LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

nadia yaqubBesides its [that is, the formula’s] poetic function of building a regular metre, itperforms various speech acts whose primary relevance is for the wedding celebration.These are quintessentially social speech acts, among them the greeting of members ofthe audience; thus, social interaction becomes poeticized … (1990: 99) 13On the surface, these direct references to the performance context are similarto the metanarrative discourse that can occur in storytelling (Bauman andBriggs 1990: 69). There are a number of such devices at the disposal of a skillednarrator. Tellers may, for example, interject into their narration commentsabout the credibility of the tale (‘Now you may not believe this, but …’) ormake deliberate comparisons between elements in the tale and their counterpartsin the performance situation (‘It was about as tall as that tree over there’).Such commentary draws the audience members’ attention to the here and now,transporting them momentarily from the mimetic world into which they havebeen psychologically drawn by the narration, back to the present of theperformance. One can argue that such language operates as a trope similar toliterary allusion in that it results in the coexistence of two contexts for a singleutterance (Conte 1986: 38–9; Riffaterre 1983: 120). 14 In the Palestinian poetryperformance, however, in which more than half the lines explicitly mentionelements of the performance context, something very different is happening.The poetry performance does not transport the audience psychologically to afictional world and then jerk them back to the present through metacommunicativecommentary. Indeed, to a large extent, we can argue that theperformance itself becomes a central theme of the performance. There is somuch ‘meta’ discourse in the poetry that the audience is never permitted toforget exactly where they are (at a wedding sahrah) and what they are doing(celebrating the approaching nuptials of their friend or kinsman, the groom).The performance context is never allowed to slip into the background, butforced to be present in the minds of participants even as an Arab heroic contextis constantly evoked through the language of chivalry.Here, too, phaticity has a role to play. Muhawi, following Babcock, has notedthe phatic function of ‘meta’ discourse. Like the greetings mentioned above(and, indeed, as we have already noted in the context of performance, thegreetings are themselves metacommunicative) the ‘meta’ discourse that permeatesthe poetry not only binds the sahrah participants to the poetry in performance,but also serves to bind them psychologically to one another. The simultaneity ofthe two contexts is in part created through the equation between performanceand battle that is explicitly enunciated in the poetry itself. In a number of lines,poetry and performance are specifically linked to battle. The poets are the‘knights of speech’, their poetry is a weapon – ‘the sword of Æataba’ – whichserves as ‘a support on the day of battle’. Through the performance an identity iscreated between laylat kayf (a night of enjoyment) and yawm al-maÆrakah (the— 26 —www.taq.ir