Speak Bird Speak Again (2 page)

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.

In
1978, when Muhawi was teaching modern poetry, Shakespeare, and
composition courses at Birzeit University, he was reintroduced to a
rich tradition of Palestinian folklore through the pages of a locally
published journal, Heritage and Society (Al-turath wa-al-mujtama).
Although he had grown up with this tradition, his formal education
first in engineering and later in English literature had not led him
to seriously consider it as an object of study. Now, however, he
began to remember his childhood when he would seek out and avidly
listen to the tales of the best raconteurs in the town of Ramallah.

During
this time, Sam Pickering of the University of Connecticut, a former
Fulbright Scholar at the University of Jordan and a colleague of
Muhawi, assumed the editorship of Children's Literature . He wrote to
Muhawi asking for illustrations of Palestinian traditions. Muhawi
approached Sharif Kanaana, whom he knew as an advisory editor of
Heritage and Society and as author of several papers on Palestinian
folklore that had appeared in that journal. He discovered that
Kanaana had already collected a substantial sampling of Palestinian
folktales, and when he heard the oral renditions on tape he was
spellbound by their esthetic quality and expressive power. The two
scholars decided to pool their talents and collect, from throughout
Palestine, as many types of tales from as wide a range of raconteurs
as possible.

Collecting
the tales proved to be only the first step. Transcribing and
translating the tales took many, many hours of arduous, meticulous
work. Then, to make the tales intelligible to readers unfamiliar with
Palestinian society, Muhawi and Kanaana elected to prepare a
comprehensive yet succinct cultural overview with special emphasis on
family dynamics. The ethnographic portrait provided in the
introductory essay is a remarkable achievement, and it certainly
facilitates a better understanding of the tales that follow. The
relationships and tensions between generations, siblings, in-laws,
and males and females are lucidly delineated. The anthropological
influence is also felt in the very organization and sequential order
of the tales, which move from the concerns of childhood through the
life cycle to the intricate details of marriage arrangement and
beyond. The anthropological bias, however, is always balanced by
attention to literary topics; the poetics of opening and closing
formulas, for example, are discussed in depth, and careful
comparative annotations relate these tales to other Arabic folktales
as well as to the international folktale scholarship in general.

This
extraordinary combination of anthropological and literary expertise
has achieved a set of exquisite folktales, translated accurately,
sensitively, and lovingly, together with a dazzling array of
ethnographic and folkloristic notes providing a landmark entree into
Palestinian Arab ethos and worldview. I am not sure either of the
coauthors could have written this volume alone. It is precisely
because such close attention was paid to the concerns of the humanist
and the social scientist alike that this collection of folktales is
so special.

This
collection is important for yet another, political reason. These
tales belong to a people, the Palestinian Arabs. Whatever one's view
is of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, it cannot be
denied that the event caused considerable dislocation and
fragmentation of the Palestinian Arab people. It is somewhat
analogous to the colonial powers in earlier times claiming territory
which was already occupied. It is perhaps a tragic irony of history
that the Jews, who themselves have been forced by bigotry and
prejudice to wander from country to country seeking even temporary
sanctuary, have through the formation of a "homeland"
caused another people to become homeless. Although this complex issue
has engendered great emotion on all sides, one fact is beyond
dispute: there was once an area of the world called Palestine, where
the Arab inhabitants had - and have - a distinctive culture all their
own. It is that culture that is preserved so beautifully in the
magical stories contained in this volume. In this context, all
people, regardless of political persuasion, should be able to
appreciate the value of these magnificent folktales: as oral products
of the creative spirit of the human mind, they belong not just to the
Palestinian Arab community but to all humankind.

Some
readers may choose not to refer to the scholarly apparatus,
preferring instead to enjoy only the tales themselves, but scholars
will surely be grateful for the thoughtful notes and "afterwords"
the authors have provided. I have repeatedly heard literary
folklorists claim that the fairy tale genre is dead. These misguided
academics continue to pore over such purely literary collections as
the Arabian Nights or the celebrated collections of Perrault and the
Grimms, not realizing that the fairy tale is alive and well in the
modern world. This collection of Palestinian Arab folk-tales includes
a great many fairy tales (i.e., Aarne-Thompson tale types 300-749),
and they provide eloquent testimony that the fairy tale still
flourishes. Such tales, I have little doubt, will be told as long as
birds sing!

ALAN
DUNDES

BERKELEY,
CALIFORNIA

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every
book is a collective effort and this one, even more than most, is no
exception. The authors are happy to acknowledge the contribution of
the following individuals and organizations to the completion of this
book.

