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

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.