By: MATTIE SPINK
Staff Writer
“Making a Fist” is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye that depicts a seven-year-old girl overcoming her sickness in the backseat of a car while her mother drives. This story is meant to explore themes of morality along with the strength that is resilience in the face of adversity. The poem is structured in free verse, all within 3 short stanzas. The speaker is the seven-year-old girl, who is presumed to be Naomi Shihab Nye herself in her youth. This poem confronts the complexities of death by prompting the narrator to ask her mother the signs of recognizing her own death due to the pain she feels from her sickness.
The poem has 17 total lines, all within 3 stanzas. The short length of the poem is meant to symbolize the shortness of life. The first stanza contains 6 lines, with 3 of them being enjambment lines and the other 3 being end-stopped. These first 6 lines have a rather youthful point of view, despite hinting at topics much grimmer. The poem opens with personification: “For the first time, on the road north of Tampico, / I felt the life sliding out of me” (1-2). This personification of life as a physical thing creates an image in the audience’s head, emphasizing just how unwell the speaker felt at this moment. It also captures the sense of disorientation and vulnerability that often comes with realizing one’s morality. The speaker is only a child, lying in the backseat of a car and watching the world pass by outside. This feeling only increases with the sensory details of the palm trees creating a “sickening pattern” as the narrator passes by them in the car and causing the narrator to feel as though her “stomach was a melon split wide inside [her] skin” (5-6). These descriptions of how the speaker views her life at that given moment make the audience feel unease as they come to terms with their morality alongside the speaker, contradicting the innocent tone that comes with the childish metaphors used to create this unease. The tone then shifts between the ending of the first stanza and the beginning of the second stanza from a more pure tone to a serious one with a single question: “How do you know if you are going to die?” (7). This line finally explicitly acknowledges a strong motif found in this poem: death. Though the topic of morality had been looming over the poem since the beginning, this is the first time that death itself is directly mentioned, which leaves readers feeling shocked. Long gone is the innocence of a child, for she has recognized that death is now a real possibility. Her mother’s answer, “When you can no longer make a fist,” is both mysterious and reassuring (11). The idea of making a fist becomes a powerful symbol throughout the rest of the poem, representing the speaker’s fear of death and her determination to hold onto life. But more than that, we come to realize that making a fist also represents resilience against all struggles of life when the speaker reflects on her journey and the lessons she learned from it in the third stanza. She describes herself as “still lying in the backseat behind all [her] questions, clenching and opening one small hand” (16-17). The image of the speaker, now a grown adult, still making a fist in order to test her own strength demonstrates the impact her mother’s words had on her and her determination to make the most of her life, struggles and all.
To me, “Making a Fist” reminds me to count my blessings and hold them close to me. Through vivid imagery and powerful metaphors, Naomi Shihab Nye captures the complex emotions that arise in the face of challenges, represented here through death, while also offering a sense of hope and resilience in the face of adversity. When I read this poem, I too find myself making a fist, a symbol of my own strength and resilience.