Speak Bird Speak Again (4 page)

Thus
we see that the tale creates a time and space set apart from the rest
of life in which events and transformations, because they have no
equivalent in experience, can be understood only by the imagination
and not by rational thought. The narrative attitude appropriate to
folktales must somehow present the possibility of magical
transformation as though it were an ordinary event, yet still allow
the narrator to remain skeptical. Tellers frequently interject
remarks such as "If the tale is to be trusted!" (an
alienating device in the Brechtian sense) to remind listeners that
the tale is, after all, a fiction. In this manner the narrative
attitude identifies the elements of a possible fictional world but
distances it from experience. For example, because merely to mention
the jinn in narrative time (that is, while the tale is being told)
could bring them into being, the narrator must avoid this possibility
by invoking the name of Allah. This in fact is another verbal
mannerism of women: mention of the jinn (who occur frequently in the
tales) is immediately followed by the formula, "In the name of
Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful!"

Although
the folktales told in the type of setting just described are not
specifically children's tales, the presence of children in the
audience is essential to the whole activity. One would never find
grown men and women telling folktales just to one another. Of course,
adults, including the men, enjoy the tales and are usually on hand
during a session, but it is the presence of children that shapes the
event, affecting the manner of delivery and helping to create a sense
of anticipation during which anything can happen. The tales in any
case appeal to the children, who, more easily than the adults, can
imagine the jinn, ghouls, and other supernatural beings that abound
in them. These are frightening creatures, which mothers frequently
use in warning ("You'd better behave, or the ghoul will devour
you!"). The presence of the adults at these sessions, especially
the mothers, is therefore reassuring to the children, and the whole
process helps to socialize and imbue them with the values of the
culture.

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).

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 its 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.

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.