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Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales

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Summary

Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana, Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (University of California Press, 1989): forty-five Palestinian folktales selected for popularity and excellence of narration from approximately two hundred tales recorded on cassette between 1978 and 1980 in the Galilee, the West Bank, and Gaza, translated from the Palestinian dialect with the tellers’ formulas and scatology unexpurgated, and arranged not by tale type but by a life-cycle scheme — individuals, family, society, environment, universe — so that the tales present, in the authors’ terms, a portrait rather than a mirror of Palestinian culture (Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, line 292). Part 1 (lines 1-1641) gives the front matter, Alan Dundes’s foreword, the whole Introduction, and the opening of the tales: Group I, subgroup Children and Parents, Tales 1-5 in full with their afterword, and Tales 6-7 in full and Tale 8 begun in the subgroup Siblings. The Introduction argues that the Palestinian folktale is a woman’s art form — of seventeen tellers only three are men — whose style, formulas, and plots are generated by the structure of the Palestinian extended family, extended, patrilineal, patrilateral, polygynous, endogamous, and patrilocal, within which women are defined as the Other yet exercise power at least equal to that of “self” through sexuality, food distribution, and narration itself; that Polygyny is denigrated in the tales far beyond its incidence in life; and that action in the tales, in which the Jinn and the Ghouleh are humanised and neither fully supernatural nor fully physical, is an artistic imitation of the unfolding of predestined fate.

What the file is

The UC Press E-Books Collection Archive HTML edition of the book (preferred citation as printed: Muhawi, Ibrahim, and Sharif Kanaana. Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4s2005r4), made freely available by the publisher. The original as saved is the HTML file; the paired text copy is a plain-text rendering of the same edition, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers in the text copy (14,764 lines by the counting used in the reading notes; about 171,326 words). Printed page numbers appear in the text copy as the book’s own pagination breaks and are given alongside line ranges in the reading notes. The text copy preserves numerous printed slips, recorded under Open questions and in the reading notes as printed, and loses the macrons of the transliteration system described in the Note on Transliteration (lines 146-157).

Section by section

Foreword, by Alan Dundes (lines 76-125)

Dundes presents the book as a departure from earlier folktale collections: the Grimms and their imitators rewrote and composited peasant tales for national patrimony, collectors of non-European tales were outsiders who omitted bawdy material, and even reputable series give minimal cultural annotation. Here, he argues, two scholars rooted in the region — biographies of Muhawi (born Ramallah, 1937) and Kanaana (born `Arrabe in the Galilee, 1935) are given — collected, transcribed, and translated the tales and supplied an ethnographic introduction organised around family dynamics and the life cycle. Dundes adds a political reason for the collection’s importance: the tales belong to the Palestinian Arabs, whose dislocation and fragmentation followed the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and preserve a distinctive culture that was, and is, their own (lines 76-125).

Acknowledgments; Note on Transliteration; Key to References (lines 126-183)

Thanks are given first to the women and men from whom the tales were collected, and to, among others, Sam Pickering, whose request prompted the project, Osama Doumani, John R. Miles, Alan Dundes, and Jane Muhawi, singled out above all other individuals. Financial support came from the American Palestine Educational Fund (now the Jerusalem Fund), the Ford Foundation, the American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine, and the Kayali Scholarship Fund. The transliteration follows the Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik guidelines in Fischer and Jastrow’s Handbuch der arabischen Dialekte. Journal abbreviations are fixed: JPOS, PEQ, TM, and TS (lines 126-183).

Introduction — The Tales (lines 184-257)

The forty-five tales were selected from approximately two hundred recorded in 1978-1980, in most cases only where more than one version existed, a chosen version always taken whole and without modification. Only the hikaye or xurrafiyye, the folktale proper, is included: hikaye from a root meaning to narrate and to imitate artistically, xurrafiyye stressing the fabulous. The community calls the tales kizib, “lies,” and hikayat ‘ajayiz, “old women’s tales”; men prefer the qissa of the diwan — the sira of Abu Zed il-Hilali, Bedouin raids, and adventure — and a man who tells folktales is a niswanji. Women’s narration minimises gesture and rests on voice and colloquial language; style matures with age and most tellers were over sixty, which may indicate the tradition is dying out. Tales were told at small winter-evening family gatherings (sahra), after supper, rarely more than four or five at a sitting, with opening and closing formulas that set narrative time apart: threefold repetition, the formula “Testify that God is One!”, invocations against the jinn, and tellers’ asides such as “If the tale is to be trusted!” Children in the audience are essential; the tales socialise them. With the recent displacement of the Palestinian people, the social and geographic bases for the tradition have been severely disrupted, the authors state, though grandmothers in villages and refugee camps still tell the tales (lines 184-257).

