The Curious Case of Childhood: Naomi Shihab Nye’s The Turtle of Oman and The Turtle of Michigan — A Book Review by Dr. Deeba Shireen

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] child is a lifeline of every family, community, and society. Since conception, a child inherits the natural right to have a good life. In every field of knowledge—polity, religion, economy, and literature, children occupy a significant place. Adonis, in his poem “The Beginning Speech,” puts the voice of a child in perspective. It is a voice we all once had as children, but was buried somewhere in the process of growing up:

We were brought together by good manners
and these sheets now flying in the wind
then we split,
a forest written by earth
watered by the seasons’ change.

Child who once was, come forth—
What brings us together now,
and what do we have to say?
(Translated by Khaled Mattawa)

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University. Naomi’s cross-cultural experience, along with the artistic exposure through her mother’s paintings and recitations of poetry to her right from the time she was a three-year-old shaped her consciousness as a writer. She has numerous poetry collections and books for children to her credit.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s novel The Turtle of Oman and its sequel The Turtle of Michigan connects us to the voice of a child lost in all of us. It follows the journey of a young boy, Aref, from Oman to Michigan. The story is a simple one where the child resists leaving home in the first novel and adapts to the new world of Michigan in the next. We follow Aref’s journey from his home country to a host country he makes his own. The Turtle of Oman has a simple narration, and the book needs to be perused by readers of all ages.

Nye’s children’s fiction is such that it throws profound light on the world of not only the children but the adults as well. Aref is caught in a world where his parents, who are professors at the University of Oman, must move to the US to pursue their doctoral degrees. Aref has to move to Michigan with his parents until they complete their US research. The child’s initial stubbornness, refusing to leave the familiarity of home, gives way to a child’s wonder when he starts his journey into the unknown. The simplicity of the text belies the complexity of our changing world. Both novels touch on perennial themes of humanity: What is home? What does it mean to be a child in a world of adults? What does it mean to be an adult in a child’s world? Is communication possible between the two worlds? Is there a child in all of us?

The story is set in the beautiful country of Oman, which is home to Aref. The familiarity of the Hajar Mountains and the backdrop of the turquoise-blue Arabian Sea bring an assuring feeling of home to Aref. It shelters him like a home country shelters children when the country is at peace. As per PRIO (Peace Research Institute Oslo) over 473 million children—more than one in six globally—now live in areas affected by conflict. For children, the safety of home is akin to the safety of the womb. It nourishes, cushions, and sustains life. The sounds of home, like the sounds of a womb, breed familiarity and safety. Aref cherishes the sounds of his home:

Aref knew how people moved, crossed a street, wrapped their scarves, and how the call to prayer echoed across the city and made everyone feel peaceful and proud inside. He liked the way large white boulders were stacked beside the water. He even loved the clicking sounds of shoes and animal hooves on the old cobbled streets in the marketplace, called the souk. The buzzing and hammering from smoky shops and garages. He loved it when shopkeepers who knew his family called him “Marhaba, Aref! Tylee should! Come see what we have today!”

Eventually, Aref leaves Oman but memorizes the contours of home to preserve it in his memory safely: “After dinner, Aref quietly turned the handle of the front door and stepped outside by himself to memorize what his house looked like under the moon. He needed its shape and shadows.” The irony of the second novel, The Turtle of Michigan, is that he embraces Michigan more readily than his mother, who was all set to move to Oman. The Atlantic Ocean contains secrets and dreams for Aref. He embraces Ann Arbor with an open heart. Yet, he has intricate dreams of Oman with glass facades of new buildings, the golden fields on the edge of Muscat, the desert and the mountains, the grand towers of the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, the coziness of his bed, and the cat he left back home.

One of the most endearing figures in Aref’s life is his grandfather, Sidi. He brings the old-world charm peculiar to our grandparents: “Sidi’s memory was intense. He remembered the days before electricity came to Oman, when everything was lit by kerosene lamps or tiny bulbs run by generators or candles in cups. Matches were precious then.” He is the only one from the world of adults who talks to a child as a child. Sidi is sure where he belongs. He is a grown-up who hasn’t lost touch with the beauty and mysteriousness of the world. He doesn’t wear a watch, he carries a rosary in his hand, he has no access to the internet, he relies heavily on his memory, and his knowledge of the world has mainly been transmitted orally to him. He tells and retells his story; each time it is told, it is born anew. In a world of overriding mistrust, he talks to everyone and meets and calls everyone his friend. He is in no rush to catch up with the world and know everything about everything. Both Sidi and Aref would write messages in Arabic and English, stick the notes into glass bottles, heavily tape the top, put them into the sea, and wait eagerly for a reply. The imaginative power of Sidi’s way of talking aligns with a child’s sense of wonder as he tells his grandson, “Remember our bottle? I think the fish are keeping it in their library.”

