Going

g Wheree
I Coming From
I’m
Naomi Shihab Nye

S hortly after we arrived in Jerusalem, our relatives came to see us at a hotel.

Sitti, our grandmother, was very short. She wore a long, thickly embroidered
Palestinian dress, had a musical, high-pitched voice and a low, guttural laugh.
ANALYZE VI SUALS
What do the colors in this
painting suggest about
the setting?
She kept touching our heads and faces as if she couldn’t believe we were there. I
had not yet fallen in love with her. Sometimes you don’t fall in love with people
immediately, even if they’re your own grandmother. Everyone seemed to think we
were all too thin.
We moved into a second-story flat in a stone house eight miles north of the
city, among fields and white stones and wandering sheep. My brother was enrolled
10 in the Friends Girls School and I was enrolled in the Friends Boys School in the
town of Ramallah a few miles farther north—it all was a little confused. But
the Girls School offered grades one through eight in English and high school
continued at the Boys School. Most local girls went to Arabic-speaking schools
after eighth grade.
I was a freshman, one of seven girl students among two hundred boys, which
would cause me problems a month later. I was called in from the schoolyard at
lunchtime, to the office of our counselor who wore shoes so pointed and tight her
feet bulged out pinkly on top. a a SETTI NG I N
“You will not be talking to them anymore,” she said. She rapped on the desk NONFI CTION
Reread lines 1–18.
20 with a pencil for emphasis.
What details help you
“To whom?” understand what life
“All the boy students at this institution. It is inappropriate behavior. From now was like in Jerusalem?
on, you will speak only with the girls.”

Jerusalem (1984), Tamam Al-Akhal. Palestine.

382 unit 3 : setting and mood Oil on canvas, 50 cm × 70 cm. Private collection.
 “But there are only six other girls! And I like only one of them!” My friend was
Anna, from Italy, whose father ran a small factory that made matches. I’d visited
it once with her. It felt risky to walk the aisles among a million filled matchboxes.
Later we visited the factory that made olive oil soaps and stacked them in giant
pyramids to dry.
“No, thank you,” I said. “It’s ridiculous to say that girls should only talk to
30 girls. Did I say anything bad to a boy? Did anyone say anything bad to me?
They’re my friends. They’re like my brothers. I won’t do it, that’s all.”
The counselor conferred with the headmaster1 and they called a taxi. I was
sent home with a little paper requesting that I transfer to a different school. The
charge: insolence. My mother, startled to see me home early and on my own,
stared out the window when I told her. b CON NECT
My brother came home from his school as usual, full of whistling and notebooks. Note Nye’s reaction to the
school’s rule about boys
“Did anyone tell you not to talk to girls?” I asked him. He looked at me as if I’d and girls. How do you
gone goofy. He was too young to know the troubles of the world. He couldn’t even respond to rules you think
imagine them. b are unfair?
40 “You know what I’ve been thinking about?” he said. “A piece of cake. That
puffy white layered cake with icing like they have at birthday parties in the United
States. Wouldn’t that taste good right now?” Our mother said she was thinking
about mayonnaise. You couldn’t get it in Jerusalem. She’d tried to make it and it SO CI AL STUDI ES
didn’t work. I felt too gloomy to talk about food. CON NECTI ON
My brother said, “Let’s go let Abu Miriam’s chickens out.” That’s what we always
did when we felt sad. We let our fussy landlord’s red-and-white chickens loose to
flap around the yard happily, puffing their wings. Even when Abu Miriam shouted
and waggled his cane and his wife waved a dishtowel, we knew the chickens were
thanking us.
50 My father went with me to the St. Tarkmanchatz Armenian School, a solemnly
ancient stone school tucked deep into the Armenian Quarter of the Old City of
Jerusalem. It was another world in there. He had already called the school officials
on the telephone and tried to enroll me, though they didn’t want to. Their school
was for Armenian students only, kindergarten through twelfth grade. Classes were Jerusalem was built
taught in three languages: Armenian, Arabic and English, which was why I needed around 3000 .. Its
original name, Urr
to go there. Although most Arab students at other schools were learning English, I
Salem, meant “the
needed a school where classes were actually taught in English—otherwise I would land of peace.”
have been staring out the windows triple the usual amount.
The head priest wore a long robe and a tall cone-shaped hat. He said, “Excuse
60 me, please, but your daughter, she is not an Armenian, even a small amount?”
“Not at all,” said my father. “But in case you didn’t know, there is a stipulation stipulation
in the educational code books of this city that says no student may be rejected (stGpQyE-lAPshEn) n. the
act of laying down a
solely on the basis of ethnic background, and if you don’t accept her, we will alert
condition or agreement
the proper authorities.”
They took me. But the principal wasn’t happy about it. The students, however,
seemed glad to have a new face to look at. Everyone’s name ended in -ian,

