Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon
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Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page i POPULAR CULTURE AND NATIONALISM IN LEBANON Based on an award-winning thesis, Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon is a pioneering study of musical theater and popular culture and its relation to the production of identity in Lebanon in the second half of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of the departure of the French from Lebanon and the civil violence of 1958, the Rahbani Brothers (Asi and Mansour) staged a series of folkloric musical-theatrical extravaganzas at the annual Baalbeck Festival which highlighted the talents of Asi’s wife, the Lebanese diva Fairouz, arguably the most famous living Arab singer. The inclusion of these folkloric vignettes into the Festival’s otherwise European-dominated cultural agenda created a powerful nation-building combination of what Partha Chatterjee calls the “appropriation of the popular” and the “classicization of tradition.” This musical-theatrical movement coincided with the confluence of increasing internal and external migration in Lebanon, as well as with the rapid development of mass-media technology, of which the Baalbeck Festival can be seen as an extension. Employing theories of nationalism, modernity, globalism, and locality, the book shows that these factors combined to give the project a potent, if not always constructive, identity-forming power. Small wonder then that with the start of the civil war in 1975 would come the collapse of this project. In the ashes of these events Ziad Rahbani, the son of Fairouz and Asi, began to author, compose, and star in his own series of exceedingly popular musical plays. These works comically and parodically confronted the gap between his parents’ Lebanon and the Lebanon of brutal internecine war. Ziad’s plays portray a much more heteroglossic and complex Lebanon than that of his parents. He achieves this, however, without completely breaking free from the strong pull of his parents’ project. In the space of intertextual connections and the interpersonal and intergenerational relationships among the figures in question, one can see how the nation comes to be debated, imagined, and represented. This book is the first study of Fairouz and the Rahbani family in English and will appeal to students and researchers in the field of Middle East Studies, Popular Culture, and Musical Theater. Christopher Stone is an Associate Professor of Arabic and Head of the Arabic Division at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page ii ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES Editors James E. Montgomery University of Cambridge Roger Allen University of Pennsylvania Philip F. Kennedy New York University Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures is a monograph series devoted to aspects of the literatures of the Near and Middle East and North Africa both modern and pre-modern. It is hoped that the provision of such a forum will lead to a greater emphasis on the comparative study of the literatures of this area, although studies devoted to one literary or linguistic region are warmly encouraged. It is the editors’ objective to foster the comparative and multi-disciplinary investigation of the written and oral literary products of this area. 1. SHEHERAZADE THROUGH 6. THE NOVEL AND THE THE LOOKING GLASS RURAL IMAGINARY IN Eva Sallis EGYPT, 1880–1985 Samah Selim 2. THE PALESTINIAN NOVEL Ibrahim Taha 7. IBN ABI TAHIR TAYFUR AND ARABIC WRITERLY 3. OF DISHES AND CULTURE DISCOURSE A ninth-century bookman Geert Jan van Gelder in Baghdad Shawkat M. Toorawa 4. MEDIEVAL ARABIC PRAISE POETRY 8. RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES Beatrice Gruendler IN MODERN MUSLIM AND JEWISH 5. MAKING THE GREAT BOOK LITERATURES OF SONGS Edited by Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick Hilary Kilpatrick Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page iii 9. ARABIC POETRY 14. LITERATURE, JOURNALISM Trajectories of modernity and AND THE AVANT-GARDE tradition Intersection in Egypt Muhsin J. al-Musawi Elisabeth Kendall 10. MEDIEVAL ANDALUSIAN 15. THE THOUSAND AND COURTLY CULTURE IN ONE NIGHTS THE MEDITERRANEAN Space, travel and transformation Three ladies and a lover Richard van Leeuwen Cynthia Robinson 16. ARAB CULTURE AND 11. WRITING AND THE NOVEL REPRESENTATION IN Genre, identity and agency in MEDIEVAL ISLAM Egyptian fiction Muslim horizons Muhammad Siddiq Julia Bray 17. LITERARY MODERNITY 12. NATIONALISM, ISLAM