decides it is time for him to take his Arab-American family home to live in Palestine, Liyana’s heart is broken. Liyana, a fourteen year old Arab-American who has just had her first kiss. She has a comfortable life with her friends and her grandmother in St. Louis. Now she will be moving to a place were she can’t wear short shorts or kiss a boy in public. Throughout the story, Liyana begins to learn about the country and her father’s family. Liyana is reminded many times by her father of the war and the battle between the Arabs and Jews. When she meets Omer, a young Jewish male, the two become immediate friends. Although they are from different backgrounds, the two share a common bond. They both believe in peace. Liyana begins to settle into her new life.

Critical Analysis

An award winning author and poet, Naomi Shihab Nye has written a powerful novel of an Arab-American girl’s experience growing up as an immigrant in the Middle East.

Liyana, a fourteen year old girl is the main character in the story. She is very strong and says whatever she feels. When her father was arrested and put in jail, Liyana took a taxi to jail and demanded that the prison guards let her in to see her father. At her Armenian school, Liyana told her friend to say “no” to the directress who ordered her friend to remove a small clip from her hair. Liyana thought about everything. She wrote poems and enjoyed writing in her small blue notebooks. She wrote first lines for stories and included them as brief messages at the beginning of each chapter.

Liyana, an immigrant in a foreign country was very unsure about her family and their customs. When she first arrived in Palestine to meet her relatives, she was rather surprised to see how welcoming they were. Sitti, her grandmother, and all of her aunts and uncles greeted the family with hugs and kisses on the checks. Sitti “trilled and trilled and trilled. She shimmied her arms in the air like a Pentecostal preacher. The backs of her hands were tattooed with the dark blue shapes of flying birds.” Liyana did not understand Arab words, so her Poppy had to translate everything to Liyana, her brother Rafik, and their mother. Sitti wanted very much to get to know Liyana and to teach her Arab traditions, but Liyana was very withdrawn at first. She could not understand what her grandmother was saying and she couldn’t get use to the Arab ways. She longed for home and for someone to remember who she was.

Liyana opened up to Sitti and life in Palestine. She enjoyed walking the neighboring streets during her long lunch time and watching the tourist and store owners. Liyana made friends with Khaled and Nadine who lived in a refugee camp down the road. She even meet a Jewish boy named Omer that she feel in love with.

There were many cultural markers that made this book authentic. Religion and war both played an important part in this story. When Liyana’s family visited with Poppy’s family for the first time, “a muezzin gave the last call to prayer” and the family “unrolled small blue prayer rugs from a shelf, then knelt, stood, and knelt again, touching foreheads to the ground, saying their prayers in low voices.” While Poppy’s family was Muslim, Liyana’s family had never belonged to a church. Her mother said “they were a spiritual family, they just weren’t a traditionally religious one.” Omer, Liyana’s Jewish friend, introduced her to a few Jewish customs like shiva which is a time when the family mourns the dead by removing their shoes, not leaving the house, and covering the mirrors.

Other cultural markers include the Middle Eastern names like Rafik, Omer, Sitti, Khaled, Saba, and Amal. The family always ate big meals together around mattresses arrange in a circle on the floor. They ate olives, katayef, oranges, almonds, white cheese, falafel sandwiches, spinach pie, hummus, and flat bread. Nye used simple Arabic phrases throughout the story as Liyana learned to use Arabic. Some examples include: nos-nos/half-half, yimkin-maybe, Alham’ dul-Allah-Praise be to God, Wahad, nin-fadlack-one please, ana tayyib-I’m fine, shookran-thank you, and Habibi which means darling. The author does a great job describing what life is like in Palestine. She describes a tour the family took through Jerusalem. The family saw the Chapel of Calvary, the Garden of Gethsemane, Via Dolorosa, and the Wailing Wall were “Jew were tucking tiny notes and prayers into cracks between the stones.”

The conflict between the Arabs and the Jews is very important in the story. Liyana is told that when her Poppy was a young boy that he had a Jewish friend, but then the Arabs and Jews became at war with one another. Several events take place during the story that Liyana experiences. The first is when her grandmother’s house is destroyed by soldiers because the soldiers were searching for her distant son. Then there was a bombing in the Jewish market. The soldiers believed it was someone from the refugee camp and the soldiers shot Khalad by mistake. When Liyana’s father saw the attack, he tried to pull the soldiers away. Her father was taken to jail. Liyana had a hard time dealing with these issues, but when she became friends with Omer the two brought a shared sense of peace. This friendship was not accepted at first by her father, but when Omer traveled with Liyana’s family to West Bank to visit her grandmother Sitti, she welcomed him into her family.

Reviews

School Library Journal review: “An important first novel from a distinguished anthologist and poet. Nye introduces readers to unforgettable characters. The setting is both sensory and tangible: from the grandmother's village to a Bedouin camp. Above all, there is Jerusalem itself, where ancient tensions seep out of cracks and Liyana explores the streets practicing her Arabic vocabulary. Though the story begins at a leisurely pace, readers will be engaged by the characters, the romance, and the foreshadowed danger. Poetically imaged and leavened with humor, the story renders layered and complex history understandable through character and incident. Habibi succeeds in making the hope for peace compellingly personal and concrete...as long as individual citizens like Liyana's grandmother Sitti can say, "I never lost my peace inside."

Kirkus Reviews: “Liyana Abboud, 14, and her family make a tremendous adjustment when they move to Jerusalem from St. Louis. All she and her younger brother, Rafik, know of their Palestinian father's culture come from his reminiscences of growing up and the fighting they see on television. In Jerusalem, she is the only ``outsider'' at an Armenian school; her easygoing father, Poppy, finds himself having to remind her--often against his own common sense--of rules for ``appropriate'' behavior; and snug shops replace supermarket shopping--the malls of her upbringing are unheard of. Worst of all, Poppy is jailed for getting in the middle of a dispute between Israeli soldiers and a teenage refugee. In her first novel, Nye (with Paul Janeczko, I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You, 1996, etc.) shows all of the charms and flaws of the old city through unique, short-story-like chapters and poetic language. The sights, sounds, and smells of Jerusalem drift through the pages and readers glean a sense of current Palestinian-Israeli relations and the region's troubled history. In the process, some of the passages become quite ponderous while the human story- -Liyana's emotional adjustments in the later chapters and her American mother's reactions overall--fall away from the plot. However, Liyana's romance with an Israeli boy develops warmly, and readers are left with hope for change and peace as Liyana makes the city her very own.”

Connections

Other books written by Naomi Shihab Nye include:

Nye, Naomi Shihab. SITTI’S SECRET. ISBN 0689817061

Nye, Naomi Shihab. 19 VARIETIES OF GAZELLE: POEMS OF THE MIDDLE EAST. ISBN 0060097655

Nye, Naomi Shihab. GOING GOING. ISBN 0060293667

Nye, Naomi Shihab. HONEYBEE: POEMS & SHORT PROSE. ISBN 0060853905