Speak Bird Speak Again

by Folktales

  Folktale sessions do not go on for long hours into the night, partly because the fellahin go to bed early but also because a natural rhythm, or span of attention, exists beyond which telling and listening become tedious. The length of a session is determined by the audience and the mood. If adults outnumber the children, the tales are likely to be more serious; with more children, shorter and more humorous stories are likely to be told. If people feel bored, or if there is an interruption from the outside, the session will come to an end. At any rate it rarely lasts longer than the time it would take to narrate four or five tales. Spontaneity is essential.

  The Palestinian folktale is part of the Arabic folk narrative tradition. The tales are told in the Palestinian dialect, with its two major divisions of fallahi (village speech) and madani (city speech). Most of the tales included here were narrated by villagers only because tellers were more available in the villages, where the tendency to preserve folk traditions is today much greater than in the cities. In times past, however, the folktale tradition was as popular in cities as in villages, perhaps even more so since city dwellers had more leisure time compared with peasants, who were tied to the cycle of the seasons. City dwellers tend to be more polished in their use of language than villagers, and they are less likely to hold the variety of folk beliefs exhibited by village tellers.

  The tradition, as we have noted, is carried on mostly by older women in a household setting, but it is not unusual for girls and prepubescent boys to tell tales to one another or to their younger brothers and sisters for practice or pleasure. When going visiting, for example, parents will sometimes tempt their younger children to stay at home with promises of tales from their older brothers and sisters. Once puberty is reached, however, the boys will stop telling the tales; they now want to be regarded as men, who consider the telling of folktales a womanly, household activity, one intimately connected with the rearing of children. Before radio and television, folktales were the main form of entertainment for the young during the evenings. They were universally popular throughout the country, and there are very few Palestinians over the age of forty who have not heard them on at least one occasion. Their preservation up to the present day attests to this popularity.

  Tellers have little room to improvise. Their function, as the audience understands it, is to give the tale its due by narrating it with all the stylistic devices and verbal flourishes at their command, but they may not change any of the details. Despite this expectation on the part of the audience, however, variation does arise (and necessarily so, for without variation the folktale traditions of the world would have ossified and died out long ago). Narrative details, or folk motifs, can fit into more than one plot context, and it would be surprising if different motifs were not woven into the same tale. The important consideration here, however, is not how variation comes into being - a thorny theoretical question in any case - but what the attitudes of tellers and audience toward that variation are. If a teller should narrate a tale with details different from the ones the audience knows, she will never claim originality but will always say she is telling it the way she remembers it. Or she might say she knows two versions of the tale and has decided to tell one rather than the other. Both explanations are acceptable to the audience. In this manner, once a new motif enters a tale it becomes a part of it, particularly for those hearing it for the first time.

  The folktale tradition we have been describing falls within the context of the extended family and forms part of the social life of a settled and flourishing peasant community. With the recent displacement of the Palestinian people, the social and geographic bases for the tradition have been severely disrupted. Certainly, the frequency of taletelling sessions has declined markedly, and with the people's continued dispersal the chances that the tradition will survive are dim. Modern, educated Palestinian parents are more likely to read than tell tales to their children, and the tales they do read are frequently European ones translated into Modem Standard Arabic. Because, as we have said, the colloquial language is itself an essential aspect of the experience of the tale, the children of today are not hearing the same tales their parents did.

  Yet in spite of the odds against it, the tradition still survives. Grandmothers in the villages and refugee camps still tell the tales to the children, and young people interested in the tradition do become active car-tiers. One of the tellers included in this volume is a twenty-two-year-old woman from the West Bank (Tale 31).

  The Tellers

  There is nothing unusual about the seventeen tellers from whom the tales were collected. They do not think of themselves primarily as taletellers, nor do they feel they have a special ability. They are all householders, the great majority (fourteen) being housewives who can neither read nor write. Only two of them live in a city (Gaza and Jerusalem); the others have lived in villages all their lives. To introduce readers to the life circumstances of the tellers, we have chosen to focus on those among them who have. given us the largest number of tales. Knowledge of their circumstances will help us understand the tales they have told.

  Fatme (Tales 1, 9, 11, 23, 24, 26, 36, 38, 43), fifty-five years old when these tales were collected, is a housewife who lives in the village of Arrabe in the Galilee, next door to her father's family. Married to her (patrilateral parallel) first cousin, she has never lived more than twenty yards from the house of her birth. She has given birth to twenty live children, eleven of whom have survived. A passive carrier of the tradition, she does not normally tell tales, nor is she known in the village as a teller. When she did consent to tell some tales, she was apologetic because she could not remember details quickly enough. Not being literate or a regular teller, she was not entirely comfortable using the flourishes that enhance the style of the tales. She apologized frequently when using them, saying that was the way she had heard them from her mother. Nevertheless, she is a good conversationalist and, in spite of all her apologies, told the tales well.