BETWEEN THE MIDDLE EAST AND WORLD LITERATURE AND EUROPE Sites of confluence in the writings of Textual transactions in Mahmud al-Masadi nineteenth-century Arabic, English, Mohamed-Salah Omri and Persian literatures Kamran Rastegar 13. THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN IN EARLY ISLAM 18. POPULAR CULTURE AND Gregor Schoeler NATIONALISM IN LEBANON Translated by Uwe Vagelpohl The Fairouz and Rahbani nation Edited by James Montgomery Christopher Stone Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page iv Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page v POPULAR CULTURE AND NATIONALISM IN LEBANON The Fairouz and Rahbani nation Christopher Stone Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page vi First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Christopher Stone All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-93435-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–77273–7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–93932–8 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–77273–0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–93932–1 (ebk) Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page vii TO KAVITA AND ZUNE Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page viii Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page ix CONTENTS Acknowledgments xii Note on transliteration xiii Introduction 1 Fairouz at the 1998 Baalbeck Festival 2 The academic marginalization of theater 6 Sources 7 Methodology 8 Chapter outline 9 1 Baalbeck and the Rahbanis: folklore, ancient history, and nationalism 13 Baalbeck: whose site is it anyway? 14 The Baalbeck Festival: “Finally/forever anchored in Lebanese life” 17 The beginnings of the Baalbeck Festival and the beginnings of the nation 21 Folklore at Baalbeck: the appropriation of the popular, part one 24 The Baalbeck Festival: “A mirror with two faces” 29 The Festival program: “A Festival in and of itself” 32 2 The musical theater of the Rahbani Brothers: representation and the formation of subjectivities 40 The “stunning” reception of the Rahbanis and Fairouz at Baalbeck in 1957 40 Radio and the pre-1957 Rahbani Brothers: Rumba, refrigerators, and the Lebanese song 43 ix Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page x CONTENTS From Sayyid Darwish to the Rahbani Brothers: musical theater and commitment 49 The Rahbani Brothers, Chamoun, Chehab, and Chiha: the cultural politics of nationalism 53 The Moon’s Bridge and the miracle of national unity: the Rahbani Brothers and Said Akl 56 The Holiday of Glory and The Night and the Lantern: inclusivity through exclusivity, or the “Other” in the early theater of the Rahbani Brothers 58 “I am the word, you are the song,” or the appropriation of the popular, part two: from folkloric to operatic, from the Baalbeck Festival to Beirut 64 Representation and The Ring Seller: “The Word Became a Man” or “The Lie” versus “The Story” 70 “The Rahbanis’ Lebanon” 75 The Days of Fakhr al-Din: exception to the rule? 85 3 Ziad Rahbani’s theatrical “novelization” of the Rahbanis’ Lebanon 93 The decline of the trinity: the post-1967 Rahbani Brothers 93 Happiness Hotel: prognostication or proclamation? 99 Petra: civil war and the theater of the Rahbani Brothers 107 What Do We Need to Do Tomorrow and A Long American Film: the paradox of parody 110 A Failure: the power of parody 123 Ziad and the novelization of the Rahbanis’ Lebanon 133 4 Fairouz and/as the nation 139 Fairouz as metaphor for the nation 144 “Fairouz Was and Remains a Villager:” the appropriation of the popular, part three 152 Fairouz: “Prisoner of the Mold” 154 Fairouz and Ziad: from sky to earth, from mother to daughter 160 x Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page xi CONTENTS Conclusion: Beiteddine 2000 and beyond 170 Appendix: the musical theater of the Rahbanis 179 Notes 181 Bibliography 193 Index 215 xi Acknowledgements The author expresses his thanks to John G. Richardson for his interest and helpful advice and the following who supplied data and photographs: Mexboro Concrete Ltd Roger Bullivant Ltd The United Kingdom Cast Stone Association xii Herstone-FM.qxd 6/8/07 12:19 PM Page xiii NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION I have used a simplified system of dropping the diacritics (dots under emphatic consonants) but of keeping macrons (the lines above long vowels). A ta’ marbuta is represented by “a.” The hamza, except for the initial hamza which is not marked, is represented with a single closing quotation mark and the letter ‘ayn with a single opening quotation mark.