SPEAK BIRD, SPEAK AGAIN - Palestinian Arab Folk Tales
by Ibrahim Muhawi, and Sharif Kanaana, University of California
Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1989. POINT OF DEPARTURE - Letters from Prison
by Izzat Ghazzawi, Arab Center for Contemporary Studies. Jerusalem
1993. reviewed by GALIT HASAN-ROKEM
For the sake of the song
The innocent wandering bird, mingling mellow notes in the window,
Her voice today as her voice that calls
Five, ten, twenty years ago.
Almost nothing has changed, the same
Layers of wind and earth
Breathe soul into her body, fire in her flight, In her voiced
message
Not so man, gathered from the comers of the earth, as an imagined
people. But his tongue is a mixture. For the sake of the song
'The singer invents a dream, a distant tongue. Yair Horowitz from Relationships and Worry
(Translation)
The book, Speak, Bird, Speak Again, is one of the best collections
of folk stories published in recent years. Its two authors, Ibrahim
Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana edited the stories in an order that
expresses their approach to their significance. The same approach
is evident in the chapter headings to the stories: Individuals
(Subtitles: Children and Parents, The Quest for the Spouse), Family
(Subtitles: Husbands and Wives), Society, Environment, Universe.
Folk tales, then, are judged by their social ecology, expressed in
a concentric circle, with the individual at the center and the
world at the circumference. The variation of the stories does not,
to be sure, permit the assigning of a story to one group only: what
seems related to the individual often touches the whole society,
just as a story about the world can deal with family matters.
The composition of the chapters expresses a clear ideological
approach, seeking harmony between the
individual-family-society-world. This harmony is one of the
classical representations of traditional society in the eyes of
people belonging to a modern society. I believe that this
representation mainly expresses the modern experience of our life
as lacking harmony.
Ibrahim Muhawi, born in Ramallah, who left his country for the
United States in the 1950s, is an American-Palestinian scholar,
whose field has been English literature. He renewed his connection
with the traditional folk tales of his people when teaching at
Birzeit University at the end of the 1970s. Sharif Kanaana, born in
Arrabe in Galilee, is an Israeli citizen, who also studied in the
United States, in his case anthropology. Since 1975, he has been
teaching that subject at Birzeit and AI-Najah Universities. His
work has been presented at international forums, particularly those
dealing with folk narratives coming out of the Intifada.
Social unity as an ideal, reflected in the organization of the
stories, receives an additional significance against the background
of the political struggle of the Palestinians against the Israeli
occupation. This does not appear in the stories as such. They are
of a genre in which the world depicted by the author is distanced
from the reality of the narrator and the audience, by various
techniques of style and content, such as talking and humanized
animals, supernatural phenomena, linguistic formulations, rhymes,
and rich musical language. But the fact that this book is written
out of the spirit of the struggle is profoundly conveyed, both in
the authors' introduction, and in the passages educating the reader
in the geography of Palestine-Israel, and also in Palestinian
expressions and customs that appear in the stories. To the modern
man's longing for harmony are added the special problems of the
authors, as representatives of the Palestinian diaspora - Muhawi -
and the Palestinians living under occupation - Kanaana (to a
certain extent because of his association with West Bank
Universities).
The historical process of acquiring a specific national character,
as a cradle for the appearance of written literature from oral folk
tales is a known phenomenon of the past two centuries. The most
famous example is the volume of Tales for Children and Household by
the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (First edition 1812-1815),
which, like their collections of myths and legends, became one of
the comer-stones of the cultural unity of the German people,
unifying the tribes, scattered in various dukedoms and
principalities at that time. As a result of the work of the
Brothers Grimm, the Finnish writer Elias Loennrot created his epic
Kalevala, based on epic songs sung by many singers, and written
down by Loennrot and his colleagues, who went out from the capital
to the outlying villages to do the field work. The epic fulfilled a
central task in expressing the patriotism of the Finnish people, at
that time under Russian occupation, after centuries of Swedish
occupation.
It is possible that this was also the basis for Sefer Ha-Aggada
(the Book of Legends) of H. N. Bialik and Y. H. Ravnitzki. In the
almost total absence of a Hebrew oral tradition in their time, they
forged a connection between the Jewish and Hebrew national identity
and the ancient written sources of the sages, thereby missing, in a
way, the direct political effect achieved by the Brothers Grimm and
Loennrot. At the same time we must acknowledge the enormous
influence of this book on the establishment of a modem Hebrew
culture in the land of Israel.
