LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duel— 21 —period anterior to both the narrating and narrated present whose world of socialupheaval differed markedly from Homer’s. ‘It [that is, the catalogue] mayrepresent Homer’s attempt to define the synthesization of society in a world,unlike his own, which had not yet accomplished it completely’ (1978: 277). 5As fellow bearers of a shared Palestinian identity, participants are alsodefined as a community. In this regard, the Palestinian poetry duel is similar toother folklore genres which serve culturally to bind members of a society. Thephatic nature of many lines is relevant here. Discussion of phaticity is complicatedby a terminological confusion that has existed since Malinowski firstcoined the term in 1923. As Muhawi has pointed out, Malinowski uses the term‘phatic communion’ to refer to both a type of meaningless small talk employedsolely to keep conversation going and to all types of utterances in which ‘ties ofunion are created by a mere exchange of words’ (quoted in Muhawi 1999: 268).Whereas most subsequent research on phaticity has focused on the ‘small talk’,Muhawi, interested primarily in the ‘ties of union’, seeks to divorce the conceptof phatic communion from small talk in his exploration of the phaticity of anexpressive genre, the proverb. The division is necessary to reconcile a contradictionin Malinowski’s own description of phatic communion as ‘a speechevent which does and does not have the ability to act upon the world bycreating and not creating bonds of sympathy and union …’ (Muhawi 1999:268). What is interesting about the Palestinian poetry is that it inserts ‘smalltalk’ within an expressive genre precisely, I would argue, as a means ofexploiting its phaticity. In one performance, for instance, the poet chooses as arefrain the phrase ‘Greet the guest, Abu Ibrahim (hayy al-dayf yabu brahim).’ Inperformance, the saff’s chanting of the refrain alternates with the poet’s offeringof greeting to various guests. By extending greetings to guests, families andvillages, by employing the formulas that are used by Palestinians on a daily basisto greet each other, poets invoke the phaticity that is inherent in thosegreetings, thereby strengthening the bonds of community (and producing thelocality) that emerge from the sahrah.The sense of community that emerges from performance will affect anyonewho attends or participates in the event. Atchity’s analysis of the Homericcatalogues is also relevant here. For Atchity, the catalogue of ships is also aboutsubordinating the individual to the communal in a time of social crisis. ‘Fromthe largest group to the smallest collective … the poet’s emphasis is uponcommunity’ (1978: 277). Moreover, Atchity says, individuals are named asgeneric representatives, usually of the troops that they bring with them.Similarly, the listing of Palestinian villages and family names defines sahrahparticipants as a group, one that is obliquely described in the performance asPalestinian. Furthermore, like the individuals in the Homeric catalogue ofAchaian ships, the mention of Palestinian sahrah participants in the performwww.taq.ir