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Sitti means grandmother in Arabic, and in this lyrical
picture book an American child misses her grandmother who lives in a
Palestinian village "on the other side of the earth." The child
remembers when she visited Sitti. They didn't speak the same
language: at first they talked through her father, who spoke both
English and Arabic, and then they invented their own language with
signs and hums and claps. She remembers the house and the
countryside, the culture and the clothes, and the intimacy of
brushing Sitti's hair. She also remembers the painful leave-taking
("Even my father kept blowing his nose and walking outside"), and
back in the U.S., she writes a letter to the President: "If the
people of the United States could meet Sitti, they'd like her, for
sure." Carpenter's paintings show the physical bond between child
and grandmother when they're close and their imaginary connection
when they're far away from each other. Like the human embrace, the
pictures flow with soft curving lines of clothes and hills, birds
and sky, all part of the circle of the rolling earth. There are too
few books like this one about Arabs and Arab Americans as people.
Nye edited the powerful global poetry collection for older readers,
This Same Sky (1992); that title applies here, too, showing
that "people are far apart, but connected." Every child who longs
for a distant grandparent will recognize the feeling. Hazel
Rochman |