First
and foremost, of course, our thanks are due to the women and men from
whom the tales were collected - those for whom we have names as well
as those for whom we do not. For initial encouragement to proceed
toward publication, we are grateful to Dr. Sam Pickering. For help
during the long evenings in the village of Birzeit, where we sat
hammering out rhymes and discussing the proper level of formality for
the translation, we wish to thank Donna Bothen and Terrance Cox. For
his advice on specific matters relating to Palestinian and Arab
culture, and for his general concern over the welfare of the project
and his unstinting support of it throughout, we wish to thank Dr.
Osama Doumani.

Thanks
are also due to our colleagues at the University of California,
Berkeley, for their invaluable support and encouragement. We are
grateful to Dr. Bridget Connelly and Dr. Laurence Michalak for their
comments on the first draft of the Introduction. For the generous
contribution of her time in discussing certain aspects of the
transliteration, we thank Barbara DeMarco. Dr. John R. Miles deserves
our deepest gratitude for his unflagging support of the project from
the moment he read the first draft of the tales in 1980. And to
Professor Alan Dundes, for his enthusiasm about the work, his
encouragement during difficult moments, and his guidance in
folkloristic matters, we wish to express our most sincere
appreciation.

For a
very fruitful professional association, we thank also the Center for
Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley and its staff (Dr. Ira Lapidus,
Chairman; Dr. Laurence Michalak, Coordinator), as well as Dr. William
Hickman, who originally invited Ibrahim Muhawi to become an associate
of the Center. In particular, we are grateful to the Center for the
postdoctoral fellowship awarded Dr. Muhawi in 1983.

For
their financial support, the authors would also like to thank the
following organizations: the American Palestine Educational Fund (now
the Jerusalem Fund); the Ford Foundation; the American Federation of
Ramallah, Palestine; and the Kayali Scholarship Fund.

The
authors also wish to express our deep appreciation to the editorial
staff of the University of California Press for their excellent and
dedicated guidance.

Finally,
we wish to single out Jane Muhawi, who, more than any other
individual, made a significant contribution to this book. Without her
encouragement, editorial skills, and native ear, this book would not
be what it is.

NOTE ON
TRANSLITERATION

The
system adopted in this book for transliterating the Palestinian
dialect follows the guidelines established by the
Zeitschrift
für arabische Linguistik
,
articulated in
Handbuch der arabischen
Dialekte
, by Fischer and Jastrow, two
editors of that journal. Readers are referred to the grammatical
discussion in Chapter 10 of that work ("Das
syrisch-palästinenische Arabische") and to the examples
provided in Section VII immediately following the chapter.

The
list of characters used for transliterating the Palestinian dialect
phonemically is as follows:

Short
vowels are represented as
a
,
e
,
i
,
o
,
and
u
,
and long ones as
a
,
e
,
i,
o
, and
u
; diphthongs are rendered
aw
and
ay
.

Because
an apostrophe, or hamza, before an initial vowel indicates
glottalization, readers should note that the absence of this
apostrophe is itself a phonetic marker indicating elision of that
word-initial vowel with the final consonant of the preceding word.
Furthermore, in the transcription of Tale 10 (Appendix A) only the
definite article is hyphenated, whereas in the smaller pieces of
discourse included elsewhere in the book hyphenation is used somewhat
more extensively.

KEY TO REFERENCES

All
references to works are keyed to the Bibliography. In the footnotes
to the tales, book and article titles are shortened for ease of use.
The Folkloristic Analysis following the tales proper utilizes even
more abbreviated forms, as explained in the introduction to that
section.

The
following abbreviations have been used for the names of journals:

In
footnotes, Roman numerals always indicate volume number, whether for
a book or a journal article. Arabic numerals
preceding
a colon indicate the issue number of the journal being cited, in
references for which this information is essential. Arabic numerals
following
a colon always indicate page references.

INTRODUCTION

The
forty-five tales included in this volume were selected on the basis
of their popularity and the excellence of their narration from
approximately two hundred tales collected on cassette tapes between
1978 and 1980 in various parts of Palestine - the Galilee (since 1948
part of the state of Israel), the West Bank, and Gaza. The criterion
of popularity reflects our intention to present the tales heard most
frequently by the majority of the Palestinian people. Both our own
life-long familiarity with this material and the opinions of the
raconteurs themselves helped us to assess a tale's popularity. We
made a point of asking the tellers to narrate the tales heard most
often in folktale sessions of the past, and in most cases we selected
only those tales for which we had more than one version. In the few
cases where variants were not available (e.g., Tale 44), excellence
of narration was the determining criterion, as it was in choosing a
version (always taken as a whole and without modification) from among
the available variants.