Speak Bird Speak Again
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SPEAK BIRD, SPEAK AGAIN
The book contains a collection of 45 Palestinian folk tales drawn from a collection of two hundred tales narrated by women from different areas of historic Palestine (the Galilee, the West Bank, and Gaza). The stories collected were chosen on the basis of their popularity, their aesthetic and narrative qualities, and what they tell about popular Palestinian culture dating back many centuries. The authors spent 30 years collecting the material for the book Speak, Bird, Speak Again: A book of Palestinian folk tales is a book first published in English in 1989 by Palestinian authors Ibrahim Muhawi and professor of sociology and anthropology at Bir Zeit University Sharif Kanaana. After the original English book of 1989, a French version, published by UNESCO, followed in 1997, and an Arabic one in Lebanon in 2001.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
KEY TO REFERENCES
INTRODUCTION
The Tales
The Tellers
The Tales and the Culture
The Tales and Authority in the Society
Food in Society and the Tales
Religion and the Supernatural
THE TALES
Notes on Presentation and Translation
GROUP I INDIVIDUALS
CHILDREN AND PARENTS
1. Tunjur, Tunjur
2. The Woman Who Married Her Son
3. Precious One and Worn-out One
4. Swes, Swes!
5. The Golden Pail
Afterword
SIBLINGS
6. Half-a-Halfling
7. The Orphans' Cow
8. Sumac! You Son of a Whore, Sumac!
9. The Green Bird
10. Little Nightingale the Crier
Afterword
SEXUAL AWAKENING AND COURTSHIP
11. The Little Bird
12. Jummez Bin Yazur, Chief of the Birds
13. Jbene
14. Sackcloth
15. Sahin
Afterword
THE QUEST FOR THE SPOUSE
16. The Brave Lad
17. Gazelle
18. Lolabe
Afterword
GROUP II FAMILY
BRIDES AND BRIDEGROOMS
19. The Old Woman Ghouleh
20. Lady Tatar
21. Soqak Boqak!
22. Clever Hasan
23. The Cricket
Afterword
HUSBANDS AND WIVES
24. The Seven Leavenings
25. The Golden Rod in the Valley of Vermilion
26. Minjal
27. Im Ese
Afterword
FAMILY LIFE
28. Chick Eggs
29. The Ghouleh of Trans-Jordan
30. Bear-Cub of the Kitchen
31 The Woman Whose Hands Were Cut Off
32. N ayyis (Little Sleepy One)
Afterword
GROUP III SOCIETY
33. Im Awwad and the Ghouleh
34 The Merchant's Daughter
35. Pomegranate Seeds
36. The Woodcutter
37. The Fisherman
Afterword
GROUP IV ENVIRONMENT
38. The Little She-Goat T
39. The Old Woman and Her Cat
40. Dunglet
41. The Louse
Afterword
GROUP V UNIVERSE
42. The Woman Who Fell into the Well
43. The Rich Man and the Poor Man
44. Ma ruf the Shoemaker
45. Im Ali and Abu Ali
Afterword
FOLKLORISTIC ANALYSIS
APPENDIX A: TRANSLITERATION
APPENDIX B: INDEX OF FOLK MOTIFS
APPENDIX C: LIST OF TALES BY TYPE
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
FOOTNOTE INDEX
Speak Bird, Speak Again
Palestinian Arab Folktales
Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana
FOREWORD
It was with great pleasure that I watched a joint collaborative effort between a man of letters and a social scientist come to fruition. The marvelous results of this partnership lie in the pages ahead. Not only are there forty-five splendid Palestinian Arab folktales to be savored, but we are also offered a rare combination of ethnographic and literary glosses on details that afford a unique glimpse into the subtle nuances of Palestinian Arab culture. This unusual collection of folktales is destined to be a classic and will surely serve as a model for future researchers in folk narrative.
For the benefit of those readers unfamiliar with the history of folktale collection and publication, let me explain why Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales represents a significant departure from nearly all previous anthologies or samplers of folktales. When the Grimm brothers collected fairy tales, or Marchen, from peasant informants in the first decades of the nineteenth century, they did so in part for nationalistic and romantic reasons: they wanted to salvage what they regarded as survivals of an ancient Teutonic heritage, to demonstrate that this culture was the equal of classical (Greek and Roman) as well as prestigious modern (French) cultures. The publication of Kinder-und Hausmarchen in 1812 and 1815 sparked a host of similar collections of fairy tales from other countries by scholars imbued with the same combination of nationalism and romanticism. By the end of the nineteenth century, numerous folklore societies and periodicals had been initiated to further the collection and analysis of all types of traditional peasant art, music, and oral literature.