  The presence of the collector's children, who were hearing these tales for the first time, was a great help in drawing the material from her. She would not have told the tales straight into the cassette machine, or to an audience composed only of adults. The children made her feel it was not a serious matter, and, not surprisingly, most of the tales she related are those that could be considered "children's tales." Enjoying the telling, she laughed along with the children at the funny spots; the relaxed mood no doubt colored her choice of material, for her tales are among the most humorous in the entire corpus. (A good teller in a natural taletelling situation, it must be noted, would normally not break the spell of narration so frequently, commenting on the action and laughing with the audience. She would give the tale its due by telling it as it should be told, leaving the rest to the audience.)

  Safi, in contrast, is an active carrier of the tradition, that is, one of four or five in any village community who show an intense personal interest in preserving and transmitting the practice. Because he has a good memory, his repertoire is large, and he is always seeking to increase it. He differs from most other active carriers in being male and in having learned to read simple texts. He therefore has access to the material from the Arabic oral tradition available in print, such as the epic story (sira) of Abu Zed il-Hilali and tales from the Thousand and One Nights, which have left an indelible mark on his work. Indeed, he at times had recited parts of the epic stories, performing them to an audience of friends at his home in Arrabe (Galilee).

  These few facts tell us a great deal about his tales (5, 8, 10, 15, 25, 44), which most resemble the type of adventure tale available in print. At age sixty-five, he is a mature teller. His sense of plotting and double-plotting is superb, and his narrative style is highly polished. The actions in his tales evolve logically, and the transitions are natural; there is none of the clumsiness in delivery or forgetfulness of detail that collectors sometimes encounter. Having been a shepherd and a plowman all his life, he has direct knowledge of the land and i
ts contours and of the details of the husbandman's daily life. The material culture of the Palestinian peasant is open to our gaze in his tales, as are human virtues and vices. Being an experienced teller, he was able to pace himself, filling approximately one side of a sixty-minute cassette for each of his tales.

  His wife, Almaza (Tales 14, 18, 37), is also an active carrier of the tradition. She has told stories all her life, enjoys telling them, and prides herself on knowing many. Unlike Fatme, who has heard tales from only one source (her mother), Almaza has heard them from a wide variety of sources. She was in her late fifties when her tales were collected.

  At age sixty-five, Im Nabil (Tales 17, 19, 28, 30, 39) lived with her son in the village of Turmusayya (district of Ramallah) when we collected her tales. Like most of the other tellers, she could not read or write, but she knew many tales - long ones, short ones, humorous ones, tales of adventure, and "tales for children." In some respects she is the archetypal old woman, the repository of old wives' tales. Because she had not told the tales in a long time, her narration was not always fluent; she halted frequently, recalling details. Nevertheless, her delivery was authoritative, and she knew exactly the type of tale the collector was seeking. Of the eight she volunteered, five were selected for inclusion.

  Finally, a word about Im Darwis, who is responsible for two of the best tales in the collection (Tales 21, 45). She was about sixty-five when we recorded her. The daughter of the village chief of Der Hanna, she is married to the son of the village chief of Arrabe (both villages in the Upper Galilee). Although she can neither read nor write, unlike most of the other tellers she is not directly connected with agriculture. Both her tales weave prose and poetry in an organic manner, relying on a good memory for poetry and the ability to use it effectively in the structure of the tale. Tales like "Soqak Boqak" (Tale 21), a sophisticated romance, are rarely ever told by peasant tellers in a village milieu. Her mother, who was originally from the city of Haifa, had taught her both tales.

  The Tales and the Culture

  Having selected the forty-five tales to be included in this volume on the bases discussed earlier, we then had to arrange them so as to give the reader the most meaningful perspective. In many collections, tales are presented at random, without regard to form or content. We rejected this arrangement because it does not demonstrate an organic connection between the tales and the culture that gives rise to them. Other arrangements are based on the form of each tale - that is, on its Aarne-Thompson type number (for which, see Appendix C) - but this approach too was rejected on the same grounds. The best arrangement, we thought, is one that not only relates the tales to the context but also helps them cohere one to another. On considering the tales as a whole, we observed that they fit into a pattern reflecting an individual's life cycle from childhood to old age. We therefore decided to divide them according to this pattern into five thematic groups - individuals, family, society, environment, and universe - some of which are further divided into subgroups. These categories are useful only to the extent that they help us understand the tales; the discussion in the afterword to each group will make clear why certain tales were grouped together.

