Folk Stories and Personal Narratives in Palestinian Spoken Arabic

A Cultural and Linguistic Study

N. Sirhan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137325761
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

By analysing the folk stories and personal narratives of a cross-section of Palestinians, Sirhan offers a detailed study of how content and sociolinguistic variables affect a narrator's language use and linguistic behaviour. This book will be of interest to anyone engaged with narrative discourse, gender discourse, Arabic studies and linguistics.

1

Introduction

It is language and our ability to use language which distinguishes us as humans and sets us apart from other animals. Like language, the act of storytelling is a uniquely human trait. We tell stories on a daily basis, at home, at work, in our free time, consciously or unconsciously; in fact, most of our lives are spent telling stories and listening to other people’s stories. Narrating stories has various functions. For some, narrating is a form of diversion or entertainment; for others it is a way to remember, teach or explore. Whatever the functions of narrating, in a conflict situation like the Palestinian one its functions are heightened. In other words, if one of the functions of oral narratives is to divert, then in a conflict area where the need for diversion is greater, the function of storytelling is all the more important. This is true of both fictional and factual narratives. Factual narratives, here personal narratives, have an additional function which is to preserve the history and culture of the individual or group narrating, as well as providing an outlet for, and giving voice to, the narrator. In some cases, as we shall see in the Palestinian one, the primary function of personal narratives is to remember and to provide a collective history where no official version exists. As such, preserving the past for future generations becomes of paramount importance and a race against both time and the Israeli army. Interestingly, Pennebaker (2000: 3) notes that ‘when people put their emotional upheavals into words, their physical and mental health improved markedly. Furthermore, the act of constructing stories appeared to be a natural human process that helped individuals understand their experiences and themselves.’ It seems that the numerous benefits of narration include not only physical benefits but emotional and mental ones as well.

This book endeavours to analyse oral narratives narrated by Palestinians in both Palestine and Jordan in order to provide a linguistic and cultural analysis. The narratives collected were of two kinds: the folk tale and the personal narrative; the first represents a fictional genre and the latter a non-fictional one. These genres were chosen partly because they are the oral narratives that are present in Palestine, but also because by analysing a fictional and a non-fictional genre the effect of content on language in narration, if any, could be evinced. As will be seen, this is a rich area made richer by the particularity of the ‘Palestinian situation’. The first challenge is to define precisely what is meant by ‘oral narratives’. Like any definition the term ‘oral narrative’ has been subject to contentious and vigorous discussion. For what do we mean by ‘oral’ and what do we mean by ‘narrative’? One must here beware the Scylla and Charybdis of all definitions: of being on the one hand too narrow, and thereby excluding relevant material, and on the other, wide to the point of obliterating any meaningful borders of the definition. No one definition seems to be all-encompassing and therefore some overlapping, no matter how slight, between one definition and the next is unavoidable. As a starting point, narrative is defined as a text which tells a story (Trask 1999: 198), in other words, one which relates a connected series of events in a more or less orderly manner. The events described in a narrative may be real or fictional, they may be connected by coincidence, subsequence or sequence, or the relationship may be causal or consequential. Defining the term ‘oral’ presents a yet greater challenge and the debate continues to rage as to whether it should encompass only the performance of the narrative, or whether it includes its mode of composition: whether it is spontaneous or pre-planned, composed in writing or memorised. For the purpose of this study, oral is defined as that which is said but has not previously been written down.

The term ‘oral narrative’ subsumes a plethora of subgenres including tales, personal narratives and historical narratives – indeed, any form of orally delivered stories. Though transmitted through speech, oral narratives differ considerably from normal speech or dialogue. Oral narratives may be recited verbatim, or composed spontaneously, and they may require audience participation to differing degrees and within prescribed customs. In oral narratives in general the onus lies with the narrator. In a conversation, on the other hand, the responsibility to maintain speech is shared by all the participants on relatively equal terms. The key difference between dialogues and oral narratives, however, is found in the structure; for the narrator knows the events that are to be narrated and more or less how the narration will end; with conversation this is rarely the case.

