My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop

“My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop” is a six-stanza free verse poem published in 1998 as a part of Naomi Shihab Nye’s collection Fuel. Through its descriptions of the eponymous coffee shop, the speaker of Nye’s poem uses the uncle figure to create a complex, humane portrait of an American immigrant experience. Ultimately, the uncle returns to his “old country” (Line 29), likely Palestine or another Arab country, and dies the week he arrives. Throughout the poem, the speaker attempts to make sense of her uncle’s immigrant experience and understand his motivations.

As a part of Fuel, which in addition to poems about families on the south Texas border examines the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, “My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop” has many of the hallmark characteristics of a Nye poem. Focusing on small, human details to access a larger political argument is common in Nye’s work, and this poem allows the uncle to speak, giving voice to his experience and offering him a kind of eulogy.

Poet Biography

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952 in St. Louis, Missouri—the child of a Palestinian refugee father and an American mother. Her family lived in the West Bank, the landlocked Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation, in 1966 before returning to San Antonio, Texas. Nye remained in the city, attending Trinity University for college, and quickly began publishing after graduation.

In 1980, Nye published her first full-length collection, Different Ways to Pray, which examines themes that became integral to her poetry over the following decades including explorations of the differences, conflicts, and shared experiences between divergent cultures and religions.

Nye became a prolific writer within multiple genres, releasing award-winning poetry collections as well as essays, translations, songs, children’s books, and young adult novels. In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Nye became a vocal supporter of Arab Americans, speaking out against the increasing prejudice she saw rising in the United States, while also denouncing terrorism. In 2002, Nye earned a National Book Award nomination for 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, which represented an effort to establish more open lines of communication between the two cultures. Other collections, including Fuel (1998), also examine the Middle East from her distinctive poetic lens, and continue to earn critical acclaim and awards.

The Poetry Foundation recently awarded Nye the Young People’s Poet Laureate, a post she will hold through 2021. Currently a creative writing professor at Texas State University, Nye has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations, and won the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Robert Creeley Prize, many Pushcart Prizes, and other awards. Her most recent collection is Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (2020).

Poem Text

Nye, Naomi Shihab. “My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop.” 1998. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop” begins with a description of steam rising from a cup of coffee, and moves into a description of a barista, Barbara, who knows a coffee shop patron so well that she presents their order without their having to ask. Nye describes the comfort of this relationship, and the specific pleasure it offers the immigrant, who can have their ordered delivered “without saying” (Line 7) anything.

In the second stanza, Nye describes the speaker’s uncle in more detail, and gives him a voice. He has a particular booth that he frequents at the coffee shop in question, and he says, “I cannot tell you—how I love this place,” (Line 9). He drinks a glass of ice water, and the speaker muses that he “hailed from an iceless region” (Line 11) and had “definite ideas about water drinking” (Line 12). She notes that he uses the particular phrase, “I cannot tell you” (Line 13), all the time, but despite his claim, he would always attempt to articulate what he wanted to say.

The third stanza, the longest of the poem, examines in greater detail the uncle’s life in the United States. The speaker notes he “wore a white shirt every day of his life” (Line 14) and experiences a multitude of threatening things, like the “roaring ocean / and the television full of lies” (Lines 15-16). She emphasizes the duality of his immigrant experience, saying, “[h]e shook his head back and forth / from one country to the other” (Lines 17-18). The speaker pulls the focus back to a more macro level, describing the roles immigrants often fill—driving taxis, selling beer and sodas—and claims they “had double and nothing all at once” (Line 20). She returns to her uncle and his experience with the English language, how when he would “[f]ind one note that rang true, / he sang it over and over inside” (Lines 22-23). And while the uncle felt at home at the coffee shop, “he never became” (Line 27) the people in other booths who seem more at ease with their “loose banter and casual clothes” (Line 26).

The speaker writes that after 23 years in America, her uncle, “in a bravado moment” (Line 28), decides to leave and return to his home country. The speaker says, “maybe it would be peaceful now” (Line 32), although it is unclear if this is her uncle’s hope and voice, or her own projection. The uncle’s voice interjects once more, saying “I cannot tell you—how my heart has settled at last” (Line 33) as the speaker describes how she and others took leave of her uncle.

Before moving into the last stanza and recounting her uncle’s death, Nye places a single phrase as the penultimate stanza: “I cannot tell—” (Line 37). The speaker’s voice in the final lines is flat and resigned, as she says that what she cannot tell is “how we felt / to learn that the week he arrived, / he died” (Lines 38-40). She claims that she also cannot tell the reader what it is like now, in the aftermath, driving to the same coffee shop to sit in his booth and order “oh, anything, because if we don’t, nothing will come” (Lines 43-44).