The collection of Muhawi and Kanaana does not have the same
potential to influence Palestinian society as such, chiefly because
the authors decided to publish their texts and analyses in English.
The preference of the authors for a dialogue with their western
scholarly colleagues reflects the greater awareness in our time
that it is not enough for a national identity to develop inside the
particular society; but to establish itself, it has to be
recognized by other nations, hopefully the stronger ones such as
the United States of America. The advantage of this choice is that
the treasure house of stories in this book is available for
comparative research, which is still important in the study of
folklore, although it is being increasingly superceded by studies
that focus on the social and cultural context of folk tales.
The anthropological, social and cultural analysis in the long and
serious introduction of the authors reveals the human and social
basis of the stories. They depict a patriarchal society, full of
tensions and violent impulses, in which the personal security
granted to the individual is bought at the highest emotional (and
sometimes physical) price. The main tensions are rooted in
competition for the family property, and notions of honor that are
only partly based on a functional background of family unity in the
society. Notions of honor, expressed for the most part by the
savage repression of women, are a cumulative effect of the social
structure, but at the same time they possess an almost demonic
independence in Arab and Mediterranean culture, which has been
analyzed in all its complexity by the French sociologist, Pierre
Bourdieu in his book Algier 1960.
The jealousy of the brothers competing for the family property
aggravates and intensifies the repression of the women -
particularly the young women - in the humiliating status of brides
and sisters-in-law, torn between their loyalty to their husbands,
who sometimes treat them brutally, and their loyalty to their own
sex, to the other brides. While the women are often mutual
guarantors for each other, they feel the tension between loyalty
toward the representatives of the patriarchal society, the parents
of the husband - in particular the father - and loyalty to their
own family, which still exerts a strong hold over them, and over
their children, in the person of their brothers.
What stands out in this collection of stories is the abundance of
savage and unnatural themes, which is familiar in all folk stories
to the extent that a special category of motif has been established
for it in the indexing of folk literature. In folk tales, and in
folk culture generally, it is permissible to give expression to
forbidden feelings and impulses - in particular aggressive impulses
and sexual attraction toward unsuitable subjects, such as members
of the family. The unifying strand of the violent themes in this
connection is the special focus on violence within the family.
Children hurt their parents, brothers hurt each other, and
everybody hurts the young brides. Because of this complexity the
analysis of Muhawi and Kanaana is necessary, as is the comparative
research carried out on other folk literature.
Among the exciting cha¬racters in this collection are many
birds, and that is perhaps one of the reasons for the title. The
birds are generally characters enchanted by damaging forces, or
they change into birds, after being brutally murdered. Even birds
that are neither bewitched nor reincarnations behave in a
thoroughly human fash¬ion. In the story, The Green Bird, the
bird is the reincarnation of a son, who was murdered by his
stepmother and eaten by his father (without the father's
knowledge). At the end of the story, he returns to his human form
and punishes his evil parents by making them swallow nails, and he
repays the loyalty of his sister. The cry, "Speak, bird, speak
again," is uttered by the listeners after the bird's lament about
her bitter fate. Is it not natural that the cry of encouragement,
directed to someone imprisoned in a personality not her own, is the
title of a book representing the folk literature of a people asking
that its identity be recognized by itself and by its counterparts?
The cry, "Speak," expresses a positive relationship to the
communication of the individual and the generality in all
expression, even in the most personal grief. The stories, often
dealing with individuals struggling against the forces of darkness
and desiring their sexual expression, are a powerful instrument in
articulating the misfortune of the individual narrator.
In the story, Little Nightingale the Crier (p.102), the bird
reveals to everyone the exchange of her two sons and her daughter
for a puppy, a kitten and a stone by her jealous sisters, because
she married a prince and they married simple craftsmen. In the
story The Little Bird, the bird behaves as a human being in every
way, ordering a dress at the dressmakers, putting on make-up while
preparing for a party, singing of the beauty of her dress. The
prince hears her and shoots her, and she sings a song, praising his
marksmanship. Afterwards he plucks her feathers and she sings a
song in praise of this. Finally he cooks her and she sings in
praise of his cooking. After he has swallowed his dish, the prince
digests her and excretes her. Then the bird can take her revenge,
singing:
"Ho! ho! I saw the prince's hole, "It's red, red like a burning
coa1."
- a crude hint of masculine homosexuality.
