LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duelday of battle), both of which are formulaic epithets for the wedding sahrah.The nature of the speech acts employed in the poetic performance also helpsto create this identity. The typical Palestinian wedding poetry performanceincludes a great deal of what Jacobson calls conative language, and what Hymesdefines as directive language, that is, language directed at the audience(Jacobson 1960: 355; Hymes 1974: 23). Some lines consist of instructions to thesaff or the audience as a whole, and others of explicit performatives. I have beenusing the term participant to refer to audience members, not only because of theactive role that the saff plays in the performance, but also because so much ofthe typical performance consists of this type of direct address. In this sense, thePalestinian wedding poetry duel differs markedly from a theatrical performancein which audience members stand outside of the interaction that makes up theperformance. As the addressees of so many lines, they are drawn directly intothe context created by the poetry, that is, into the heroic Arab construct.The creation of this heroic Arab construct in performance and its relationshipto the transforming nature of that construct add a complexity to the notionof locality which Appadurai does not address. Appadurai discusses the contextsof locality primarily in terms of the relationships that can exist betweenmultiple neighbourhoods in a non-hierarchical setting and the limitations onlocality production that can occur when a nation-state imposes itself ontoneighbourhoods. Speaking of the Yanomami villages of Brazil, for example, hesays that ‘while they are still in a position to generate contexts as they produceand reproduce their own neighbourhoods, they are increasingly prisoners in thecontext-producing activities of the nation-state, which makes their own effortsto produce locality seem feeble, even doomed’ (1996: 186). Palestinianresidents of Israel find their locality similarly challenged by the activities of thestate of Israel, but what of the wider context of the Arab world? Throughcreation of the Arab heroic construct, we find Palestinians voluntarily definingtheir locality to a larger cultural entity – the Arab nation. In the process, it isIsrael, a non-Arab society, which is marginalised, at least for the duration of theperformance.Most important is the way that sahrah participants are drawn into thesignified context. They are not made temporarily to forget their presence at thesahrah and identify with characters in a fictional world created by the poetry.Indeed, the poets through the use of conative language and relentless referencesto the performance context prevent anything of the sort from happening.Rather, the fictional world of chivalry created by the overarching heroic Arabconstruct that characterises the poetry is brought squarely into the present ofthe performance. The wedding sahrah itself is transformed into a heroic, Arabevent, and the participation of poet and audience is redefined as a heroic, Arabact. We are reminded of Genette who, in discussing a very different sort of— 27 —www.taq.ir