1. headmaster: principal of a private school.

384 unit 3 : setting and mood

 the beautiful, musical Armenian ending—Boghossian, Minassian, Kevorkian,
Rostomian. My new classmates started calling me Shihabian. We wore uniforms,
navy blue pleated skirts for the girls, white shirts, and navy sweaters. I waited
70 during the lessons for the English to come around, as if it were a channel on
television. While other students were on the other channels, I scribbled poems in
the margins of my pages, read library books, and wrote a lot of letters filled with
exclamation points. All the other students knew all three languages with three
entirely different alphabets. How could they carry so much in their heads? I felt
humbled by my ignorance. One day I felt so frustrated in our physics class—still
another language—that I pitched my book out the open window. The professor
made me go collect it. All the pages had let loose at the seams and were flapping
free into the gutters along with the white wrappers of sandwiches. c c CON NECT
Every week the girls had a hands-and-fingernails check. We had to keep our Reread lines 69–78. Think
of a time when you felt
80 nails clean and trim, and couldn’t wear any rings. Some of my new friends would
frustrated in class. What
invite me home for lunch with them, since we had an hour-and-a-half break and I did you do to solve the
lived too far to go to my own house. problem?
Their houses were a thousand years old, clustered beehive-fashion behind
ancient walls, stacked and curled and tilting and dark, filled with pictures of
unsmiling relatives and small white cloths dangling crocheted2 edges. We ate
spinach pies and white cheese. We dipped our bread in olive oil, as the Arabs
did. We ate small sesame cakes, our mouths full of crumbles. They taught me to
say “I love you” in Armenian, which sounded like yes-kay-see-goo-see-rem. I felt I
had left my old life entirely. d d SETTI NG I N
90 Every afternoon I went down to the basement of the school where the kindergarten NONFI CTION
What details help you
class was having an Arabic lesson. Their desks were pint-sized, their full white smocks
to picture the Armenian
tied around their necks. I stuffed my fourteen-year-old self in beside them. They had houses and to understand
rosy cheeks and shy smiles. They must have thought I was a very slow learner. Armenian customs?
More than any of the lessons, I remember the way the teacher rapped the backs
of their hands with his ruler when they made a mistake. Their little faces puffed
up with quiet tears. This pained me so terribly I forgot all my words. When it
was my turn to go to the blackboard and write in Arabic, my hand shook. The
kindergarten students whispered hints to me from the front row, but I couldn’t
understand them. We learned horribly useless phrases: “Please hand me the
100 bellows3 for my fire.” I wanted words simple as tools, simple as food and yesterday
and dreams. The teacher never rapped my hand, especially after I wrote a letter to
the city newspaper, which my father edited, protesting such harsh treatment of
young learners. I wish I had known how to talk to those little ones, but they were
just beginning their English studies and didn’t speak much yet. They were at the
same place in their English that I was in my Arabic.
From the high windows of St. Tarkmanchatz, we could look out over the Old
City, the roofs and flapping laundry and television antennas, the pilgrims and
churches and mosques, the olivewood prayer beads and fragrant falafel 4 lunch

2. crocheted (krI-shAdP): needlework made by looping thread with a hooked needle.

