Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales

357 Pages·1989·1.09 MB·English

by  Ibrahim Muhawi

SPEAK BIRD, SPEAK AGAIN
The book
contains a collection of 45 Palestinian folk tales drawn from a collection of two hundred tales narrated by
women from different areas of historic Palestine (the Galilee, the West Bank, and Gaza).
The stories collected were chosen on the basis of their popularity, their aesthetic and narrative qualities, and
what they tell about popular Palestinian culture dating back many centuries. The authors spent 30 years
collecting the material for the book Speak, Bird, Speak Again: A book of Palestinian folk tales is a book
first
published in English in 1989 by Palestinian authors Ibrahim Muhawi and professor of sociology and
anthropology at Bir Zeit University Sharif Kanaana. After the original English book of 1989, a French
version, published by UNESCO, followed in 1997, and an Arabic one in Lebanon in 2001.
CONTENTS

FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
KEY TO REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION
The Tales
The Tellers
The Tales and the Culture
The Tales and Authority in the Society
Food in Society and the Tales
Religion and the Supernatural

THE TALES
Notes on Presentation and Translation
GROUP I INDIVIDUALS
CHILDREN AND PARENTS
1. Tunjur, Tunjur
2. The Woman Who Married Her Son
3. Precious One and Worn-out One
4. Swes, Swes!
5. The Golden Pail
Afterword

SIBLINGS
6. Half-a-Halfling
7. The Orphans' Cow
8. Sumac! You Son of a Whore, Sumac!
9. The Green Bird
10. Little Nightingale the Crier
Afterword

SEXUAL AWAKENING AND COURTSHIP
11. The Little Bird
12. Jummez Bin Yazur, Chief of the Birds
13. Jbene
14. Sackcloth
15. Sahin
Afterword

THE QUEST FOR THE SPOUSE
16. The Brave Lad
17. Gazelle
18. Lolabe
Afterword

GROUP II FAMILY
BRIDES AND BRIDEGROOMS
19. The Old Woman Ghouleh
20. Lady Tatar
21. Soqak Boqak!
22. Clever Hasan
23. The Cricket
Afterword

HUSBANDS AND WIVES
24. The Seven Leavenings
25. The Golden Rod in the Valley of Vermilion
26. Minjal
27. Im Ese
Afterword

FAMILY LIFE
28. Chick Eggs
29. The Ghouleh of Trans-Jordan
30. Bear-Cub of the Kitchen
31 The Woman Whose Hands Were Cut Off
32. N ayyis (Little Sleepy One)
Afterword

GROUP III SOCIETY
33. Im Awwad and the Ghouleh
34 The Merchant's Daughter
35. Pomegranate Seeds
36. The Woodcutter
37. The Fisherman
Afterword

GROUP IV ENVIRONMENT
38. The Little She-Goat T
39. The Old Woman and Her Cat
40. Dunglet
41. The Louse
Afterword

GROUP V UNIVERSE
42. The Woman Who Fell into the Well
43. The Rich Man and the Poor Man
44. Ma ruf the Shoemaker
45. Im Ali and Abu Ali
Afterword

