“Self-Wrought Homemaking”: Revisiting the Concept of the “Home” in the Poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye and Lisa Suhair Majaj
Keywords:
Palestinian-American poetry, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye, home, substitute, process, loss, homemakingAbstract
The study aims to investigate the changing perception of what constitutes the home in a number of selected poems by the Palestinian-American poets Naomi Shihab Nye and Lisa Suhair Majaj. As the home is constructed as a literary space rather than a physical place in their poetry, the traditionally established notion of the home as a “‘safe place’ that can exist unchanged by shifts of time or space” is refuted and is constructed as a “fertile site of contradictions demanding constant renegotiation and reconstruction.” The fixed perception of the home as a lost object in some of their poems, as well as the more realistic perception of the home as a substitute for the lost object in other poems are eventually replaced with a self-motivated realization of the need to free their perception from the essentialist categories of old and new, lost and retrieved through language. This realization on the part of the two poets is clarified by tracing, comparing and contrasting the change in the two poets’ perception of the home in a selection of their poems.
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