Introduction — The Tellers (lines 258-283)

Profiles are given of the principal tellers: Fatme of Arrabe, a passive carrier who told nine of the tales; Šafi, an active male carrier with a polished adventure repertoire; his wife Almaza; Im Nabil of Turmus`ayya; and Im Darwiš, daughter of the village chief of Der Hanna (lines 258-283).

Introduction — The Tales and the Culture (lines 284-445)

The arrangement by life cycle is defended against random and Aarne-Thompson arrangements: form is part of content, as in “Sackcloth” (Tale 14), in plot a Cinderella tale whose content is Palestinian. The tales assume the stable social order of before the British Mandate of the early 1920s, while present Palestinian life is diaspora and exile; the standards of the extended family remain current and the tales’ survival confirms cultural continuity. The family is defined as extended, patrilineal, patrilateral, polygynous, endogamous, and patrilocal, and each element is read as a structural pattern generating behaviour in the tales. Polygyny, frequent in ten named tales and never shown in a good light, sets co-wives and their children against each other, though it can preserve a loved, childless first wife under a marriage understood as sutra, protection; for Muslims it is regulated by šari`a, which limits a man to four wives. Endogamy — marriage to the patrilateral parallel first cousin — joins descent (hasab) and affinality (nasab), yet Tales 21 and 25 criticise first-cousin marriage. Patrilocality makes the incoming wife a stranger and the Other; yet the Other’s power is at least equal to “self”, most tales concern heroines rather than heroes, and mothers in the tales almost always wish for daughters. Authority rests on sex, age, and position in the family; older women, considered asexual past childbearing age, are freed from speech taboos, which accounts for the tales’ earthy, even scabrous tone. Relationships are then examined in turn: father/son, the ideological basis, grounded in absolute obedience; mother/daughter, mutual and without inheritance conflict; mother/son, emotionally complex, as in Tales 2, 4, and 22; father/daughter; natural brothers, ordered by age; sisters, whose conflict is jealousy over marriage (Tales 10, 12, 20); brother/sister, the most idealised relationship, bound up with sexual honour and with the sister’s usual surrender of her inheritance; brothers’ wives (salafat); mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, against a protective father-in-law; the bride’s father and the son-in-law; husband and wife, the most prominent relationship in the tales, including the calumniated-wife tales; and sister and brother’s wife (lines 284-445).

Introduction — The Tales and Authority in the Society (lines 446-515)

Authority in the tales runs in a cycle of abuse or disobedience, conflict, and a resolution in which the social order remains intact; heroic action is individual action, often a woman’s journey, undertaken at the price of separation from collective identity. Sexuality is the family’s most guarded resource because female sexuality is reproduction, labour through marriage, and the making of nasab alliances; sexual honour is, the authors state, the most important value in Arab society, and segregation — strongest precisely where marriage is possible — affirms sexuality through constant denial. The tales reverse the norm: women actively choose mates, romance and premarital contact found marriages, and displaced fantasy (the magic bird of Tale 12, the underground cavern of Tale 15) makes the challenge to men’s guardianship of honour tellable (lines 446-515).

Introduction — Food in Society and the Tales (lines 516-545)

Food, the family’s most important material resource in households of thirty or more, works in the tales as motivator, metaphor, magical conception aid, and sign of love; its fair distribution by the patriarch’s wife is the family ethic, favouritism is theft from the collective, and hospitality and generosity are expressed through food, as are prestige and sulha reconciliation (lines 516-545).

Introduction — Religion and the Supernatural (lines 546-617)

Peasants do not distinguish official from folk religion, the spiritual from the material: the ghouleh may be unseen, animal, human, or combined, God is addressed at the opening “gates of heaven”, and good and evil forces coexist along a continuum from the pious man and the holy man (wili) to the evil eye, the hyena, the qarine, and the jinn, with the recording angels Raqib and `Atid on each shoulder. Every fortune is written on the forehead at birth, yet predestination means acceptance of outcomes rather than abandonment of effort. From this the authors build a theory of action: a wish put into words is already an action, language — naming, puns, incantation, the rhymed formula of Tale 41 — has power over the physical and supernatural worlds, the journey locates action between the real and the super-real, plot is set in motion when the balance of forces is disturbed and resolved when a new balance is reached, and plot itself is an artistic imitation of the unfolding of fate (lines 546-617). The Introduction ends at printed p. 48.

