16 pages • 32-minute read
Alphabet
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Themes
Death and Mourning
With “Alphabet,” Naomi Shihab Nye captures the emptiness that often accompanies a major loss. She achieves this by painting a landscape devoid of people but peopled by objects. In fact, every person mentioned in the poem is in the sky, whether literally flying in an airplane or metaphorically ascending as they pass away, lending the poem its ominous, lonely tone. The speaker ruminates on the multitude of deaths they have experienced, specifying how they need a “long cord” (Line 19) to hold the “string [of] names” (Line 18) of the departed.
Because poetry often relies on figurative or metaphorical language, indirect references, and interpretation, poets are able to write about topics and capture feelings and moods that are otherwise difficult to explain in more expository writing. For example, in this poem, Shihab Nye never explicitly says the community elders have died; rather, she uses the metaphor of them “going up / into the air” (Lines 4-5) and descriptions of everyday objects and idiosyncrasies—the baked goods, clothing, and turns of phrase unique to the elders—to illustrate what “we are losing” (Line 14), emphasizing the craterous absence the dead have left behind. The poem suggests that death’s impacts create a ripple effect throughout communities and throughout the world, its bookending images of flight illustrating the inevitable, unending cycle of life, mourning, and death.
Identity and Place
The question of what makes a person who they are has been much explored by poets through the ages—including American poets such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson—and this question also rings throughout Shihab Nye’s poetry, which often explores her intertwining Palestinian, American, and familial identities.
In “Alphabet,” places and people are tightly woven together. The speaker understands their neighborhood through landmarks such as trees, chairs, and yards, the elders’ names and faces secondary to the details of their environment. The community and the environment work as a team, however: Through the community members, each landmark and object becomes part of a story, and without the storytellers—the elders, with their wealth of knowledge and memory about this specific place and its traditions—the speaker struggles to know who they are.
The poem begins and ends with the speaker referencing “our neighborhood” (Lines 3 and 34), highlighting the importance of the collective “we” or “our” in a community made up of individual people but also the importance of the physical place itself, the buildings and trees and even graveyards that give each corner of the map its own unique identity. It is no wonder that “the roof of our house” (Line 37) is the thing that “[dots] the tiniest ‘i’” (Line 39), or, in other words, it is no wonder that the speaker’s home is their lifeline to their sense of self.
Loss of Communal Memory
This poem captures the pain and panic of collective memory loss. Organizations such as the US Senate, the National Archives, ACT UP, and the Smithsonian all have their own oral history projects for the same reason: Without firsthand accounts of the past and present, history becomes a homogenous master narrative devoid of different perspectives or individual opinions. The same can be said of landscapes, with groups like Queering the Map and Native Land Digital building maps that tell more diverse individual stories about land and the communities and cultures that develop within those lands.
In “Alphabet,” the speaker feels the impact of losing these individual memories on a personal level, and they understand that these memories, while not their own, impact their sense of self and sense of home. They value the dead not only for the tangible details of their lives, such as “cupcakes” (Line 17) and “housecoats” (Line 15) but also for their collective knowledge of the past, which becomes their own past. When the speaker wonders “what stood in that / brushy spot / ninety years ago” (Lines 23-25), they realize that, without the elderly, immense bodies of cultural and community knowledge disappear; even languages and ways of speaking, the “formal phrasings” (Line 16) of older generations, will eventually be forgotten. The speaker cannot seem to put words to the immensity of this loss, relying on the biggest metaphor they can muster—the sky—to approximate the scale of their community’s loss. The plane—a symbol for modernity—contrasts with the past, which slowly disappears.
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