  Our decision to adopt this scheme is based on our desire to ground the tales in the culture from which they arise. It would be wrong to start out with the assumption that the tales merely reflect the culture, or that the culture constitutes the subject matter of the tales, for then their interest would be strictly regional, limited to the cultural area from which they came. Rather, the forms of these tales, which are derivable directly from the Arabic and Semitic traditions in folk narrative, are related also to the Indo-European tradition, with which they share recognizable plot patterns (as identified by Aarne-Thompson type numbers). Certainly, the form of each tale is part of its content. If, for example, we consider "Sackcloth" (Tale 14) on the basis of plot alone, we see that it is in essence the story of Cinderella (and indeed, both tales have the same Aarne-Thompson type number). To the extent that "Sackcloth" embodies a courtship ritual in which an eager male pursues an elusive female, the content (and meaning) of both tales is similar. Yet when we examine "Sackcloth" more carefully, it becomes apparent that much of its content is derivable from Palestinian (and Arab) culture. Therefore, knowledge of at least that part of the culture embodied in the folktales will enrich our study of them; without it, analysis would suffer from a certain degree of abstraction. The culture and the art form are not reducible to, or deducible from, each other. The tales do not simply mirror the culture; rather, and more accurately, they present a portrait of it. It would surely be of interest to readers of these folktales to observe how thoroughly that portion of their form which is common with other traditions has been adapted by local tellers to express indigenous realities. Then we will be better able not only to understand the tales as cultural documents but also to appreciate them as works of art.

  In the footnotes accompanying each tale and in some of the afterwords following each group, we will explore further specific aspects of this relationship between the tales and the culture. Our concern here is to present the general features of Palestinian culture that inform the tales - that is, the common assumptions that hold narrators, audience, and material together. The tales assume a stable social order, which no doubt characterized Palestinian society for hundreds of years before the advent of the British Mandate in the early 1920s; the current situation for most Palestinians, however, is one of diaspora and exile, requiring adaptation and cultural change. This is not to say that the cultural assumptions informing the tales and those prevailing in modern Palestinian society have been severed. Ideals of behavior that have developed through the institutions of the culture over countless generations do not simply vanish overnight. Even though the majority of Palestinians no longer live in extended families, for example, the standards of behavior characteristic of this ancient institution are still current in their social milieu. Indeed, the very survival of the tales as a tradition with a recognizable narrative structure, a coherent moral universe, and a set of assumptions immediately understandable to audience and narrator alike confirms the cultural continuity of Palestinian social life.

  The Palestinian folktale, as we have seen, is primarily a woman's art form, and certain stylistic features give the tales their particular character. Yet Western readers will be struck as much by the tone of the tales - the narrative voice that speaks through them - as by their style, for the tales empower the women who narrate them to traverse, in their speech, the bounds of social convention. This speech is direct, earthy, even scatological, but without awkwardness or self-consciousness. The narrators are keen observers of the society around them, particularly those features of the social structure that touch directly on their lives. Because the tale-tellers are older women who have gone through the cycle of life, they are free of blame and at the same time endowed with the experience and wisdom necessary to see through hypocrisy and contradiction.

  The "household" context of the tales, moreover, is that of the extended family, and our understanding would not be complete without some knowledge of the structure of this institution, within which women have traditionally spent their whole lives. As in the case of Fatme, older village women who have spent their lives with contact limited almost completely to the social unit that is the extended family are not uncommon. A Palestinian proverb says, "The household of the father is a playground, and that of the husband is an education" (bet il-'ahil talhiye, u-bet il-joz tarbiye). Whatever the truth of the proverb, the fact remains that a woman always belongs in one household or the other.

  Folktales, like other forms of narrative, thrive on conflict and its resolution, not only as a theme but for plot structure as well. As we shall see, the tellers do not have to invent situations of conflict, for they are common in the social milieu, just as the colloquial language, with all its expressive potential, is in the linguistic environment. The majority of conflicts embodied in the tales have their basis in the structure
of society - and necessarily so, if the tales are to be accepted as presenting a portrait of that society. The organizing or orienting principle in Palestinian life is the kinship system, which defines both social position and roles and modes of interaction. Out of this stable, conservative ground arise figures in the tales whose desires put them in conflict with the established order as represented by the dictates of the kinship system, and who in the long run must learn to harmonize their separate wills with the will of the collectivity. Much can be learned about conflict and harmony simply from contemplating the definition of the Palestinian family, which is extended, patrilineal, patrilateral, polygynous, endogamous, and patrilocal. (Unless otherwise indicated, all future reference to the "extended family" will be to the Palestinian version.) We consider the elements of this definition as structural patterns that generate the types of behavior encountered in the tales. By looking more closely at these elements, then, we can learn something about the grammar of that behavior.

  The extended Palestinian family has traditionally had three or more generations living in close proximity as one economic unit, sharing all income and expenses, with ultimate authority lying in the hands of the patriarch who heads it. It is patrilineal because descent is traced through the father, patrilateral because only the relatives on the father's side are considered relatives in the formal system of relationship, and patrilocal