Notes on Presentation and Translation (lines 618-641)

The Notes follow the heading THE TALES at line 618, as printed p. 51-52: commentary follows each group so as not to interfere with a first reading, and the translation steers a middle course between standard and informal English, follows the original’s rhythm closely, adds nothing, and censors no scatological reference (lines 618-641).

Group I, Individuals — Children and Parents: Tales 1-5 and Afterword (lines 642-1365)

Tale 1, “Tunjur, Tunjur,” told in full: a childless woman asks Allah for a girl “even if she is only a cooking pot”, bears a pot, and the pot-daughter rolls from finders’ houses bringing back in her mouth first honey, then meat, then the king’s son’s wife’s jewelry, gold, and money, and on a last, forbidden outing the first finder’s excrement, after which the mother washes her, perfumes her, and shelves her. Tale 2, “The Woman Who Married Her Son”: a bird-reared foundling marries the sultan’s son; on his hajj his jealous mother expels the wife, buries a sheep in the palace garden as her own grave, disguises herself as the wife, sleeps with her son, and conceives; the true wife’s refrain — “The sultan’s son has taken his mother to wife” — costs two servants their tongues to the descending scissors but spares the son’s, and he digs up the sheep and lights the crier-summoned fire. Tale 3, “Precious One and Worn-out One”: the disfavoured co-wife’s son stays awake on three kilograms of roasted watermelon seeds, follows the sheep-stealing ghoul to his well, kills him as he sleeps with red eyes in the youngest kidnapped girl’s lap, is cut down into the well by his father, who wants that girl, returns with her matching bracelet, kills his father, and marries her. Tale 4, “Šweš, Šweš!”: a son whose mother curses him has his wives rock her in a hammock until a travelling salesman elicits that she wants a husband; the son dresses her, carries her, blind, to the hyena’s lair, and watches while, repeating her refrain “Not so fast… lest you break the seed”, she is devoured. Tale 5, “The Golden Pail”: Clever Hasan, the old wife’s son, beaten where his half-brothers were merely dismissed, is sent out on his mother’s jinn horse Ballan; a glowing feather brings him under a foreign king’s death sentence. At the vizier’s suggestion the king demands the bird and then its owner the princess; her ring from the sea’s bottom, her horse, that horse revived after she chops it up, and finally Hasan’s own burning at the stake are the princess’s conditions for opening her door, with the vizier each time saying the youth can do it. Each task is met by Ballan’s counsel and at the vizier’s treasury’s expense — for the cage, the boat, the flour boat, the bridle and the pail — ending with the king revealed as Hasan’s uncle, the vizier burned in his place, the princess married to Hasan, and his father abdicating the kingdom to him. The Afterword reads the five tales as mother/daughter, mother/son, and father/son conflicts over individual freedom, sexual jealousy, and inheritance (lines 642-1365).

Group I, Individuals — Siblings: Tales 6-7 and the opening of Tale 8 (lines 1366-1641)

Tale 6, “Half-a-Halfling,” in full: a man whose cousin-wife and stranger-wife are both childless is sent by a sheikh to a ghoul, by him to his elder brother, and by him to their sister the ghouleh, whose breasts he sucks and whose flour he eats, making him dearer to her than her sons Isma`in and Nassar; on her direction he takes two pomegranates from a sleeping ghoul’s orchard, eats part of his cousin’s on the way home, so the stranger bears twins, Hasan and Husen, and the cousin bears half a human being. Half-a-Halfling out-hunts his brothers with a lame she-goat and a wooden poker, brands their backsides as the price of his deer, stays awake in the hanging basket under a dripping waterskin and keeps the ghouleh busy cooking a stuffed rooster and then a stuffed lamb until sunrise, escapes on the she-goat when her milk-spell stops the horses, and finally traps the ghouleh in a halvah box and has her burned. Tale 7, “The Orphans’ Cow,” in full: a stepmother who feeds her own children the best and her stepchildren bran discovers through her daughter that the orphans’ cow gives meat and rice from between her horns, feigns an illness curable only by the cow’s slaughter, and the father slaughters it; the fleeing brother drinks from the forbidden spring and becomes a gazelle, his sister marries the king, is dropped into a well by the women of his house while he is on his hajj, the women slaughtering and eating the lamb meant for her after the birth, is found in the well with the king’s son in her lap through the gazelle’s bread-carrying and the siblings’ verse exchange, is drawn up, sees her brother restored by drinking again from the spring and made a sultan, and watches the king burn his mother, sister, and servantgirl. Tale 8, “Sumac! You Son of a Whore, Sumac!”, is begun: a woman asks for a little girl even if she turns out to be a ghouleh, bears one, and the youngest of three sons, armed with roasted fava beans, thorn bushes, and a dripping leather bottle, stays awake all night to see his sister open the sheep pen, devour a sheep, wipe her mouth, and return to bed (lines 1366-1641).