Unfortunately, despite the laudable stated aims of these pioneering collectors to preserve unaltered the precious folkloristic art forms of the local peasantry, all too often they actually rewrote or otherwise manipulated the materials so assiduously gathered. One reason for this intrusiveness was the longstanding elitist notion that literate culture was infinitely superior to illiterate culture. Thus the oral tales were made to conform to the higher canons of taste found in written literature, and oral style was replaced by literary convention. The Grimms, for example, began to combine different versions of the "same" folktale, producing composite texts which they presented as authentic - despite the fact that no raconteur had ever told them in that form.
The Grimms and their imitators were trying to create a patrimony for purposes of national pride (long before Germany was to become a nation in the modern sense), and tampering with oral tradition suited their goals. Texts that are rewritten, censored, simplified for children, or otherwise modified may well be enjoyed by readers conditioned to the accepted literary stylistics of so-called high culture. Such texts, however, are of negligible scientific value. If one wishes to understand peasant values and thought patterns, one needs contact with peasant folktales, not the prettified, sugar-coated derivatives reworked by dilettantes.
Sad to say, the vast majority of nineteenth-and even twentieth-century folktale collections fail to meet the minimum criteria of scientific inquiry. The tales are typically presented with no cultural context or discussion. Of their meaning (we do not even know if their tellers were male or female), and rarely is a concerted attempt made to compare a particular corpus of tales with other versions of the same tale types. Let the reader think back on folktale anthologies he or she may have read, as either a child or an adult. How many of these standard collections of folktales contained any scholarly apparatus linking the content of particular tales to the cultures from which they came? Appallingly, these criticisms apply even to collections of folktales published by reputable folklorists. The highly regarded Folktales of the World series, published by the University of Chicago Press, for example, includes volumes of
bona fide folktales from many countries, but the tales are accompanied by only minimal comparative annotation. The reader may be informed that a given folktale is identifiable as an instance of an international tale type (as defined by the Aarne-Thompson typology, available since 1910), but little or no information is given on how the tales reflect, let us say, German, Greek, or Irish culture as a whole. This criticism applies as well to most folktale anthologies published in other countries.
Another reason for the inadequacy of nineteenth-century folktale collections, especially those representing countries outside Europe, is that the collectors were typically not from the place where the tales were told. English, French, German, and other European colonialist administrators, missionaries, and travelers recorded stories they found quaint or amusing. Either informants self-censored the tales to protect their image or else the collectors, who were not necessarily fully fluent in the native languages, simply omitted details they deemed obscene (by their own cultures' standards) or elements that were not altogether clear to them. Thus most nineteenth-century collections of tales from India or the Middle East contain only the blandest tales, sometimes in severely abridged or abstract form, with no hint of even the slightest bawdy or risqué motifs. Although folklorists today are not ungrateful for these early versions of folktales, they cannot condone the lack of honesty in the reporting of them. What remains badly needed are collections of folktales made by fieldworkers whose roots are in the region and who speak the native language of the taletellers.
In the present volume we have two scholars with the requisite expertise. Ibrahim Muhawi was born in 1937 in Ramallah, Palestine (nine miles north of Jerusalem). After completing high school at the Friends Boys' School in Ramallah, he went to the United States where, in 1959, he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering at Heald Engineering College in San Francisco. Then came a dramatic shift of intellectual gears, with a B.A. (magna cum laude) in English from California State University at Hayward (1964), followed quickly by an M.A. (1966) and a Ph.D. (1969), both also in English, from the University of California, Davis. After teaching English at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada (1969-1975), and at the University of Jordan in Amman (1975-1977), Muhawi joined the English department at Birzeit University in the West Bank, where he served as department chairman from 1978 to 1980. It was there that he met the coauthor of this book.
Sharif Kanaana was born in Arrabe in the Galilee, Palestine, in 1935, and he too received his higher education in the United States. Following a 1965 B.A. in psychology and economics from Yankton College in South Dakota, he transferred to the University of Hawaii where he was awarded an M.A. (1968) and doctorate (1975) in anthropology. After teaching anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh for four years (1972-1975), he became chairman (1975-1980) of the sociology department at Birzeit University, and from 1980 to 1984 he was affiliated with An-Najah National University, West Bank, as dean of the Faculty of Arts (1980-1982) and acting president of the university (1982-1984). In 1984 he became the director of the Birzeit University Research and Documentation Center.
In 1978, when Muhawi was teaching modern poetry, Shakespeare, and composition courses at Birzeit University, he was reintroduced to a rich tradition of Palestinian folklore through the pages of a locally published journal, Heritage and Society (Al-turath wa-al-mujtama). Although he had grown up with this tradition, his formal education first in engineering and later in English literature had not led him to seriously consider it as an object of study. Now, however, he began to remember his childhood when he would seek out and avidly listen to the tales of the best raconteurs in the town of Ramallah.
During this time, Sam Pickering of the University of Connecticut, a former Fulbright Scholar at the University of Jordan and a colleague of Muhawi, assumed the editorship of Children's Literature . He wrote to Muhawi asking for illustrations of Palestinian traditions. Muhawi approached Sharif Kanaana, whom he knew as an advisory editor of Heritage and Society and as author of several papers on Palestinian folklore that had appeared in that journal. He discovered that Kanaana had already collected a substantial sampling of Palestinian folktales, and when he heard the oral renditions on tape he was spellbound by their esthetic quality and expressive power. The two scholars decided to pool their talents and collect, from throughout Palestine, as many types of tales from as wide a range of raconteurs as possible.
