Summary
The hikaye or xurrafiyye, the folktale proper in the Palestinian dialect: a highly developed, predominantly women’s art form, told in colloquial Palestinian Arabic at small winter-evening family gatherings, which Muhawi and Kanaana argue presents a portrait of Palestinian culture rather than mirroring it (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 184-312).
Details
- The community calls the tales kizib, “lies”, and hikayat ‘ajayiz, “old women’s tales”; of the seventeen tellers in Speak, Bird, Speak Again only three are men, and a man who tells folktales is considered a niswanji, one who prefers the company of women (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 184-214).
- Men in their diwan prefer the qissa — the sira of Abu Zed il-Hilali, Bedouin raids, and adventure — whose heroes are thought to have lived “just yesterday”; folktale narration, by contrast, minimises gesture, is delivered seated, and rests on the voice and women’s speech mannerisms, which male tellers must adopt to sound credible (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 184-214).
- Sessions (sahra) take place after supper in winter, among two or three mothers of one extended family and their children; the oldest woman present is deferred to, a tale is narrated straight through without interruption, and a session rarely lasts beyond four or five tales. Children in the audience are essential to the event (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 215-312).
- Opening and closing formulas, threefold repetition, and invocations such as “Testify that God is One!” set narrative time apart from ordinary life; tellers may not, in the audience’s understanding, change a tale’s details, and a teller whose version differs claims only to tell it as she remembers it (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 215-312).
- Most tellers represented in the book were over sixty when recorded, and the authors state that displacement and dispersal have severely disrupted the tradition’s social and geographical bases, while grandmothers in villages and refugee camps still tell the tales (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, lines 184-312).
- Events inside the tales are fiction: on entity and concept pages they are recorded as what happens in a named tale, never as fact.
Related pages
Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, Palestinian extended family, Ibrahim Muhawi, Sharif Kanaana