FOLKLORISTIC ANALYSIS
APPENDIX A: TRANSLITERATION
APPENDIX B: INDEX OF FOLK MOTIFS
APPENDIX C: LIST OF TALES BY TYPE
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
FOOTNOTE INDEX
Speak Bird, Speak Again
Palestinian Arab Folktales
Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana
FOREWORD
It was with great pleasure that I watched a joint collaborative effort
between a man of letters and a social scientist come to fruition. The
marvelous results of this partnership lie in the pages ahead. Not only are
there forty-five splendid Palestinian Arab folktales to be savored, but we are
also offered a rare combination of ethnographic and literary glosses on
details that afford a unique glimpse into the subtle nuances of Palestinian
Arab culture. This unusual collection of folktales is destined to be a classic
and will surely serve as a model for future researchers in folk narrative.
For the benefit of those readers unfamiliar with the history of folktale
collection and publication, let me explain why Speak, Bird, Speak Again:
Palestinian Arab Folktales represents a significant departure from nearly
all previous anthologies or samplers of folktales. When the Grimm brothers
collected fairy tales, or Marchen, from peasant informants in the first
decades of the nineteenth century, they did so in part for nationalistic and
romantic reasons: they wanted to salvage what they regarded as survivals of
an ancient Teutonic heritage, to demonstrate that this culture was the equal
of classical (Greek and Roman) as well as prestigious modern (French)
cultures. The publication of Kinder-und Hausmarchen in 1812 and 1815
sparked a host of similar collections of fairy tales from other countries by
scholars imbued with the same combination of nationalism and
romanticism. By the end of the nineteenth century, numerous folklore
societies and periodicals had been initiated to further the collection and
analysis of all types of traditional peasant art, music, and oral literature.
Unfortunately, despite the laudable stated aims of these pioneering
collectors to preserve unaltered the precious folkloristic art forms of the
local peasantry, all too often they actually rewrote or otherwise manipulated
the materials so assiduously gathered. One reason for this intrusiveness was
the longstanding elitist notion that literate culture was infinitely superior to
illiterate culture. Thus the oral tales were made to conform to the higher
canons of taste found in written literature, and oral style was replaced by
literary convention. The Grimms, for example, began to combine different
versions of the "same" folktale, producing composite texts which they
presented as authentic - despite the fact that no raconteur had ever told
them in that form.
The Grimms and their imitators were trying to create a patrimony for
purposes of national pride (long before Germany was to become a nation in
the modern sense), and tampering with oral tradition suited their goals.
Texts that are rewritten, censored, simplified for children, or otherwise
modified may well be enjoyed by readers conditioned to the accepted
literary stylistics of so-called high culture. Such texts, however, are of
negligible scientific value. If one wishes to understand peasant values and
thought patterns, one needs contact with peasant folktales, not the
prettified, sugar-coated derivatives reworked by dilettantes.
Sad to say, the vast majority of nineteenth-and even twentieth-century
folktale collections fail to meet the minimum criteria of scientific inquiry.
The tales are typically presented with no cultural context or discussion. Of
their meaning (we do not even know if their tellers were male or female),
and rarely is a concerted attempt made to compare a particular corpus of
tales with other versions of the same tale types. Let the reader think back on
folktale anthologies he or she may have read, as either a child or an adult.
How many of these standard collections of folktales contained any scholarly
apparatus linking the content of particular tales to the cultures from which
they came? Appallingly, these criticisms apply even to collections of
folktales published by reputable folklorists. The highly regarded Folktales
of the World series, published by the University of Chicago Press, for
example, includes volumes of bona fide folktales from many countries, but
the tales are accompanied by only minimal comparative annotation. The
reader may be informed that a given folktale is identifiable as an instance of
an international tale type (as defined by the Aarne-Thompson typology,
available since 1910), but little or no information is given on how the tales
reflect, let us say, German, Greek, or Irish culture as a whole. This criticism
applies as well to most folktale anthologies published in other countries.
Another reason for the inadequacy of nineteenth-century folktale
collections, especially those representing countries outside Europe, is that
the collectors were typically not from the place where the tales were told.
English, French, German, and other European colonialist administrators,
missionaries, and travelers recorded stories they found quaint or amusing.
Either informants self-censored the tales to protect their image or else the
collectors, who were not necessarily fully fluent in the native languages,
simply omitted details they deemed obscene (by their own cultures'
standards) or elements that were not altogether clear to them. Thus most
nineteenth-century collections of tales from India or the Middle East
contain only the blandest tales, sometimes in severely abridged or abstract
form, with no hint of even the slightest bawdy or risqué motifs. Although
folklorists today are not ungrateful for these early versions of folktales, they
cannot condone the lack of honesty in the reporting of them. What remains
badly needed are collections of folktales made by fieldworkers whose roots
are in the region and who speak the native language of the taletellers.
In the present volume we have two scholars with the requisite expertise.
Ibrahim Muhawi was born in 1937 in Ramallah, Palestine (nine miles north
of Jerusalem). After completing high school at the Friends Boys' School in
Ramallah, he went to the United States where, in 1959, he earned a B.S. in
electrical engineering at Heald Engineering College in San Francisco. Then
came a dramatic shift of intellectual gears, with a B.A. (magna cum laude)
in English from California State University at Hayward (1964), followed
quickly by an M.A. (1966) and a Ph.D. (1969), both also in English, from the
University of California, Davis. After teaching English at Brock University
in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada (1969-1975), and at the University of
Jordan in Amman (1975-1977), Muhawi joined the English department at
Birzeit University in the West Bank, where he served as department
chairman from 1978 to 1980. It was there that he met the coauthor of this
book.
Sharif Kanaana was born in Arrabe in the Galilee, Palestine, in 1935, and
he too received his higher education in the United States. Following a 1965
B.A. in psychology and economics from Yankton College in South Dakota,
he transferred to the University of Hawaii where he was awarded an M.A.
(1968) and doctorate (1975) in anthropology. After teaching anthropology at
the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh for four years (1972-1975), he became
chairman (1975-1980) of the sociology department at Birzeit University, and
from 1980 to 1984 he was affiliated with An-Najah National University,
West Bank, as dean of the Faculty of Arts (1980-1982) and acting president
of the university (1982-1984). In 1984 he became the director of the Birzeit
University Research and Documentation Center.