HEROIC POE TS, POETIC HEROES A volume in the series MYTH AND POETICS edited by GREGORY NAGY A list of titles appears at the end of the book. HEROIC POETS, POETIC HEROES The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition DWIGHT FLETCHER REYNOLDS CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1995 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1995 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reynolds, Dwight Fletcher, b. 1956 Heroic poets, poetic heroes : the ethnography of performance in an Arabic oral epic tradition / Dwight Fletcher Reynolds. p. cm. — (Myth and poetics) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-3174-6 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-2321-6 (pbk.) 1. Ethnology—Egypt—Banī Hilāl. 2. Sīrat Banī Hilāl. 3. Epic poetry, Arabic— Egypt—Banī Hilāl. 4. Folklore—Egypt—Banī Hilāl—Performance. 5. Oral tradition—Egypt—Banī Hilāl. 6. Rites and ceremonies—Egypt—Banī Hilāl. 7. Banī Hilāl (Egypt)—Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. GN648.R49 1995 398′.0962—dc200 94-44173 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Photo of Shaykh Tāhā Abū Zayd by Dwight Fletcher Reynolds To Kathryn Lee Gill Reynolds and Edd Van Ness Stockton Contents List of Illustrations IX Foreword, by Gregory Nagy Xl Preface Xlll Notes on Transcription and Transliteration XVll Introduction: The Tradition 1 Part One: The Ethnography of a Poetic Tradition I. The Village 23 2. Poets Inside and Outside the Epic 48 3. The Economy of Poetic Style 102 Part Two: Textual and Performance Strategies in the Sahra 4. The Interplay of Genres 139 5 . The Sahra as Social Interaction 177 Conclusion: Epic Text and Context 207 Appendix: Texts in Transliteration 213 Wo rks Cited 227 Index 239 Vll Illustrations FIGURES I. Evidence fr om the oral tradition (map of Middle East) 2-3 2. Poet fa milies of al-Bakatush 55 3. Residence patterns in al-Bakatush 5 8 4. Bifurcation of the epic hero 84 5 . Performance collusions 86 6. Thematic movement in Bitat BaladI performance 168 PHOTOGRAPHS I. Shaykh BiyalI Abu Fahmi 129 2. Shaykh cAbd al-Wahhab Ghazi 131 3. Shaykh Taha Abu Zayd 1]2 4. Shaykh cAbd al-I:Iamid Tawfiq 134 lX Foreword by Gregory Nagy Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Ep ic Tradition, by Dwight Fletcher Reynolds, introduces an impor­ tant new perspective into the Myth and Poetics series. An intensive study of heroic poetry (the S,rat BanI Hiltil epic) in al-Bakatiish, the Nile Delta "village of the poets, " this book concretely illustrates the centrality of performance in the very process of composition or recomposition in oral traditions. Or, to put it in Saussure's terms, we see how the element of parole is key to understanding the langue of the poetic process. Reyn­ olds's emphasis on the performative dimension of oral poetics gives the reader a chance to observe how an oral tradition works in its own social fr amework. The author explains the tradition itself, not just a given text sample of the tradition. Another highlight of the book is its emphasis on a poetic mentality that assumes a dialogue linking poet and audience with the characters in the story being told. Such a mentality has been investigated in the case of Homeric poetry by classicists such as Joseph Russo and Bennett Simon, but here we see, fo r the very firsttime, a detailed demonstration on the basis of a living tradition, and the result is a quantum leap in our understanding of oral epic. Reynolds isolates those tenuous moments of performance when poets and audience members alike expect to find reflections, or interactions, between their reality and the reality of the epic heroes. The poetic tradition of S,rat BanI Hiltil struggles to reconcile and even unite the worlds of poets and heroes, men of words and men of deeds. The heroes may be long dead, but they become ever-present each time the epic performance gets under way. This book brings another new perspective to the Myth and Poetics Xl XlI Foreword series. Unlike most ethnographers of today, Reynolds has taken with him into his fieldwork the questions classicists and other literary critics ask about the very nature of epic as genre. His research in a living oral epic tradition corroborates, and has in fa ct been strongly influencedby, Richard Martin's work on speech acts in Homer, The Language oJ Heroes (1989) , the very first book in this series. Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes addresses the performative realities of a living epic tradition. It accounts fo r the economic fo rces that shape the dynamics of performance, the individual poet's personal ambition to be popular, and the artistic choices necessitated by the immediacy of interaction with the audience. It demonstrates that epic can represent very different things to audiences of different social and educational backgrounds. Refuting the stereotypical image of a static "folk" poem, supposedly immutable fr om time immemorial, Reynolds's book reveals an epic tradition open to constant reshaping and reinterpretation, even within its conservative rural setting. In its performative context, epic is revealed as an ongoing interaction of poet, audience, and the heroes that it glorifies. Preface Sirat Bani Hilal, the epic history of the BanI Hilal Bedouin tribe, is an astonishingly rich and varied oral tradition. Its roots lie in historic events that took place between the tenth and twelfth centuries C.E. in the Arabian peninsula and North Africa. The exploits and fa tal weaknesses of the heroes of the BanI Hilal tribe have been recounted in Arabic oral tradition fo r nearly a thousand years, and traces of the tradition are fo und throughout the Arab world fr om the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the shores of the Indian Ocean. In different regions and over different historical periods the epic has been performed as a complex tale cycle narrated entirely in prose, as a prose narrative embellished with lengthy poems, as a narrative recited in rhymed verse, and as narrative sung in rhymed verse to the accompaniment of various musical instruments. In some areas, several styles of performance coexist and may be patronized by different social groups. In many regions, verses fr om the sira also circulate widely as proverbs and riddles. The main characters of the story have become fo lk archetypes of the courageous warrior, the cunning schemer, the irresistibly beautiful maiden, and the stranger-in-a-strange-Iand; as such they are often utilized by modern Arab writers and poets as deeply resonant social symbols. This work treats the Sirat Bani Hi/al tradition as it is fo und in a single village in northern Egypt, a village known throughout the Nile Delta as the "village of the poets, " owing to the large community of hereditary epic-singers resident there. These fo urteen households of professional poets all perform in the same basic style: to the accompaniment of the Egyptian two-stringed spike-fiddle, the rabab, they sing the immense tale of the BanI Hilal heroes in measured, rhymed verse with only Xl11 XIV Preface occasional intervening prose passages to set the scene or gloss the main action. The most accomplished poets in the village may take well over one hundred hours to sing the entire story. As we shall see, however, there is no such thing as a complete rendition, fo r there exists a virtually unlimited body of subtales, historical background, and possible descrip­ tive expansions, passed down fr om master poet to apprentice. These tools and techniques of the trade are many; thus some but never all are deployed in a given performance. The fo cus of this book is the intense tripartite relationship that obtains between the poets, their listeners, and the heroes of the BanI Hilal narrative. In examining the tradition fr om several different angles, I demonstrate that poets, heroes, and audience members perceive one another, interact with one another, and even rely on one another as social allies (or adversaries) in fa scinating and highly significant ways, all of which contribute to the continual re-creation and propagation of the epic tradition. Furthermore, this process is not necessarily restricted to moments that we outsiders would recognize as moments of epic performance, but rather is one that takes place both inside and outside of the epic "text." Though it might at first seem surprising to consider the epic heroes as active participants in this exchange, they are deployed both by poets when singing and by audience members in the ensuing discussions, so that their characters as conceived and constructed by participants invariably leave their mark on the personal relationships and social tensions that are played out during epic performances. Major issues, including ethnic identification, Arabness, religious orientation, traditional codes of behavior, manhood, womanhood, and the hierarchi­ zation of social power, are woven into the texture of any modern perfor­ mance of Strat Bant Hilal. The tradition of performing the epic poem in this region is to a great extent kept alive by its role as catalyst fo r such significant social concerns.