The Awlad ʿAli ghinnāwa is a form of traditional oral poetry. Scholars of oral literature and Arab poetry would no doubt find a thorough analysis of this genre and greater attention to the textual interesting. What follows is a brief and preliminary discussion of the use of formulas and the range of themes in the ghinnāwa that will do little more than hint at the rich field awaiting analysis.
Bedouin individuals either draw poems from a cultural repertoire or compose them extemporaneously, playing with familiar themes, phrases, and structures. I thus characterize the poetic discourse as formulaic, but I mean something less rigid than the use of actual formulas, which Lord and Parry have shown to be key elements of the composition and recitation of traditional epic poetry (see Lord 1971). Since rhyme is absent and meter need not be sustained for any length, and because there is little pressure to compose rapidly during performance, complex formulas may be less essential in this genre. However, images, phrases, and themes recur. The ghinnāwa even has a specialized vocabulary, its most common and characteristic terms being ones rarely heard in ordinary speech. Some of these terms are so ubiquitous that they must be viewed as conventions or simple formulas.
Awlad ʿAli do not seem overly concerned with distinguishing between original poems and those heard and repeated, a feature characteristic of oral poetry (Lord 1971, 101). The answers I got to questions of authorship were not reliable. Often, just after someone had told me a poem was theirs I would hear it from someone else. Several people told me that “in the olden days” everyone could compose poems but that since few could now do so, most people merely repeated poems by rote. Even so, certain individuals are recognized as particularly gifted and interested in poetry. These individuals do compose original poems, remembering the date and occasion of the composition. For example, one man recited a poem to me that he said he had composed eight years earlier about a married woman whom he had loved.
Only under a few special circumstances do people self-consciously quote or repeat the poems of others. The first is in recounting well-known Bedouin love stories or romances, in which the dialogue between lovers is nearly always in poetry of the ghinnāwa form. The second is when they relate true-life events that involved the exchange of poetry. In both these cases, the poems are prefaced by the phrase “she said . . . ” or “he said . . . ”
In any case, the line between original poems and poems in the repertoire is extremely thin In individual recitations, whether at formal occasions such as weddings or in the course of ordinary conversations, people tend to recombine formulaic elements creatively or to elaborate on familiar themes within traditional constraints to create their own songs, as can be seen by comparing poems.
The simplest variations in poems depend on the composer’s ability to substitute words and phrases to change the meaning only slightly. The following two poems, recited by different people over a year apart, illustrate this:
you cherish people and then they’re gone . . .yā anẓār dīrun ʿazmtghālī ʿarab wyfārgū . . .It’s your fate, oh eyeyou cherish people and then they’re gone . . .maktūb yā l-ʿēn ʿalēktghālī ʿarab wyfārgū . . .
Similarly, substituting phrases or hemistiches can produce slight changes in meaning, as in the following two poems, the first recorded by Falls in 1906, the second by me in 1979:
Tears won’t bring your sweetheartendure your malady patiently . . .damiʿ mā yjīb ḥabībʿala dāk yā ʿēn uṣubrī . . .Tears won’t bring your sweetheartpay no mind and be quiet . . .damiʿ mā yjīb ḥabībblā bāl yā ʿēn isiktī . . .
Alternatively, a poem’s framework or mode of construction might be retained while the content shifts. This can be seen in the following two poems, the first recorded by me, the second by Qādirbūh (1977, 144), which are built around the idea of before and after:
Today they moved to distant campswho before just a shout would bring . . .il-yōm bāʿadū bid-dārillī gabl ʿāyṭa tjībhum . . .They patiently endured for yearswhat before they could not have borne a day . . .ṣbirun yā ʿazīz snīnillī gabl yōm ykēdhun . . .
Many poems are variations on a theme and play with a common metaphor. The following two are selected from scores revolving around the theme of the wounds of love:
The wounds, oh beloved, of your loveheal some days then open again . . .jrūḥ yā ʿazīz ghalākyabran ayām wynāwidׅh ukhra . . .My wounds were just about healedand today oh my torment, they tore open . . .jrūhī gabl biryanātwil-yōm yā ʿadhābī naggadׅhan . . .
Although these particular examples were not described as such, they would most likely be considered what Awlad ʿAli refer to as “sister songs.” One of the important forms of exchange involves answering one person’s poem with its sister, that is, another poem that plays on the same theme or picks up a key image, word, or metaphor. When one woman recited the poem that follows and was answered by another woman, people pointed this out to me as an example of sister songs.
Take the night an hour at a timesleepless until they draw near . . .khudhī l-lēl bis-sāʿātsmūr nīn yā ʿēn yagrabaw . . .Your sleeplessness in deepest nightis torment but you can bear it . . .smūrik ʿagāb il-lēlʿadhāb ghēr yā ʿēn tiḥimlī . . .
