My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop

In an interview on Idaho Public Television in 2012, Nye said of poetry: “I think it’s our job as human beings to keep extending our empathy” (“Naomi Shihab Nye: Sun Valley Writers' Conference.” IdahoPTV Video, 25 Oct. 2012, Accessed 29 Oct. 2021). This sentiment is key to her body of work, and often intertwines with political or cultural motivations. In “My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop,” Nye offers an empathetic portrait of a specific immigrant life, asking her readers to understand his humanity first, apart from any political opinions they might hold. By not naming the home country to which the uncle returns, Nye maintains focus on the man as an individual being and not the complicated and violent politics of the unnamed country. A reader might assume the country is Palestine, as Nye is the child of a Palestinian refugee, but the purpose of the poem is to humanize the uncle—not to make an argument about conflict in the Middle East. This doesn’t mean Nye ignores the political realities and complications of both America and the uncle’s home country. Throughout the poem, she alludes to conflict in both places: America has a “television full of lies” (Line 16), and the old country, the reader intuits, has been mired in violence.