LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

nadia yaqubverbal art, says, ‘to keep his thoughts fixed on two moments at the same time isalmost always, for the Proustian creature, to consider them identical and tomerge them …’ (1980: 143). Like Marcel in The Remembrance of Things Past,Palestinians at the wedding sahrah are asked to keep their thoughts fixed on twocontexts, and like Marcel, they succeed in doing so by rendering them identical.The distance between the signifying context and the signified context in thePalestinian case – between the present of performance and the mythic pastcreated mimetically within the performance – is psychologically removed.Situated squarely within the heroic Arab construct, the sahrah itself becomesa heroic context, and to participate in the sahrah becomes a heroic deed. If thelists of Palestinian family and village names create an imaginary Palestinianspace, the heroic construct created in performance defines that space as Arab.By defining the scope and nature of their locality through the poetry, Palestinianscan, at least for the duration of the performance, reject their marginalposition within Israeli society and situate themselves and their Palestinian-nessat the core of an Arab cultural centre.Myerhoff describes a similar transformation in her discussion of ritual:… The invisible referents or realities to which ritual symbols point become ourexperience and the subject may have the sense of glimpsing, or more accurately,knowing the essential, accurate patterns of human life, in relation to the natural andcosmic order. (1990: 246)This reminds us of Geertz’s comment that rituals have the effect of fusing thedreamed-of and the lived-in order. Thus transformation is a multidimensionalalteration of the ordinary state of mind, overcoming barriers between thought,action, knowledge and emotion. The invisible world referred to in ritual is mademanifest and the subject placed within it.Indeed, it is within the ritual nature of the Palestinian poetry duel that therelationship between locality and phaticity lies. The Palestinian poetry duelitself displays many of the features of ritual as defined by Schechner, includingefficacy, link to an absent Other, symbolic time, audience participation andcollective creativity (Beeman 1993: 378). At the same time, the greeting sectionsof the performance borrow heavily from another set of rituals from Palestiniansociety, that is, the rituals of phatic ‘small talk’, and most particularly the ritualsof phatic greetings (Coupland et al. 1992: 212). In other words, embedded withinthe larger ritual of the wedding eve performance are the small rituals ofphaticity. And it is precisely within ritual that Appadurai finds the ‘hard andregular work’ that must be carried out to produce locality. ‘[S]pace and time arethemselves socialized and localized through complex and deliberate practices ofperformance, representation, and action’ (1996: 180). Phaticity, then, works toproduce locality.It is no accident that an increased popularity for the Palestinian oral poetry— 28 —www.taq.ir