Like most parents of the generation, Aref's parents are preoccupied with meeting deadlines, securing finances, and building careers. It is a generation of parents that is too busy to guide their children to stroll and absorb everything around them. It can teach them to ‘listen’ to the elders but not ‘hear’ the rustling of leaves, the crackle of the fire, the tapping of the rain on roofs, the flapping of a bird’s wings, the humming of a song, and the buzzing of a bee. After all, we live in a world where talking to strangers is dangerous, and not listening to nature speak doesn’t hurt.

The book tells us about an important message: what communication failure means when talking to kids. We bombard them with directions, commands, rules, maxims, morality, platitudes, and clichés. A child’s imagination and intuition are crushed beneath this cumbersome weight. Aref’s mother continues to dismiss his attachment to home—as Aref exclaims at one place: “I am not a happiness machine, by the way.” The dismissal and denial of a child’s feelings make them vulnerable. In Aref’s imagination, home is like a village where the rooms are dimly lit and where he can imagine people like him doing things that he does too. He can, in the darkness of night, “knock on any door and the people inside might know some of the same things you knew or welcome you in—just because you all belonged there.”

Children are continuously exploring the world around them—They examine the colours and contours of the physical world as well as the mental world. They are grappling with the inexhaustible magic of the phenomenal world and the inner world of human emotions and psyche. They are processing everything, and there is no habit to deaden the marvel of the world.

Sidi takes Aref on a journey to the desert called the “Night of a Thousand Stars” camp. The journey to the desert is an act of defamiliarization:

To get to the Night of a Thousand Stars camp, they had to drive through more brown mountains, green valleys, curvy passes, and then off the paved road into a vast desert. There were still mountains all around. Sidi paused momentarily, looking out carefully, to ensure this was the place to turn. Then he drove straight onto the uneven golden sand. It felt strange driving without a road.

We get so used to our surroundings that the world's strangeness is lost on us. A trip to the desert is a way for Sidi to reconnect Aref to the world of the unknown. The breathtaking expansiveness of the desert lies in front of him; all he can do is inhale its marvel deeply. It looks like the moon with no road signs and known bends. The world is suddenly made strange. The monotonous view of the desert must not belie the diversity of life that it contains. Sidi teaches Aref how the desert is not dead but “alive and constantly shifting and changing.” The first experience of snow in Michigan teaches him how snow “sneaks up on you like a dream.” He imagines the snowy earth to be his page, on which he is the first one to write with his footprints!

Both the novels, The Turtle of Oman and its sequel, The Turtle of Michigan, are essential for our defamiliarization. They help to estrange the world for us: to help to understand that the sea, lakes, deserts, people, and places are ever changing and living; that each flake of snow has its own story, and that the turtles of Oman as well as Michigan have a heart that beats long after their death.  [et_pb_button button_url="@ET-DC@eyJkeW5hbWljIjp0cnVlLCJjb250ZW50IjoicG9zdF9saW5rX3VybF9wYWdlIiwic2V0dGluZ3MiOnsicG9zdF9pZCI6IjE5NTI4In19@" button_text="Edited by Sameem Wani" button_alignment="left" _builder_version="4.27.4" _dynamic_attributes="button_url" _module_preset="default" custom_button="on" button_text_size="15px" button_text_color="#474747" button_bg_color="#e2e2e2" button_bg_use_color_gradient="on" button_bg_color_gradient_stops="#f7f7f7 0%|#f4f4f4 100%" button_border_width="1px" button_border_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" button_font="--et_global_heading_font||||||||" button_icon="l||divi||400" button_icon_color="#6B6B6B" button_icon_placement="left" button_on_hover="off" custom_margin="||31px|||" box_shadow_style="preset1" box_shadow_blur="1px" global_colors_info="{}" button_border_color__hover_enabled="on|hover" button_border_color__hover="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" button_text_color__hover_enabled="on|desktop" button_text_color__hover="#000000" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_button][et_pb_toggle title="About the %22Edited by%22 tag/button" open_toggle_background_color="#f7f7f7" closed_toggle_background_color="#f7f7f7" toggle_icon="7||divi||400" use_icon_font_size="on" icon_font_size="30px" open_toggle_icon="6||divi||400" open_use_icon_font_size="on" open_icon_font_size="30px" _builder_version="4.27.4" _module_preset="default" title_level="h4" title_font="--et_global_heading_font|200|||||||" title_font_size="15px" body_font="--et_global_heading_font|200|||||||" body_font_size="14px" body_line_height="1.5em" border_color_all="#eaeaea" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Inverse Journal is proud to present a new feature where we invite volunteer editors to help out with the editing and proofreading process to expedite the publication of submissions sent to the journal. We hope to tackle the pending publications queue this year with a focus on getting as many pieces published as possible. Each time a Volunteer Editor edits, copyedits, and proofreads a piece that is published, we give due credit for their efforts in the spirit of community-driven collaboration that is standard and common in Open Source software communities.

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