Key passages

Evidence the work relies on

  • Approximately two hundred tales collected on cassette tapes between 1978 and 1980 in the Galilee, the West Bank, and Gaza, from seventeen tellers, fourteen of them housewives who could neither read nor write and only three of them men, from which the forty-five tales in the book were selected (lines 184-214, 215-312; Introduction, “The Tellers”).
  • The authors’ lifelong familiarity with the material and the raconteurs’ own judgments of popularity, used to assess which tales were heard most frequently (lines 184-214).
  • Comparison, announced in the Introduction and carried in the footnotes and Folkloristic Analysis, with other Arabic folktales and with the international Aarne-Thompson tale-type typology (lines 76-125, 215-312).

Analysis

As far as read in part 1, the book’s method is ethnographic and literary together: tales recorded in settings resembling authentic sahra sessions, taken whole from a single telling, translated without expurgation, and read against an account of kinship, authority, sexuality, food, and folk religion that the authors derive from the same society and present as the grammar generating the tales’ behaviour. Dundes’s foreword frames the method against the composite, censored texts of earlier collectors. The Introduction is explicit about its own limits: roles rather than characters are analysed, relationships with no tale instance are still examined for cultural background, and the emotional complexity of relationships such as mother/son is distinguished from their social content. Full analysis is reserved for the final part.

People, organizations, places and events

Ibrahim Muhawi, Sharif Kanaana, Alan Dundes, Birzeit University, Galilee, Gaza

Concepts

Palestinian folktale, Palestinian extended family, Polygyny, Jinn, Ghouleh

How it relates to other sources

The book is the wiki’s first collection of Palestinian folktales as primary texts. Its account of the pre-Mandate extended family and village society is the social world whose earlier centuries Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 reconstructs for Jabal Nablus, whose Hamula page describes a related patrilineal formation; the relation is one of subject matter, and no claim in either work is here taken to confirm the other. Fuller comparison is reserved for the final part.

Open questions

  • Tale 20 is cited in the sisters paragraph for improvident older sisters punishing the younger one, but the text copy reads “in Tale go the improvident older sisters end up punishing the younger one” (lines 391-474), with “go” as printed for the tale number.
  • The root meaning of hikaye is given twice, differently: in “The Tales” as a root meaning “to narrate” and “to imitate (artistically)” (lines 184-214), and in the theory of action as “that which is spoken” (lines 565-732).
  • Printed slips preserved in the reading notes as printed include “dosing formula” for closing formula, “Modem Standard Arabic” for Modern Standard Arabic, “child-beating age” for child-bearing age, “beatiful”, “spot dose by” for spot close by, “comer” for corner, “three gifts” for three girls in Tale 3, “fight breast” (twice) for right breast and “hale” for half in Tale 6, “All fight” (twice), “lava beans” for fava beans, and “fired the pail with water” for filled in Tale 5.
  • In Tale 7 the wife in the well answers the gazelle’s verse with “the whale has swallowed me”, although she is in a well; the line is recorded as printed.
  • In Tale 2 the narration as read ends immediately after the son lights the crier-summoned fire, without narrating its object; whether the brevity is the telling’s own is held open.
  • The singular and plural of “God’s slaves” are both given as `abid in the text copy (lines 565-732).

Coverage

lines 1-1641 of 14764, read in part 1 of 9. Remaining: part 2 (lines 1642-3282), part 3 (lines 3283-4923), part 4 (lines 4924-6564), part 5 (lines 6565-8205), part 6 (lines 8206-9846), part 7 (lines 9847-11487), part 8 (lines 11488-13128), part 9 (lines 13129-14764).

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