Under the Green Willow

Naomi Shihab Nye and I have been working together since the early 1990s, and I have quite a collection of snapshots of Naomi in faraway places. These two arrived last week. Naomi just visited The Rabat American School in Rabat, Morocco, as well as Fez, Morocco. I was convinced (since both Naomi and I are devoted Bono fans) that she was in the very same courtyard that U2 shot their “Magnificent” video. Alas, no, but it all looks beautiful to me.

What’s Naomi working on these days? A collection of extremely short stories. I’ve been reading them on the train. Here’s one for you.

Lightning
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Amal walked up to Joe and Rafael in the hallway.

“It would really be nice,” she said, “if you could stop making bad comments about my country in class. They are completely irrelevant to the topic and also inaccurate.”

“Why did you leave it if you love it so much?” Joe asked.

“I left it because I am a minor and my parents moved to the United States. If your parents moved to Japan, would you stay here?”

“Definitely,” Rafael said. “Ain’t no way I’m movin’ to Japan.”

Amal closed her eyes.

Lockers were clanging around them. The hallway smelled of athletic shoes after a steamy run. Joe said, “She’s gone to sleep.”

Amal spun around without opening her eyes again and stepped into English class. They’d been discussing Edgar Allan Poe, and no one but Amal seemed to know he had been an authority on mollusks as well as a poet. “The Raven,” while most popular, would probably not have been the poem he wanted to be remembered for. Also, she did not believe Poe died of a drug or alcohol overdose, but more likely of diabetes, which often went undiagnosed in his day.

“How do you know these things?” Sara had asked her.

“I read.”

Amal had also been to the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, which changed everything about how you looked at him.

He had incredible handwriting.

No drug addict would be able to write that well.

“Amal, you look stunned,” said Mrs. Melchor, standing behind her desk. “Have you been struck by lightning between classes?”

“Yes,” she said. “The lightning of ignorance.”

Mrs. Melchor raised her eyebrows.

Amal carefully eased into her desk and tried to smile. An art of its own, the rueful smile. This had been her favorite class all year. Mrs. Melchor paid astonishingly particular attention to every student—if someone had a raging headache, for example, by the end of class Mrs. Melchor would have noticed it on her own, without being told. She had a talent, a gift. She knew when people broke up, or even when their parents did. She was an Observer.

Today they were working on their Transcendentalism essays in class. Mrs. Melchor made them hand-write their papers, which pleased Amal because she had retained her penmanship skills. It would have pleased Thoreau, too. He might have made them write with pencil. Some of her friends complained bitterly, said they could only use a keyboard now. Their writing looked clumsy and erratic. Back in Lahore, all class papers had been handwritten, though some students had computers at home. Amal liked to make flourishes on the tails of her letters. They looked almost Arabic, graceful as swans at the park.

Joe, in his geometry class, felt a sharp twinge in his side. Appendicitis?

Did that girl do voodoo? Did they have voodoo wherever it was she came from?

He felt a little restless about razzing her. Of course it wasn’t her fault, all the bad stuff that was going on in the news, in the world. What did she say her parents were, that time he accused them of living in caves? Scientists. She said they did medical research. Yeah, sure. Maybe if he was having appendicitis they wouldn’t even fix him. She had said he should read newspapers from other countries online to see how the United States was depicted, then he might be less inclined to make stereotypical accusations. He said, “I don’t even read the school newspaper.” She said, “Part of your problem.” He didn’t have a problem. He had a pain in his side. Goddammit, she really upset him.

Rafael had completely forgotten to do his assignment. Even though it was for Spanish class, the stupidest class ever, since he had spoken Spanish all his life, he had a hard time keeping up with the Written Part Of It, and had failed to translate his Octavio Paz poem into English, or to write a paragraph about the process. And of course, of course, Mrs. Ramirez called on him first. “Rafael, will you read your translation please?” He was fanning through his messy papers as if he was looking for it. “Uh, I can’t find it,” he said. “We’ll wait,” said Mrs. Ramirez.

He hated her.

She knew.

She knew he didn’t have it, and she was torturing him in front of the class.

“It was about—the moon,” he said. Everyone laughed.  Half of them had gotten the moon poem, and the other half had been assigned a longer Alberto Blanco poem about words in boats.

“I don’t have it,” he said. He stopped rooting around like an animal and looked straight up at Mrs. Ramirez. Surly-style. Try and make me.

“Well, as you know, Rafael, we are counting homework as eighty percent of each grade in this class, since you all know I don’t like tests and think homework is a better learning tool. So far you are down around the zero percentile, sir, and your forthcoming grade will represent that.”

“I already speak Spanish,” he said.

“That will not get you an A if you don’t participate in the class and do your homework. That will not even get you a C.”

He hated women. This morning his mom had said to his dad, “Even Brad Pitt does more chores than you do.” How did she know? Women always thought they were so smart.

Reading Thoreau truly felt helpful to Amal. She didn’t care that he had lived 150 years before, or never married, or had dubious feelings about travel. He felt like a friend. He helped her steady herself. “I hope you will tell me if anyone is giving you trouble,” Mrs. Melchor whispered kindly, leaning down over Amal’s desk and staring at her encouragingly.

Amal smiled back. “Thank you. I will. ” But she knew she might not. The world was full of trouble. It was up to her to deal with it.

Copyright © 2010 by Naomi Shihab Nye