1.1 Where were the narratives collected?

The narratives used in this work were collected over the period 2007 to 2009 in the West Bank of Palestine and in Amman, Jordan. Due to the well-documented displacement of large numbers of Palestinians following the creation of the state of Israel, the main criterion when choosing the narrators was that he or she be of Palestinian origin, regardless of country of residence or birth. Nevertheless, the majority of the oral narratives collected here were narrated by Palestinians – men and women – who had been born in Palestine. The narratives collected were of two types: folk tales and personal narratives. The latter group includes political and Nakba¹ narratives, and indeed it was found that all of the political narratives were personal and all of the personal narratives were political. This is true particularly of the experience of the Nakba, and not only when the narrator recalled his or her own experience, but even in instances when the experience had been transmitted to the narrator by another, for example a family elder.

It is necessary to examine the locale of the research, and to locate the narratives in the settings in which they were narrated. As Versteegh (1997: 193) argues, ‘The most relevant factors in the speech situation are the interlocutor, the topic and the setting’, thus the locale of the research is of particular importance. In Jordan, most of the narratives were gathered in two of the ten refugee camps: the Mount Hussein Refugee Camp (muxayyam jabal ḥusēn) and the Wihdat Refugee Camp (muxayyam il-wiḥdāt). The camps are named after the areas in which they were built and they are, as one would expect, heavily populated areas. According to UNRWA, ‘in 1948 an estimated 100,000 refugees crossed the Jordan river and initially took shelter in temporary camps, in mosques and schools, or in towns and villages’ (www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/jordan.html). The refugees were housed in tents until the 1950s when UNRWA provided more permanent shelters: ‘A family of 4–5 members had one room on a plot of land not exceeding 80–100 square metres.’ With each new generation, the families grew, but not so the area of land allocated to each family. The already cramped conditions were exacerbated by the second wave of Palestinian refugees who entered Jordan following the war of 1967 which resulted in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. The additional 380,000 refugees and displaced persons were absorbed in part by six ‘emergency’ camps that were established for the occasion. The tents were later replaced with prefabricated shelters by UNRWA which were in turn replaced by concrete structures by the refugees themselves.

The Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan vary in quality. Abdel-Jawad (1981: 77) describes them as ‘the poorest in terms of housing, services, facilities and planning. They are overcrowded with muddy and narrow streets and small housing units of two or three small, one floor cabins each. Vertical expansion is very rare.’ Here, Abdel-Jawad is comparing the camps with other forms of housing in Jordan. Yet, in another sense, as he goes on to concede, they provide a social dimension where extended families and people from the same area in Palestine live in close proximity. Although the living standards in the camps are poor, the people have a good sense of community and neighbours help and look out for each other. Even though some of the camps are no more than a stone’s throw from the rest of the city and its inhabitants, the camps have their own character. Social ties and bonds in the camps are strong and consequently strong affiliations exist among their inhabitants. In effect, the camps in Jordan may be characterised as little Palestinian towns in the midst of Jordan and the better camps have their own schools, shops and makeshift clinics (which provide employment for residents), so that they effectively operate like little islands. This is certainly true of the Mount Hussein Refugee Camp which should not be seen as being representative of all the camps in Jordan or the Middle East. Moreover, in yet another sense, they are the better camps by virtue of their being located in a country where Palestinian refugees enjoy substantially greater rights than those in, for example, Lebanon where a socially divisive and less integrated system seems to be in operation: ‘At least formally speaking, in Syria and Jordan, Palestinians have local citizenship or equality of rights. In Lebanon … there is a kind of apartheid situation for the Palestinians and they are deprived of basic rights: They actually have many fewer rights than alien migrant workers in Western countries’ (Achcar in Chomsky and Achcar 2007: 164).

