LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

nadia yaqubance bears a metonymic relationship with the social groups (that is, their familiesand villages) to which they belong. As a result, the list of personal andgeographical names which is the hallmark of the praise sections of the poetryduel serves to extend the Palestinian community created in the performancewell beyond the few hundred men who attend the wedding to all members ofthe families mentioned in the poetry and to residents of all named villages. Thehost village, both as host village and as the home of the largest number of guests,is praised most extensively. Villages and towns in the immediate vicinity of thehost village will also be mentioned repeatedly. As one moves farther away fromthe host village, the pattern of mentioned villages becomes more scattered. Thenaming of villages, then, defines a specific geographic area.Because the lists of names follow the pattern of attendance at the wedding,the place names mentioned are those most closely connected with weddingparticipants. The space created in the poetry is not merely a Palestinian one,but one most intimately tied to their concepts of home, family and belonging.The area defined by a given performance is usually relatively small (for example,the north-central Galilee). However, it is not uncommon for poets to mentionother regions (the Negev, the Triangle, the West Bank and Gaza) in a clearattempt to extend the boundaries of the Arab Palestinian space created in theperformance to include all of historical Palestine. At least some poets, then,seem to be aware of the political significance of their practice, even as theyavoid direct references to Palestinian nationalist sentiments. 6Conspicuously absent from the Palestinian wedding poetry is any mention orallusion to Israel or Israeli culture and society. In his discussion of neighbourhoods,Appadurai notes that every neighbourhood is created against an Other. 7‘… [N]eighborhoods’, he says, ‘are inherently what they are because they areopposed to something else and derived from other, already produced neighborhoods’(1996: 183). The Galilee Palestinian’s Other, the larger (non-Palestinian)Israeli presence, is conspicuously absent from the Palestinian poetry duel. Thecities and settlements which Palestinians see and interact with on a regularbasis, the Hebrew words borrowed into the Palestinian dialect never occur inthe poetry. 8 One might suspect that the art form itself would be resistant to theuse of foreign words, but such is not the case, generally. English words occuroccasionally in the poetry, and the closely related Lebanese poetry duel can alsoinclude English, and more commonly French. Oral poetry from other parts ofthe Arab world also exhibits a great deal of flexibility which allows for theinclusion of foreign borrowings (albeit in an Arabised form). There also seemsto be little resistance to incorporating modern elements into oral Arabic dialectpoetry. 9 Palestinian poets will talk frankly about loudspeakers, bombs, cars andtape recorders in their poetry duels. Current events may arise, although oftenrather obliquely. One cannot argue, then, that the absence from the poetry duel— 22 —www.taq.ir