According to the author-editors, this is one of the first stories
told to children, and as usual they have maintained the language of
the narration, including opening "in the name of Allah," formula
endings, leaving the story in the hands of the audience, and direct
appeals to the audience, in this case, My Little Darlings. At the
same time it is impossible to avoid thinking that the actions of
the prince toward the bird represent the sad story of the fate of
the woman, her sexual experience in a society that represses women.
The treatment of women by men reminds the old woman narrator of
shooting, plucking, cooking, eating, digesting and excreting.
In another story, the leader of the birds appears. He is Jumez
Bin-Yazur, Sheikk of the Birds. The basic plot is well known from
European folk literature, and also from Jewish folk tales. In the
well-known story of the girl, whose skin is as soft as cheese and
hence her name is Jbene (p.122), as a fulfillment of her barren
mother's wish (like the wish of Snow White's mother for a daughter
with skin as white as snow), the birds perform the function of the
heroine's cries of longing when she is far from home. Thus, when
the heroine is liberated from her servitude and marries the prince,
as anticipated, the narrator ends with a formula ending: "The bird
of this tale has flown, and now for another one," an end that
appears in several of the stories featuring birds. Thus the story
takes the form of a bird, and so the bird actually becomes a symbol
for the Palestinian folk tale.
The extraordinary significance of birds in the world of Palestinian
tales could be the answer to one of the riddles posed by Izzat
Ghazzawi's book, Point of Departure. This book is very
different from the tales we have been considering so far. It is a
collection of letters from prison. Its author, a resident of
Ramallah, has spent three years in prisons in southern Israel, in
Ashkelon and the Negev, charged with writing Intifada
leaflets.
The point of departure of the author is the unquestioning assertion
of the creative "I", even in the most difficult hours of
humiliation and confusion. His life-belt was his creativity, the
words that he joined together in his consciousness, every hour,
every minute, the literary creation in his language, the language
of the defeated, in an action of resistance of revolutionary
significance - particularly when the text was written down and
circulated among the prisoners.
This is a surprising book from several points of view. Firstly, it
is entirely lacking in self-pity or self-righteousness. We hear
very little about the prison guards, and when we do there is no
hatred or contempt. One chapter opens with a dialogue between the
author and an interrogator: 'Well, you want your own state?" - "Yes
of course!" - "So where will we go?"
Although nobody should deceive himself about the reality of the
interrogation cell, the content of the dialogue, and its simple
humane tone, reveals the basic understanding of the existential
seriousness of the problem of the confrontation between two peoples
over one small country. Nothing in this dialogue denies the Jewish
claim to the land; the Palestinian claim is simply placed
symmetrically opposite the Jewish, giving up a simplistic solution
in favor of the complex human and political truth.
The book is also surprising because of the author's constant
awareness of his internal world, connected with writing, and his
thematic link that leads to mobilized aggressive writing. Ghazzawi
carries on a dialogue with his wife and children, imprinted inside
himself, particularly with his small daughter, who was a baby only
a few months old, when he was sent to prison. It is a sensuous
dialogue, which is surprising considering the circumstances in
which it was written. It is the discourse that saved the creative
"I" from spiritual annihilation, at a time of separation from most
of his life-support systems; the discourse, involved with the roots
of his creativity and masculinity, fortifies his human identity,
and puts him in a position to listen to his fellow, even when that
fellow is threatening and harmful.
Another voice periodically heard in this book is the voice of the
poet, deep in the friendship of his colleagues, as if Ghazzawi is
telling himself and his faithful imaginary comrades, his jailers,
his fellow prisoners, and his people: "Nobody can prevent my
dialogue with Apollinaire, with Nazim Hikmat, with Fredrico Garcia
Lorca." This the subjective self, grows stronger within him and
within his creative work, becoming not only a point of departure,
but a base for showing those worlds that the walls of the prison
and the constrictions of time cannot overcome. The discourse to the
poets, most of them dead, is also a declaration of the universal
longing for freedom, and in addition a intellectual poetic
justification for what is basically a pure cry, without any
additional significance. But there should be no mistake: the angry
bitter cry is audible behind the complexity of the poetic
wisdom.
The nature of the dialogue brings Ghazzawi to clear political
conclusions, such as at least listening to - if not agreeing with -
the Jewish claim of belonging to the land. Possibly it was this
tone that caused some of the criticism in the Palestinian literary
community, which, although it recognized the poetic power of the
work, found it difficult to accept some of the nuances.