1.2 Literature review

Previous studies on Palestinian personal narratives are sparse. Peteet (2009) focuses on the way Palestinian refugees negotiate their past and present through their personal narratives. Sayigh (1998) writes about Palestinian camp women and their role as narrators of history, and Slyomovics (1998) describes the ways in which Palestinians and Jews narrate, remember and reconstruct their past and present by looking at the way they have narrated the same village: Palestinian Ein Houd and Jewish Ein Hod. A more recent study by Davis (2011) focuses on the role of Palestinian village memorial books and how Palestinians remember and record their past and the role the past plays in their present.

Although Palestinian folk tales have been little researched, more work has been done on them than on Palestinian personal narratives. The main work on Palestinian folk tales in English is Muhawi and Kanaana’s (1989) book which is a collection of tales, an explanation and an analysis of the culture in which the tales are told and a folkloristic analysis of the tales. Other works include Patai’s (1998) discussion of Arab folk tales in Palestine and Israel and Gay-Para’s (2003) collection of Palestinian tales. Sarhan’s (1987, 1988) work and research into Palestinian folk tales (only available in Arabic) is one of the most extensive studies of Arabic folklore available. His work includes a collection of tales, an analysis of the function of the tales within the Palestinian culture, and an encyclopaedia of Palestinian folklore, to name but a few.

The only comprehensive analysis of Palestinian dialects is Shahin’s (2008) description of Palestinian Arabic (PA). Other works focus on certain aspects of the dialects such as Abu Salim’s (1987) work on vowel harmony in PA, Monahan’s (2002) discussion on harmony and metrical structure in PA and Piamenta’s (1966) study of PA syntax. There are other more general works on Arabic dialects which refer to or are true of PA. Such works include Blanc’s (1960, 1970) studies on style variation in spoken Arabic and his work on the dual in the dialects. As a result of the diaspora and the large number of Palestinians in Jordan, many studies of Jordanian or Ammani Arabic necessarily discuss or refer to PA. These include Al-Wer’s (2002) study of Jordanian and Palestinian dialects in contact and her (2006) study of the Arab-speaking Middle East and Abdel-Jawad’s (1981) thesis on lexical and phonological variation in spoken Arabic in Amman. The focus of the present work will be Palestinian dialects (madani and fallāḥi) and how sociolinguistic variables and context influence the ways in which narrators narrate and how this sheds light on the culture.

1.3 Methodology

One would think that collecting narratives is a straightforward and simple endeavour and that there would be plenty of people willing to tell stories, but it transpires that people are not willing to narrate to strangers. People do not plan in advance to tell tales or their life stories, this is something which generally happens over the course of an evening when friends are reminiscing or a reason to narrate a story comes up. At first, different approaches were attempted but in the end the narratives were usually collected in the narrators’ homes or at the homes of their close friends. This proved preferable because it encouraged in the narrator a sense of comfort or ease necessary for free and natural speech and because it kept the narrative and its delivery in its typical setting. A lot of time was spent getting to know the narrators before they actually told any stories to the point that it seemed to be an initiation of sorts, as though I had to prove worthy of the stories being told. By the end, they knew just as much about me as I did about them, which inevitably made hearing their personal narratives more emotional because the narrators were no longer strangers but people who I’d grown to know and care about. Hearing their experiences which often related their traumatic exodus from their villages in Palestine in 1948 and 1967 and the effect on their lives, meant that their stories (which were reminiscent of my own family’s experiences) were especially poignant. These were emotionally charged narrations for everyone present.

The interviews themselves may be described as ‘loose’ in that they were not one-to-one, and there was no binding format. In this way, what Labov describes as the contrived nature of the interview was avoided as far as possible (see Abdel-Jawad 1981: 47). The narrator would be informed that we wanted to collect folk tales, personal narratives, and narratives about memorable days in general. Given that the narrators were Palestinian, and for the most part refugees, the prevalent and pervasive topic of the personal narratives was inevitably the war of 1948 and its ensuing events.