Shearing songs are sometimes called sister songs, too. The annual spring sheep shearing was once a festive occasion undertaken by young men from the camps, not the specialists who now travel from camp to camp. The ghinnāwas of shearing (jallāma) differ from others in their allusions and symbolism, all tied to imagery of sheep and goats. For example, in shearing songs the words for the beloved, ʿalam and ʿazīz (see chapter 5), are replaced by the words for sheep (ghanam) and goats (miʿīz), which rhyme with them. Other words are replaced by ones that refer to such things as wolves, milk, and butter, which have much to do with sheep-herding. The true meaning of the poems usually has to do with love, and their sister songs, which must be known to fully appreciate these shearing songs, are explicit.
Perhaps even more common than responding with sister songs to the ghinnāwas of others is answering with a retort or repartee. This is the form romantic dialogues usually take, and I heard a number of such poetic conversations about various subjects. The following exchange from a love story illustrates the nature of “response” (radd) poems. The man said:
Shame on you, oh belovedto forget me when you are eternally in my thoughts . . .ʿēb yā ʿazīz ʿalēktinsīnī wnā dōm fākrik . . .
to which the girl might answer in any of various ways, including:
Fear not for your loveghalāk lā tkhāf ʿalēhmadsūs bēn ʿēnī whidbha . . .
or its sister song:
Fear not for your loveyou’ll find it even after two long years away . . .ghalāk lā tkhāf ʿalēhḥattā in ghibit ʿāmēn tajidu . . .
Qādirbūh (1977), Al-Ghannāy (1968), and Jibrīl (1973) all give numerous examples of love stories, told as true stories, that involve such exchanges. Most intriguing is the fact that the first two authors relate stories in which some of the poems exchanged are nearly identical, although the stories themselves are not (Qādirbūh 1977, 132—33; Al-Ghannāy 1968, 8), suggesting that not only do individuals play with formulas in their spontaneous poetizing, but even in storytelling people vary the originals in standard ways and are not terribly concerned with reproducing the poems word for word.
Sister songs and response poems are the two culturally elaborated forms of poetic wordplay, but individuals sometimes spontaneously play with poems for humorous or serious effects. By substituting incongruous words, people can make statements, often ironic, about situations. In these cases, as with the shearing songs, the meaning depends on the prior familiarity of reciter and listener with the original. For example, one day a woman was teasing her husband’s client’s wife. A large sheep herd had been brought nearby to be fattened for market, and the young client, responsible for caring for them, was forced to spend his nights outdoors with the sheep, not at home with his wife. The woman sang:
evening he spends with me and sleeps out in the open . . .Fdׅhūla rabīʿ l-ʿēnyamsā maʿāy wybāt fil-khalā . . .
Fdׅhūla is the affectionate diminutive of the man’s name, suggesting that the singer was expressing the wife’s sentiments in the poem. The wife responded to the teasing with mock anger, acting offended that she should be suspected of caring about her husband’s absence at night and, by implication, sexuality, which threatened her image as modest. Yet what made the poem so humorous was that it called up a more serious poem that followed the same form:
The heart, oh you far awayin the evening is with me and sleeps where you are . . .il-galb yā biʿīd id-dāryamsā maʿāy wybāt ʿindak . . .
Other poems depend for their effect and meaning on strange twists given familiar poems. In one case, by changing just one word an old woman fundamentally altered the meaning of a poem and highlighted a comment she wanted to make on a current situation. She sympathetically recited the following poem to her daughter-in-law, whose husband had just married another wife:
Thirty ships of true loveloaded with love’s dues went off course . . .thlāthīn markab ṣōbwāsgāt gānūn khaṭaw . . .
As I later discovered, this poem was a transformation of the “correct” or more traditional one, which was most likely known to the other listeners:
Thirty ships of true loveloaded with love’s dues and affection . . .thlāthīn markab ṣōbwāsgāt gānūn wghalā . . .
I translate gānūn, which literally means law, as “love’s dues” because I think this better conveys the sense of the term in this poem. Informants glossed the term gānūn in this case as wājbāt, or duties. By changing just the last word from “affection” to “mistake” (which I translated as “off course” in keeping with the seafaring imagery of the poem), she poignantly highlighted the injustice of her daughter-in-law’s situation. Instead of getting the affection due her after so many years of marriage, she had lost all.
Although I would argue that typologies based on topics or key words tell us little, since the meaning of the poems derives primarily from their social contexts and uses, a look at common themes may give some sense of the arenas in which the ghinnāwa, as distinct from other genres of oral poetry, comes into play.
