LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duelin the 1990s has coincided with more active participation on the part ofPalestinians in Israeli politics. But the poetry performance is not essentiallyabout politics. In part through the work of producing locality in their weddingeve celebrations, Palestinians are in a continual process of becoming. WhenJews begin to attend Palestinian weddings, then the lists of names that are socentral to the poetry will include Hebrew names as well.notes1. Poetry duelling of one sort or another is widespread throughout the Arab world,especially in the context of weddings. See Caton for a detailed description of poetryduelling among the Khawlani tribe of Yemen. The Galilee and the Triangle arewithin the geographical borders of the present state of Israel.2. Bowman (p. 33) recognises the importance of place names in Palestinian identityformation, although he does not discuss the relationship between the act of namingand the affirmation of a cultural or political identity.3. Swedenburg notes that in 1990, Israeli government-run television and radio bannedthe use of Palestinian names for towns and villages in the Occupied Territories,replacing them with their biblical equivalents (p. 74).4. See Slyomovics for a discussion of the renaming of this village and subsequentrelationship between the original village (now Ein Hod) and the new ÆAyn Hawdwhere original inhabitants of the Palestinian village now live.5. Atchity also draws an interesting comparison between the catalogue and genealogy.Since the Palestinian lists include not only village names, but also families, thesuggestion of genealogy is also strongly present here. Palestinians are praised withinthe context of their ancestral and familial affiliations: sons of Palestinian families,who are also sons of ÆAdnan, IsmaÆil, and Ibrahim.6. That Palestinian Israelis are aware of the political implications of the village lists canbe seen from the following incident. At one duel performed shortly after theestablishment of the Palestinian Authority in Jericho, a poet included that city inhis listing of Palestinian towns, inciting considerable excitement among the audience.‘Jericho, did he say Jericho?’, ‘Jericho? We’ll spend tonight in prison!’ were some ofthe comments the mention elicited.7. Appadurai defines neighbourhoods as the existing social forms in which locality isrealised (p. 179).8. My corpus of sixty hours of recordings includes one mention of the city of Haifa, amixed Arab/Jewish city. Israel and the Jewish settlement town of Karmiel are eachmentioned once, both times by a poet who, during his interview with me, expressedgreat satisfaction as a citizen of the State of Israel.9. See, for instance, the vocabulary of the poetry cited in Caton (1990), Bailey (1974)and Sowayan (1985).10. Atchity makes a similar point about Homer and his relationship with Agamemnonin the Iliad. ‘By drawing attention to the role of the poet of memory, finally, Homerequates himself with Agamemnon. As the king protects and serves the communityin time, the poet assures the interests of human continuity’ (p. 278). Reynolds makes— 29 —www.taq.ir