Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 1998, Pages 125-126

Book Reviews

Habibi

By Naomi Shihab Nye. Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1997, 259 pp. List: $16.00 hardcover; AET: $12.00.

Reviewed by Delinda C. Hanley

Just as children, parents and grandparents fell in love with Naomi Shihab Nye’s young girl missing her Palestinian grandmother in Sitti’s Secrets, somewhat older hearts can now meet and forever love Liyana, an Arab-American teen. We are introduced to this gifted 14-year-old writer as she discovers first love in St. Louis, Missouri. Her first kiss is quickly followed by an untimely (in her eyes) family decision to “live in Jesus’s hometown” which is also “her dad’s hometown.”

Before leaving St. Louis, Liyana writes: When my father was growing up inside the old city of Jerusalem...he and the kids on his street liked to trade desserts after dinner. My father would take his square of Arabic hareesa...outside on a plate. His Jewish friend Avi from next door brought slices of date rolls. And a Greek girl named Anna would bring a plate of honey puffs or butter cookies. Everyone liked everyone else’s dessert better than their own so they’d trade back and forth... My father used to wish the politicians making big decisions would trade desserts. It might have helped.

Now her father, Dr. Abboud, hopes that it is safe to go back home to Jerusalem with his American family. The reader learns much about the close- knit, loving Abboud family as each member deals with the tumultuous move, goodbyes, and the new world awaiting them:

Habibi, darling, or Habibti, feminine for my darling. Poppy said it before bedtime or if they fell off their bikes—as a soothing syrup, to make them feel sweetened again. He said it as a good morning or tucked in between sentences...Whatever else happened, Liyana and Rafik were his darlings all day and they knew it. Even when he stayed at the hospital past their bedtimes, they could feel his darling drifting comfortably around them...They had a father who wrapped their mother in his arms. They had “Habibi, be careful, Habibti, I love you,” trailing them like a long silken scarf. Liyana knew it didn’t happen for everybody.

Liyana and her brother Rafik find more of this protective love as they discover their huge Palestinian family. They also learn to love Jerusalem and feel its pain.

Darling Sitti, as well as the children’s father and their neighborhood chum from the refugee camp each fall victim to seemingly random attacks by Israeli soldiers. When Rafik doesn’t understand the cruelty he asks, “WHY?” and Poppy tries to answer:

His voice sounded tight and hard. “THERE IS NO WHY. I am filling up to my throat from these stories. Do you know how many of them I hear every day from my patients at work? I don’t tell you. I can’t tell you. And I thought things were getting better over here.”

Liyana said quietly, “I thought there was always a why.”

Many of the lessons they learn are hard to fathom with the American part of their young minds. One day Poppy meets some missionaries and invites them home for dinner:

Rafik said, out of the blue, “Do you know what our grandmother has in her collection? She has an empty tear gas canister that the Israeli soldiers threw at her house one day. It says Made in Pennsylvania on the side of it. The soldiers get their weapons and their money from the United States.” The guests’ eyes grew wide. They didn’t know what to say.

The children ask why there is so much fighting over Jerusalem. “Think about dinner tables, her mother said.... How many fights there are in families, every day. People in families love each other, or want to love each other, but they fight anyway. With strangers you don’t care so much. Think about it.”...

“Do you think the Arabs and Jews secretly love one another?” Liyana asked.

“I think,” Poppy said, ”they are bonded for life. Whether they like it or not. Like that kind of glue that won’t let go.”

Sitti teaches lessons in coexistence to the entire family when Omer (not Omar, as Liyana originally thinks!) enters the scene. Liyana, her brother and even Poppy have a lot to learn about the other people who call Israel home.

“You know some Arabic?” [Liyana asks]

He turned his finger in the air. “Language is one tiny shiny key!”

She felt a sudden regret—she didn’t know anything in Hebrew yet. “All I know is shalom.”

“That’s a beginning,” Omer said. Liyana thought how both Hebrew and Arabic came from such a deep, related place in the throat. English felt skinny beside them.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s language makes English feel very rich and full, however, as she deftly tells this tale and teaches her readers about this family and their country. This is a book to buy for every young adult reader you love, especially if they are Arab-American. You’ll want it in your neighborhood libraries and schools. But before you give away every copy you buy, read it yourself, whatever your age. It is a classic and a keeper.