Collecting the tales proved to be only the first step. Transcribing and translating the tales took many, many hours of arduous, meticulous work. Then, to make the tales intelligible to readers unfamiliar with Palestinian society, Muhawi and Kanaana elected to prepare a comprehensive yet succinct cultural overview with special emphasis on family dynamics. The ethnographic portrait provided in the introductory essay is a remarkable achievement, and it certainly facilitates a better understanding of the tales that follow. The relationships and tensions between generations, siblings, in-laws, and males and females are lucidly delineated. The anthropological influence is also felt in the very organization and sequential order of the tales, which move from the concerns of childhood through the life cycle to the intricate details of marriage arrangement and beyond. The anthropological bias, however, is always balanced by attention to literary topics; the poetics of opening and closing formulas, for example, are discussed in depth, and careful comparative annotations relate these tales to other Arabic folktales as well as to the international folktale scholarship in general.
This extraordinary combination of anthropological and literary expertise has achieved a set of exquisite folktales, translated accurately, sensitively, and lovingly, together with a dazzling array of ethnographic and folkloristic notes providing a landmark entree into Palestinian Arab ethos and worldview. I am not sure either of the coauthors could have written this volume alone. It is precisely because such close attention was paid to the concerns of the humanist and the social scientist alike that this collection of folktales is so special.
This collection is important for yet another, political reason. These tales belong to a people, the Palestinian Arabs. Whatever one's view is of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, it cannot be denied that the event caused considerable dislocation and fragmentation of the Palestinian Arab people. It is somewhat analogous to the colonial powers in earlier times claiming territory which was already occupied. It is perhaps a tragic irony of history that the Jews, who themselves have been forced by bigotry and prejudice to wander from country to country seeking even temporary sanctuary, have through the formation of a "homeland" caused another people to become homeless. Although this complex issue has engendered great emotion on all sides, one fact is beyond dispute: there was once an area of the world called Palestine, where the Arab inhabitants had - and have - a distinctive culture all their own. It is that culture that is preserved so beautifully in the magical stories contained in this volume. In this context, all people, regardless of political persuasion, should be able to appreciate the value of these magnificent folktales: as oral products of the creative spirit of the human mind, they belong not just to the Palestinian Arab community but to all humankind.
Some readers may choose not to refer to the scholarly apparatus, preferring instead to enjoy only the tales themselves, but scholars will surely be grateful for the thoughtful notes and "afterwords" the authors have provided. I have repeatedly heard literary folklorists claim that the fairy tale genre is dead. These misguided academics continue to pore over such purely literary collections as the Arabian Nights or the celebrated collections of Perrault and the Grimms, not realizing that the fairy tale is alive and well in the modern world. This collection of Palestinian Arab folk-tales includes a great many fairy tales (i.e., Aarne-Thompson tale types 300-749), and they provide eloquent testimony that the fairy tale still flourishes. Such tales, I have little doubt, will be told as long as birds sing!
ALAN DUNDES
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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bsp; Every book is a collective effort and this one, even more than most, is no exception. The authors are happy to acknowledge the contribution of the following individuals and organizations to the completion of this book.
First and foremost, of course, our thanks are due to the women and men from whom the tales were collected - those for whom we have names as well as those for whom we do not. For initial encouragement to proceed toward publication, we are grateful to Dr. Sam Pickering. For help during the long evenings in the village of Birzeit, where we sat hammering out rhymes and discussing the proper level of formality for the translation, we wish to thank Donna Bothen and Terrance Cox. For his advice on specific matters relating to Palestinian and Arab culture, and for his general concern over the welfare of the project and his unstinting support of it throughout, we wish to thank Dr. Osama Doumani.
Thanks are also due to our colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, for their invaluable support and encouragement. We are grateful to Dr. Bridget Connelly and Dr. Laurence Michalak for their comments on the first draft of the Introduction. For the generous contribution of her time in discussing certain aspects of the transliteration, we thank Barbara DeMarco. Dr. John R. Miles deserves our deepest gratitude for his unflagging support of the project from the moment he read the first draft of the tales in 1980. And to Professor Alan Dundes, for his enthusiasm about the work, his encouragement during difficult moments, and his guidance in folkloristic matters, we wish to express our most sincere appreciation.
For a very fruitful professional association, we thank also the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley and its staff (Dr. Ira Lapidus, Chairman; Dr. Laurence Michalak, Coordinator), as well as Dr. William Hickman, who originally invited Ibrahim Muhawi to become an associate of the Center. In particular, we are grateful to the Center for the postdoctoral fellowship awarded Dr. Muhawi in 1983.