Memory, Postmemory, and the Thirdspace of Resistance in Naomi Shihab Nye's "1935"

This paper explores Naomi Shihab Nye’s prose poem “1935” through the interrelated theoretical frameworks of Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, Marianne Hirsch’s Postmemory, and the tradition of Resistance Literature. Drawing from Nye’s personal and poetic inheritance of her Palestinian father’s memories, the poem becomes a literary artefact that negotiates between historical trauma and imaginative reconstruction. At the heart of the poem lies a childhood photograph of Nye’s father in pre-1948 Jerusalem—an image that transcends mere familial nostalgia to become a site of cultural testimony and political resistance. This study argues that Nye transforms the photograph into a third space—a hybrid zone where fragmented postmemories, cultural identity, and emotional geographies converge to challenge the erasure of Palestinian narratives. Through the experimental form of prose poetry, Nye resists conventional aesthetic and ideological boundaries, offering instead a fluid, introspective mode of storytelling. The paper further investigates the everyday and intimate as loci of political resistance, demonstrating how Nye elevates the ordinary—waiting for bread, a child’s smile—into acts of enduring cultural survival. By applying Barthes’ photographic triad of operator, spectacle, and spectator, the poem is read as both a memorial and a dialogue across time, identity, and silence. Ultimately, “1935” emerges as a poetic counter-archive—an intergenerational map of memory and identity that stands against historical displacement and cultural erasure, situating Nye’s work within a broader tradition of diasporic, postcolonial resistance writing.