3. bellows (bDlPIz): an apparatus used for producing a strong current of air.
4. falafel (fE-läPfEl): fried balls of ground, spiced chickpeas.

going where i’m coming from 385

 stands, the intricate interweaving of cultures and prayers and songs and holidays. intricate (GnPtrG-kGt) adj.
110 We saw the barbed wire separating Jordan from Israel then, the bleak, uninhabited elaborate
strip of no-man’s land reminding me how little education saved us after all. People
e CON NECT
who had differing ideas still came to blows, imagining fighting could solve things. Think of a serious
Staring out over the quiet roofs of afternoon, I thought it so foolish. I asked my conversation you
friends what they thought about it and they shrugged. have had with friends.
“It doesn’t matter what we think about it. It just keeps happening. It happened Based on how you felt
afterward, how do you
in Armenia too,5 you know. Really, really bad in Armenia. And who talks about it
think Nye might have
in the world news now? It happens everywhere. It happens in your country one by felt after having this
one, yes? Murders and guns. What can we do?” e conversation?

5. It happened in Armenia, too: Refers to the Armenian massacres of 1915–1923. In response to Russia’s use of
Armenian troops against the Ottomans in World War I, the Ottoman empire ordered the deportation of 1.75
million Armenians. During the deportation, around a million Armenians were killed or died of starvation.

ANALYZE VI SUALS
What can you infer about
this family from the way
they are posed in this
painting?
The Olive Tree (2005), Ismail Shammout. Palestine. Oil on canvas, 60 cm × 80 cm. Private collection.

386 unit 3 : setting and mood

 Sometimes after school, my brother and I walked up the road that led past
120 the crowded refugee camp of Palestinians who owned even less than our modest
relatives did in the village. The little kids were stacking stones in empty tin cans
and shaking them. We waved our hands and they covered their mouths and
laughed. We wore our beat-up American tennis shoes and our old sweatshirts
and talked about everything we wanted to do and everywhere else we wished
we could go.
“I want to go back to Egypt,” my brother said. “I sort of feel like I missed it.
Spending all that time in bed instead of exploring—what a waste.”
“I want to go to Greece,” I said. “I want to play a violin in a symphony
orchestra in Austria.” We made up things. I wanted to go back to the United
130 States most of all. Suddenly I felt like a patriotic citizen. One of my friends,
Sylvie Markarian, had just been shipped off to Damascus, Syria to marry a man
who was fifty years old, a widower. Sylvie was exactly my age—we had turned
fifteen two days apart. She had never met her future husband before. I thought
this was the most revolting thing I had ever heard of. “Tell your parents no
thank you,” I urged her. “Tell them you refuse.”
Sylvie’s eyes were liquid, swirling brown. I could not see clearly to the bottom
of them.
“You don’t understand,” she told me. “In United States you say no. We don’t
say no. We have to follow someone’s wishes. This is the wish of my father. Me, I
140 am scared. I never slept away from my mother before. But I have no choice. I am
going because they tell me to go.” She was sobbing, sobbing on my shoulder. And
I was stroking her long, soft hair. After that, I carried two fists inside, one for Sylvie
and one for me. f f SETTI NG I N
Most weekends my family went to the village to sit with the relatives. We sat NONFI CTION
Note Nye’s reaction to her
and sat and sat. We sat in big rooms and little rooms, in circles, on chairs or on
friend’s problem. In what
woven mats or brightly covered mattresses piled on the floor. People came in and ways is she being affected
out to greet my family. Sometimes even donkeys and chickens came in and out. by her experiences in
We were like movie stars or dignitaries.6 They never seemed to get tired of us. Jerusalem?
My father translated the more interesting tidbits of conversation, the funny
150 stories my grandmother told. She talked about angels and food and money and
people and politics and gossip and old memories from my father’s childhood,
before he emigrated away from her. She wanted to make sure we were going to emigrate (DmPG-grAtQ) v.
stick around forever, which made me feel very nervous. We ate from mountains of to leave one country and
settle in another
rice and eggplant on large silver trays—they gave us little plates of our own since
it was not our custom to eat from the same plate as other people. We ripped the
giant wheels of bread into triangles. Shepherds passed through town with their
flocks of sheep and goats, their long canes and cloaks, straight out of the Bible.
My brother and I trailed them to the edge of the village, past the lentil fields to g SETTI NG I N
NONFI CTION
the green meadows studded with stones, while the shepherds pretended we weren’t Reread lines 144–161.
160 there. I think they liked to be alone, unnoticed. The sheep had differently colored What details help create
dyed bottoms, so shepherds could tell their flocks apart. g a sense of place?

