Summary
The feminine ghoul of Palestinian folk narrative: outwardly fearful, with an insatiable appetite and huge breasts thrown over her shoulders, yet in Muhawi and Kanaana’s reading a nourishing female who can be kinder to a hero than his own mother, and whose kindness to adopted sons in Tales 10 and 22 they treat as among the most complex images of women in folk literature (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 475-564, 565-732).
Details
- A ghouleh may be unseen yet make her presence felt, or appear as an animal, a human being, or a combination of both, as in Tale 19 (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 475-564).
- Ghouls and ghoulehs show hospitality even to the aspiring young hero, and in Tales 10 and 22 assist the young protagonists on their quests; in Tale 22 the ghouleh is kinder to the hero than his own mother (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 475-564, 565-732).
- The figure also carries the family’s fears: the paternal aunt is portrayed as a ghouleh in Tales 6 and 29, the wife in Tale 31 accuses her husband’s sister of being a ghouleh, and in Tale 34 a husband, his mother, and his sister are ghoul and ghoulehs with no redeeming features (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 391-474).
- In the tales read in part 1, a ghoul steals a sheep nightly in Tale 3 and is killed sleeping with red eyes in a kidnapped girl’s lap; in Tale 6 a ghouleh whose breasts a traveller sucks and whose flour he eats directs him to the pomegranates that make his wives pregnant, and another ghouleh who keeps the brothers overnight sharpening her teeth for Hasan and Husen is trapped in a halvah box and burned; in Tale 8, just begun, the mother asks for a little girl even if she turns out to be a ghouleh, and the youngest brother, keeping watch, sees his sister devour a sheep. These are events inside the named tales, recorded as fiction (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 733-1098, 1381-1641).
Related pages
Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, Jinn, Palestinian folktale