LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

nadia yaqubthe names’ (Swedenburg 1995: 50). 3 Thus, the destroyed town of Al-Saffuriyabecomes Zippori on Israeli maps. æAyn Hawd, which was not destroyed butoccupied and turned into an artists’ colony, has become Ein Hod. 4 Many townsand villages although still populated largely, or even solely, by Palestinians havebeen given new names by the state of Israel as a mark of historical claim to thesites in question. One might have difficulty locating the Palestinian West Banktown of Nablus, for example, unless one knows that the Israeli occupationauthorities have renamed it Shekhem and identify it as such on tourist mapsand road signs. Likewise, the Palestinian town of al-Khalil is given its biblicalname Hebron. Shafa ÆAmr, which contains an old synagogue but has not hadJewish residents since the 1920s, is identified as Shefar Am. For the Israeli state,the attachment to local towns and geographic areas of Hebrew place names,names that resonate with Jewish history in the region, has been a conspicuouspart of its appropriation of the territory identified by these names, and historicaljustification for that appropriation. For Palestinians, the continued use of Palestiniannames rather than Hebrew ones for their villages constitutes a denial ofthis appropriation. Their Palestinian place names are important preciselybecause they resonate with a Palestinian Arab, rather than a Jewish, history ofthe area.Significantly, neither Jewish Israelis nor Palestinians are interested in imposingnames on sites that have no connection with their own history. Manyvillages in the Galilee have neither Jewish residents nor ruins and as a resulthave been allowed to keep their Palestinian names. Similarly, Palestinians donot give names to the Jewish settlements that have been built in the Galileesince 1948. The use by Palestinians of Palestinian place names, then, must notbe seen merely in negative terms as a rejection of the Israeli state or of theJewish presence. Rather, it is most accurately interpreted as an affirmation ofPalestinian history and presence on the land.In this social and political context, the listing of Palestinian place names inthe poetry duels carries a special significance, reminding wedding participants ofthe Palestinian character of the region, of local Palestinian history, and of theirown legitimacy as Palestinian residents on the land. However, just as importantas the presence of the names in the poetry is the way in which they are listed.Listing is a near universal, and unfortunately understudied, phenomenon in oralpoetic traditions. Places and people are listed in the wedding praise songs of theGriots. We find it in Irish ballads and various Polynesian traditions. Perhaps thelists best known in the West are the catalogues in Homer’s epics. Atchitymentions some of the ways in which these catalogues, most notably the catalogueof Achaian ships in Book Two of the Iliad, have been analysed, notingthat the latter serves as a dramatis personae, that it presents a microcosm andprefigure of the Trojan War, and, most importantly, serves to memorialise a— 20 —www.taq.ir