“Blood is thicker than water.” I believe there is always a connection between families, and these connections make the family unique. The blood flows from ancestors, to parents, and to children. The blood passes the culture of the family from a generation to the next generation. Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem Blood expresses the unstoppable flow of blood through the people, that remind the people where they belong and guide people to their future.
Blood tells a story between the father and the narrator in 5 stanzas. The first stanza has 4 lines with 2 sentences. The narrator listens to her father about “A true Arab”. This appears in the first lines that show its importance to the whole poem. Mrs. Nye shows her strong emotions to her origin country a lot in her poems. So when I read this first lines, I can clearly feel the emotion from her to her country. This emotion is passed from her father, which the poem mainly force to discuss. Then the second sentence, the father captures a buzzer in his hand, this does not kill the buzzer. Connect this with the first sentence, I understanding that the father tries to show the blood of a true Arab person, who does not kill innocence, to his daughter. The spirit of “A true Arab” is adapted from peasants to children.
The second stanza is the extension of the first, it tells 2 more example of “A true Arab”. Specifically, it tells the palms and a belief of watermelon. These stories sound like fairy tales to me, but for the narrator, they are what she believed because she is an Arab. These 2 stanzas introduce the concept of “A true Arab” for the reader. They are shorter than the later stanzas and in a more simple form of A-B-B-A and A-A-A.
Then there is a flashback to a childhood memory in the third stanza. There are 8 lines with 4 sentences in the stanza and tells a neighbor girls comes to see the Arab. But the narrator did not realize what is an Arab, so she answered “we don’t have one’. This targeted the father talks about their names, “Shihab” which means” shooting star”. This is maybe the first time the father talks about their blood to the daughter. The father taught the girl about their culture, where they come from and where their ancestor lived. It is also the place their blood come from and can be traced back to. The story of their name symbols the connection between the generations that link people together into a family.
The last two stanzas tell about the latest story that a Palestinian been attack. In the first sentence of fourth stanzas, the narrator uses “clot in my blood” to describe her feeling at the moment. This expresses her sadness to the victim and shows an extended idea about blood. Blood can symbol more than a family, but also a large group of people in one culture. The narrator grows up from the innocent girl to a mature woman who recognizes those other people from their region as her family. The poem shows the narrator does not live in her old country. At the end of the fourth stanza, the narrator questions “What flag can we wave?” to show her struggle between her blood and the new land she lives in. It is a realistic question that many immigrants have, and this pushes the poem to a highlight, that an outbreak of the homesick from the blood. The last stanzas follow this story, which tells what the father reacts to the incident. The father shows furthermore sadness to the news. As a parent that closer to the origin, father apparently show his care to his people. The father also shows his struggles like the daughter, that “neither of his two languages can reach it”. As a stranger in another land, immigrants always see their origin people as the same blood because this blood connects them together to where they belong. Lastly, the narrator questions the world, to persuade an equal world to the different region of people.
In conclusion, many young forgets their origin, their family, their blood. Like what the narrator show in the poem Blood. There are a lot of repetition of “True Arab” in the poem, which reminds me all the time about how loyal the narrator is to her blood. Poetry is hard, but it is so beautiful when it shows its meaning. Blood is what connects ancestors, parents, and children, and blood reminds people where they belong to.
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