A limited number of rough categories based on central themes or metaphors emerge even from a quick scan of the corpus of poems I collected. Undue weight should not be given to this particular set, since it does not represent the fruits of systematic sampling but only of listening and recording poems that came up spontaneously or were volunteered. The categories might not be quite the same as those that would emerge from an analysis of other collections, although Jibrīl’s (1973, 71) list of “poetic pillars” on which ghinnāwas are built is close to mine. It is interesting to speculate about changes over time, however. For instance, Falls (1908) does not have a single poem about “despair” (yās), which I found to be one of the most elaborated themes, although some differences might also be attributed to gender, since most of the poems in my collection are women’s, and I suspect he has few, if any, not recited by men.
Most of the four hundred and fifty poems I collected fall into a number of overlapping categories based on theme or key image, and many of the poems combine elements. Nearly all the poems have to do with powerful sentiments arising in interpersonal relationships. In many cases, it is clear that the reference is to love relationships between men and women; more often the poems are ambiguous in reference and are used to describe sentiments that arise in all sorts of close relationships, including those between kin, friends, mothers, and children.
With the exception of wedding ghinnāwas, which express sentiments of happiness, pride, well-wishing, welcome, and family rivalry, poems expressing positive sentiments are not common. Among the most numerous and haunting are the poems about despair, usually the result of loss in love or inability to have the loved one. This sentiment is endowed with qualities of an independent entity whose character and devastating effects on the poet are explored in images as violent as the following:
I built, when despair was away,castles it knocked down when it came . . .banēt fī ghiyāb il-yāsgṣūr wēn mā jā hadhun . . .
Despair can also be described in images drawn from nature. In the following poem, the imagery is more consistent in Arabic than in English because the opening of a well is called an “eye.”
Blinded by the sandstorm of despairthe wells of love were plugged . . .ʿamāhum ʿajāj il-yāsbyār il-ghalā nīn in-ʿamun . . .
In the following poem, despair is vaguely anthropomorphized:
I wonder, is despaira phantom or my companion for life . . .zʿama yā l-yās iz-zōlwillā rafīg dīmā lkhāṭrī . . .
Sometimes intermingled with poems of despair are those about separations, moving away, long distances—experiences probably all too frequent in the lives of a nomadic people. The sentiments are those of the difficulty of parting, the longing for those far away, the sense of emptiness after loved ones have gone, and the misery of having no news. This theme may be overrepresented in my corpus, because people with whom I lived sang many to me as I prepared to depart for a break in the middle of fieldwork and later for my return home. They also sang for me, empathizing with the state they presumed I must be in, being so far from home and my own loved ones.
In ghinnāwas, sadness, whatever its cause, is customarily conveyed through imagery of tears (dmūʿ) and weeping (bkā), likened variously to cloudbursts, floods, rivulets, mirages, or described through its effects on the eyes, tangling eyelashes and causing blindness. A number of examples of this type were presented above.
Another set of poems of suffering draws on imagery of bodily ills. Withering of the body, wasting away, dizziness, headaches, and unspecified pain are some of the poetic symptoms of painful emotional experiences. Often it is not just a matter of illness, but of wounds of love, festering, healing, requiring medication, or incurable. Most of these images are familiar from the lyrics of Arab love poetry, from the pre-Islamic ode to the Andalusian muwashshaḥ (Compton 1976, 60), to parts of which the ghinnāwa has been likened (Jibrīl 1973, 114).
Helpless suffering and sadness are by no means the only sentiments that find expression in poems. There are defiant poems of anger and a sense of betrayal. People rebuke and insult others through poetry, although rarely to their faces. Much of the imagery in this type is drawn from tribal hearings where injustices can be brought up, grievances aired, claims settled, and appeals for rights made.
The Bedouins may conceive of the ʿagl as based in the heart, but they think of it as also profoundly connected to thoughts and memories and, ultimately, to worries. Many poems warn of the dangers of excessive worry and thought. Thinking and remembering are often linked in poetry to assorted maladies, especially anxiety, insomnia, restlessness, and confusion. They even lead to premature aging, as the following poem suggests:
You go grey in the prime of youthif your mind troubles you, dear one . . .tshīb winit fī masbāgil-ʿagl lū shākīk yā ʿalam . . .
The last major category is that defined by philosophical or religious themes, including, but not restricted to, songs sung by the descendants of saintly lineages of Mrābṭīn at their festivals (mūlids). To comfort themselves or others in adversity, individuals often recite poems that play on themes of God’s power to change things or of the immutability of fate, destiny (naṣīb), what has been “written” (maktūb), and one’s divinely decreed lot in life (gism). Misfortune is also attributed to luck (bakht), which is considered to be ultimately God-given. Patience (ṣabr), one of the great religious virtues, is enjoined as a response to difficult situations. These poems betray the importance of the Islamic faith in the lives of Awlad ʿAli.