6. dignitaries (dGgPnG-tDrQCz): people of high rank or position.

going where i’m coming from 387

 In Jerusalem (1997), Ismail Shammout. Palestine. Oil on canvas, 50 cm × 60 cm. Private collection.

During these long, slow, smoke-stained weekends—the men still smoked ANALYZE VI SUALS
cigarettes a lot in those days, and the old taboon, my family’s mounded Nye describes the “stony
bread-oven, puffed billowy clouds outside the door—my crying jags began. I splendor” of Jerusalem.
How does this painting fit
cried without any warning, even in the middle of a meal. My crying was usually that description?
noiseless but dramatically wet—streams of tears pouring down my cheeks, onto
my collar or the back of my hand.
Everything grew quiet.
Someone always asked in Arabic, “What is wrong? Are you sick? Do you wish
170 to lie down?”
My father made valiant excuses in the beginning. “She’s overtired,” he said. valiant (vBlQyEnt) adj.
“She has a headache. She is missing her friend who moved to Syria. She is brave
homesick just now.”
My brother stared at me as if I had just landed from Planet X.

388 unit 3 : setting and mood

 Worst of all was our drive to school every morning, when our car came over
the rise in the highway and all Jerusalem lay sprawled before us in its golden,
stony splendor pockmarked with olive trees and automobiles. Even the air above
the city had a thick, religious texture, as if it were a shining brocade7 filled with
broody incense. I cried hardest then. All those hours tied up in school lay just
180 ahead. My father pulled over and talked to me. He sighed. He kept his hands on
the steering wheel even when the car was stopped and said, “Someday, I promise
you, you will look back on this period in your life and have no idea what made
you so unhappy here.”
“I want to go home.” It became my anthem. “This place depresses me. It
weighs too much. . . . I hate the way people stare at me here.” Already I’d been
involved in two street skirmishes with boys who stared a little too hard and long.
I’d socked one in the jaw and he socked me back. I hit the other one straight in
the face with my purse. h h SETTI NG I N
“You could be happy here if you tried just a little harder,” my father said. NONFI CTION
Reread lines 175–188.
190 “Don’t compare it to the United States all the time. Don’t pretend the United
What is it about
States is perfect. And look at your brother—he’s not having any problems!” Jerusalem that makes
“My brother is eleven years old.” Nye feel sad and angry?
I had crossed the boundary from uncomplicated childhood when happiness was
a good ball and a horde of candy-coated Jordan almonds. i i CON NECT
One problem was that I had fallen in love with four different boys who all Which of your own
experiences can help you
played in the same band. Two of them were even twins. I never quite described it
understand what Nye is
to my parents, but I wrote reams and reams of notes about it on loose-leaf paper feeling?
that I kept under my sweaters in my closet.
Such new energy made me feel reckless. I gave things away. I gave away my
200 necklace and a whole box of shortbread cookies that my mother had been saving.
I gave my extra shoes away to the gypsies. One night when the gypsies camped
in a field down the road from our house, I thought about their mounds of white
goat cheese lined up on skins in front of their tents, and the wild oud 8 music they
played deep into the black belly of the night, and I wanted to go sit around their
fire. Maybe they could use some shoes.
I packed a sack of old loafers that I rarely wore and walked with my family
down the road. The gypsy mothers stared into my shoes curiously. They took
them into their tent. Maybe they would use them as vases or drawers. We sat with
small glasses of hot, sweet tea until a girl bellowed from deep in her throat, threw
210 back her head, and began dancing. A long bow thrummed across the strings.
The girl circled the fire, tapping and clicking, trilling a long musical wail from
deep in her throat. My brother looked nervous. He was remembering the belly
dancer in Egypt, and her scarf. I felt invisible. I was pretending to be a gypsy. My
father stared at me. Didn’t I recognize the exquisite oddity of my own life when
I sat right in the middle of it? Didn’t I feel lucky to be here? Well, yes I did. But
sometimes it was hard to be lucky.

7. brocade (brI-kAdP): a heavy fabric with a raised design.