The riddle to which I sought a solution, regarding the significance
of birds in Palestinian folklore is echoed by the fact that one of
Ghazzawi's addressees is the Israeli poet, Yair Horowitz. Like many
of the other addressees, Horowitz was already dead, when Ghazzawi
wrote his letters.
"I am but a child in this naive desire of mine, I mean the desire
to pause at the moment of birth," Ghazzawi opens his "letter" to
Yair Horowitz. He continues: "Why did you leave us, Yair Horowitz,
you inspirational poet? The 26th of July must have been nothing but
an ordinary day in Tel Aviv, when your soul went swimming in the
sky over Brussels. Why do you haunt me, Yair Horowitz, and remind
me of the death of the father in the precipice? Dear Yair, I was
late in writing you and when you died I felt sad. For the moment
you are here in my cell, reminding me of the death of the father in
the precipice. I will not admit the death of God in the precipice,
because your beautiful poems live like orange blossoms which shiver
with the dew and pour love on his holy land ... holiness is lost
but in name. I am saddened that your heart failed you, and so
early. You should
have lived to write about peace. You should have experienced the
Intifada and seen for yourself this flagrant disgrace of man. They
die, Arabs and Jews, and each waits for the miracle of peace ...
Yair, again I tell you that your voice is sorely needed ... maybe
you will tell me that they silenced the song of peace, sung by
Martin Luther King, that they expelled the Dalai Lama from Tibet
and murdered the mist in his eye born of his love for the great
Himalayas which extend upward to the sun ... what can a poet with a
bad heart like you do standing against the traffic?"
The sections of this letter to Horowitz reveal both the strength
and weakness in Ghazzawi's writing. Its strength is in the
delectable combination between revealing the delicate feelings of
the male poet, "the glistening in his eyes that was born of his
love," and between the direct statement, free of self-pity or
hatred, like "You should have seen for yourself the flagrant
disgrace of man." Its main weakness lies in the mystification,
which appears from time to time, possibly a result of lack of
knowledge on the part of the non-Palestinian reader, regarding the
details of the author's life, or permanent associations of
Palestinian culture. I am referring to incomprehensible sentences
dealing with the death of the father and the death of God.
The reader of the English translation also encounters too many
mistranslations and inaccurate spelling of the names of the
addressees, a result of their being transcribed back into English
from the Arabic; but this does not detract one whit from the
importance of the work's translation and distribution. The personal
tone in addressing the Hebrew poet personifies the good will in
Ghazzawi's writing. It is concrete, physical, and sensitive, and
reveals the writer's vulnerability, which he thus converts to his
strength. The use of orange blossoms, a symbol of longing for a
Palestinian homeland, and for the creation of a national identity
for its sons, as a metaphor for Horowitz's poems, is more evidence
than a thousand political declarations about the division of the
land between two peoples (and several declarations of this type are
found in the book) of the genuine openness that has entered
Ghazzawi's soul, to recognize the right of the other - the Israeli
- to partnership in this land.
At the center of Ghazzawi's reflective discourse is the Poem (with
a capital "P" in the English translation), which he carries with
him, and which he wants to convey in words, the incompleteness of
which, he as a true poet is forced at last to recognize.
Ghazzawi's letters from prison sharply remind us of the associative
link between letters and dreams. "A dream that is not solved is
like a letter that is not read," in the words of Rabbi Hisda in the
Babylonian Talmud. Ghawazzi shows the courage of an emotional
dream, sending his letters, his dreams "to swim in the skies" (his
term) of the world, where several of the addressees have died, and
some of them, Palestinian and Israeli, are described as "too busy
with lethal frenzy to listen to the voice of an intelligent
poem."
In choosing Yair Horowitz of all the Hebrew poets of his
generation, Ghazzawi surprises, pleases, and earns respect. The
surprise stems from the fact that many poets and poetesses have
written clearer political messages that Horowitz. Furthermore,
Horowitz was not one of those who made a point of having his poems
translated. It causes pleasure because it says something about the
potential of poetry as a means of communication, and something
about future communications in a time of peace. It earns our
respect because it indicates the sensitive instincts of Ghazzawi, a
man belonging to a culture in which birds mean freedom, but also
mean prison, poetry and folk tale, in that he listened to the less
obvious voice, expressing complete freedom from external
obligations, the voice of the poet of birds, Yair Horowitz.