LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

nadia yaqublong stretches of praise and greeting of hosts, guests and their families andvillages. The greetings can occur in any genre and at any time during theperformance. A typical wedding will include a long greeting section during thefirst half of the evening. If there is a debate, insult and boast exchange, orcomposition contest to the performance, this will usually occur during thesecond half of the duel, after a great deal of praise and greeting. However, a lesselaborate greeting section will also occur towards the end of the evening. It isnot uncommon for a performance to consist almost solely of praise and greeting,or for greetings to be interspersed with boasting, description and platitudes.These lengthy passages are generally viewed by both poets and audience as theleast ‘poetic’ sections of a given performance. They generally lack entextuality,that is, they are completely context-dependent in that they are not quotedoutside of the performance context as other, more memorable, lines may be(Bauman and Briggs 1990). Most striking is that many of the lines in thesesections are borrowed directly from the most mundane of phatic exchanges fromPalestinian daily speech. However, as we shall see later, it is within these sectionsof the performance, at least in part as a result of their phaticity, that theproduction of a distinctly Palestinian locality takes place.During the praise and greeting sections, poets may mention a specific eventor accomplishment, but generally the praise and greeting will be generic innature. Often, nothing specific is said about a given family or village. Rather, itis simply welcomed by the poet. Thus, what is said about a particular village orfamily is much less important than the mentioning of the village itself. As aresult, the poetry takes on the character of a list, a list of proper names.Consider, for example, the following excerpt:The youths of the town are around meHere are my family and friendsTo ÆAyn Mahil, my brothersTo al-ÆUzayr and RummanahI came riding my horseLong live Bayt JannWhere did the residents of Maghar go?And all the people of al-MashhadI want to send my greetingsShafa ÆAmr, I callAnd Shafa Hamadah, we greetOur party is a party of entertainmentAnd the Zaynah’s are with us and the Sarur’sWe have light, good lightAnd to Farad and SakhninGod grant a long life to people of JininWe came to the party, we cameAnd the people of the town are around us— 18 —www.taq.ir