Nani Explication

 

     The poem Nani, by Alberto Rios, is a very personal poem about the author himself. In 1952, Alberto Alvaro Ríos was born on the American side of the city of Nogales, Arizona, on the Mexican border. As a child he spoke both the English and Spanish language, and the poem shows his multicultural upbringing. Because he was punished in school for speaking Spanish, he slowly started to lose his ability to speak Spanish. His poem Nani describes an encounter with his Spanish speaking grandmother and his inability to communicate with her. Through body language, food, and culture, they find ways to understand each other without the use of words.

     Nani is written as a sestina. A sestina usually consists of six stanzas for the body of the poem, with each line ending in one of six chosen end words. The poem ends with three lines called an envoi, which includes the same repeated end words. The peculiar thing about Nani is the fact that it instead of six stanza’s, it only has three (two stanzas and one envoi). By only using three stanza’s it backs up the theme of the poem – the lack of communication between the boy and grandmother. The form of the poem is in a way dominated by the lack of communication between the two characters - the stanzas shrink. The poem has two stanzas, which could be one for each character, and because they are separate or split, it shows the lonesomeness between them.

     The six end words are crucial to the flow and meaning of a sestina, and in the poem Nani, it utilizes the words “serves, me, her, words, more, and speak”. The word SERVE can be seen as someone who serves someone else or someone who offers help. In the poem, the grandmother serves her grandson “sopa de arroz” showing her culture and her care she has for him. “ME” found him to be embarrassed and discomfited by the fact that he felt that he wasn’t able to give something back to his grandmother. “HER” is used throughout the poem as a form of communication and for the boy to simply watch his grandmother be, “I watch her,” “looks at me only with her back,” “I tell her I taste mint, and watch her speak smiles at the stove.” WORDS is one of the main parts of the theme – the idea that neither character has the words to speak or express the importance of one another to each other, “I own no words to stop her.” The word MORE is used in the poem to mainly provide us with an example of how the grandmother and grandson communicate – with food and culture. The grandmother, as most grandmothers would do, feeds and spoils her grandson. The boy feels so much love towards his grandmother that he wouldn’t dare to stop her. Finally, the word SPEAK. The importance of speak is the boys loss of his Spanish culture, he can no longer speak it or understand it, which provokes different unsettling feelings when he’s with his grandmother. 

     The poem Nani has a tone of love and sadness. The two characters love each other very much, but the boy feels like he’s allowing his grandmother to serve him in a way that he cannot return her favor. However, the boy understands that her serving (especially family) is the “tremendous string around her, holding her together.”  He’s upset that he cannot communicate with her especially with the age she is at, “I wonder how much of me will die with her, what were the words I could have been, was. Her insides speak through a hundred wrinkles, now, more than she can bear, steal around her, shouting.” He fears that he’s running out of time to rebuild his communication of words with her. He loves her so much that he questions how much of himself he will lose when she’s not around any longer.