8. oud (Ld): a musical instrument resembling a lute.

going where i’m coming from 389

 W hen we left Jerusalem, we left quickly. Left our beds in our rooms and
our car in the driveway. Left in a plane, not sure where we were going.
The rumbles of fighting with Israel had been growing louder and louder. In the
220 barbed-wire no-man’s land visible from the windows of our house, guns cracked
loudly in the middle of the night. We lived right near the edge. My father heard
disturbing rumors at the newspaper that would soon grow into the infamous Six
Day War of 1967. We were in England by then, drinking tea from thin china cups
and scanning the newspapers. Bombs were blowing up in Jerusalem. We worried
about the village. We worried about my grandmother’s dreams, which had been
getting worse and worse, she’d told us. We worried about the house we’d left, and
the chickens, and the children at the refugee camp. But there was nothing we
could do except keep talking about it all.
My parents didn’t want to go back to Missouri because they’d already said
230 goodbye to everyone there. They thought we might try a different part of the
country. They weighed the virtues of different states. Texas was big and warm.
After a chilly year crowded around the small gas heaters we used in Jerusalem, a
warm place sounded appealing. In roomy Texas, my parents bought the first house
they looked at. My father walked into the city newspaper and said, “Any jobs open
around here?”
I burst out crying when I entered a grocery store—so many different kinds
of bread. j j SETTI NG I N
A letter on thin blue airmail paper reached me months later, written by my NONFI CTION
Reread lines 217–237.
classmate, the bass player in my favorite Jerusalem band. “Since you left,” he said,
How is Texas different
240 “your empty desk reminds me of a snake ready to strike. I am afraid to look at it. I from Jerusalem?
hope you are having a better time than we are.”
Of course I was, and I wasn’t. Home had grown different forever. Home had
doubled. Back home again in my own country, it seemed impossible to forget
the place we had just left: the piercing call of the muezzin 9 from the mosque10
at prayer time, the dusky green tint of the olive groves, the sharp, cold air that
smelled as deep and old as my grandmother’s white sheets flapping from the line
on her roof. What story hadn’t she finished?
Our father used to tell us that when he was little, the sky over Jerusalem
crackled with meteors and shooting stars almost every night. They streaked and
250 flashed, igniting the dark. Some had long golden tails. For a few seconds, you
could see their whole swooping trail lit up. Our father and his brothers slept on
the roof to watch the sky. “There were so many of them, we didn’t even call out
every time we saw one.”
During our year in Jerusalem, my brother and I kept our eyes cast upwards
whenever we were outside at night, but the stars were different since our father
was a boy. Now the sky seemed too orderly, stuck in place. The stars had learned
where they belonged. Only people on the ground kept changing.

9. muezzin (myL-DzPGn): a crier who calls the Muslim faithful to prayer.

10. mosque (mJsk): a Muslim house of worship.

390 unit 3 : setting and mood

After Reading

Comprehension
1. Recall Why was it necessary for Naomi Shihab Nye to attend the Armenian
school after being expelled from her first school?
2. Clarify Reread lines 130–143. Why was the author angry about her friend’s
being sent to Damascus?
3. Clarify Why did the family leave Jerusalem?

Critical Analysis
4. Make Connections Look at the chart you filled in as you read. Which two
connections best helped you understand what the author experienced in
Jerusalem? Explain.
5. Examine Setting Use a web diagram to identify girls marry young
descriptive details that helped convey the setting
of this selection. Then expand your web to include customs and beliefs landscape
insights on how this setting affected the author.
6. Analyze Memoir At what point in the selection does the author 1960s Jerusalem
become aware of a sense of belonging in Jerusalem? Support your
answer with examples from the memoir. day-to-day life

7. Compare Literary Works Nye’s father encouraged her to try to be happy

in Jerusalem and to learn to appreciate the “exquisite oddity” of her life.
What does the poem “My Father and the Figtree” on page 391 reveal about
her father’s feelings toward living in different places?

Extension and Challenge

8. Creative Project: Music Naomi Shihab Nye belongs to two cultures.
If this memoir were to be made into a television show or a documentary,
an appropriate soundtrack might feature American music as well as music
from the Middle East. Divide this selection into parts and note which type
of music should accompany each part.
9. SO CIAL STUDIES CON NECTION Learn more about Jerusalem—
its history, geographical setting, and culture. Present your information
in the form of a colorful poster.
research li nks
For more on Jerusalem, visit the Research Center at ClassZone.com.

going where i’m coming from 393