In the case of personal narratives, some formulaic questions would be asked to get the narrator started, but then the narrator would often start speaking spontaneously which resulted in fluid, natural and comfortable narrations. The questions the narrators were asked often arose from the narrations themselves but questions were most frequently asked by the narrator’s friends or family members present in the audience. The approach used with folk tales was somewhat different; the folk tale narrator would not be interrupted as this often resulted in the loss of fluidity of narration. When there was a need for elaboration or elucidation, if the narrator had not himself explained a point, questions would be asked once the narration had been completed.

Interestingly, children were not present at the narration of personal narratives. Sometimes there were children present in the audience when folk tales were being narrated, and this was clearly reflected in the style of narration. Since children are the customary audience of folk tales, their presence often encouraged a more colourful narration, and allowed the narrator to narrate without the constraining scepticism of adults. Most surprisingly, it was found that the conflict had not permeated the folk tales; this will be discussed in greater depth later on. Unlike the narration of personal narratives, the narration of folk tales was a more light-hearted experience. The equipment used for recording all narratives was a voice recorder or video camera.

In order to convey the essence of these narratives, they have been left uncensored. In published anthologies of Arabic folk tales, censorship is the norm whereby profanities and obscenities are removed as a matter of course. In the folk tales collected here, no such censorship has taken place in favour of greater linguistic freedom. Undoubtedly there was a degree of self-censorship by the narrators themselves due to the presence of recording equipment, but often enough, once the narration commenced, both narrator and audience forgot about the presence of the recording equipment and the narration became the main and only focus. The tales and personal narratives have been kept in the colloquial in which they were narrated with no intra-lingual translation being made from the colloquial into Classical Arabic (CA). All translations in this work are my own unless otherwise noted.

How data is collected can influence the way a narrator narrates and sometimes it can change the results; and so the aim when collecting these narratives was to make the narrators comfortable so that their speech was in its most natural and spontaneous form. In order to achieve this, the narrations often took place in their own homes and with people they felt comfortable speaking in front of. The presence of a voice recorder or video camera and whether or not it would affect the narrator’s narrative style was another point to consider. Narrators were always aware that they were being recorded which seemed to pose no real limitation and, when it did, they usually requested to remain anonymous. Only one narrator asked for the recording to be stopped.

One could discern an attitude of both guilt and fear when those narrators residing in Jordan were critical of the leadership of a country which has accommodated a large proportion of the Palestinian refugees and given them citizenship. Guilt, because they did not want to seem ‘ungrateful’ towards their host country, and fear, because of the possible ramifications and repercussions they could face if something they said fell into the wrong hands, namely al-muxābarāt – ‘the Secret Service’. Many narrators warned of the repercussions one would face if we spoke about the Jordanian government’s ‘insidious’ role in the Palestinian events, especially in print. Interestingly, there are numerous 39 conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 1948 and 1967 and many Palestinians believe that certain Arab leaders were complicit in the loss of Palestine or that they had interests which ran contrary to the interests of the Palestinians. For example, King Abdullah of Jordan, King Hussein’s father, is believed by many to have been a traitor (see Shlaim 2000: 30). Some narrators clearly believed this and others expressly stated it. On the whole, one can only concur with Peteet when she explains that ‘Palestinians feel a keen sense of betrayal and mistrust vis-à-vis other Arab countries and an international community that has either ignored them or assigned them to the “terrorist camp”’ (see Valentine Daniel and Knudsen 1995: 181–2). According to folk belief, the Jordanian Secret Servic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Transcription System
• List of Narrators
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Oral–Written Divide
• 3 The Lore and Tales of the Folk
• 4 Narratives of Personal Experience
• 5 The Arabic Language – lisan al-‘arab
• 6 Cultural Characteristics of the Texts
• 7 Linguistic Features of the Oral Narratives
• 8 The Texts
• 9 Observations and Conclusions
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index