Palestinian Music and Song

Expression and Resistance since 1900

Moslih Kanaaneh, Stig-Magnus Thorsén, Heather Bursheh, David A. McDonald, MOSLIH KANAANEH, STIG-MAGNUS THORSEN, HEATHER BURSHEH, David McDonald

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780253011060
• eBook ISBN: 9780253011138
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

"[A] monumental contribution to Palestinian studies... an indispensable resource for those interested in Middle Eastern folklore, music, history, and politics." — Journal of Folklore Research Drawing from a long history of indigenous traditions and incorporating diverse influences of surrounding cultures, music in Palestine and among the millions of Palestinians in diaspora offers a unique window on cultural and political events of the past century. From the perspective of scholars, performers, composers, and activists, Palestinian Music and Song examines the many ways in which music has been a force of representation, nation building, and social action. From the turn of the twentieth century, when Palestine became an exotic object of fascination for missionaries and scholars, to twenty-first-century transnational collaborations in hip hop and new media, this volume traces the conflicting dynamics of history and tradition, innovation and change, power and resistance.

Part 1

Background

1

Palestinian Song, European Revelation, and Mission

Rachel Beckles Willson

One of the earliest—perhaps the very earliest—publications of Palestinian song is a book of 360 pages produced in Germany in 1901 titled Palästinischer Diwan (Palestinian Diwan).¹ The collector and editor was German theologian and linguist Gustaf Dalman (1855–1941), who went on to become one of the leading commentators on Palestine in the early twentieth century. At first glance the volume seems to be a rather limited source of actual song of the time, because the bulk of the material presented consists of song texts alone. Only thirty-two melodies are provided and many of these are rather minimal. The traces it offers could nevertheless be of enormous value to folklorists seeking a history for poetry and song in the region. And the book’s wide geographical source base—most of the songs with melodies stem from as far afield as Madaba (now Jordan), Aleppo (now Syria), and what is now southern Lebanon—reminds us of the scope of conceptions of Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century.

My main concern here, however, is not a folkloristic one. Rather, I discuss the intellectual and ideological frameworks that led Dalman’s book to be researched and published in the form that it eventually took. This would seem a crucial process to contextualize the song material, but it is also a valuable inquiry in itself, because it contributes to broader debates about Europe’s relationship with the so-called Orient. On one level the Diwan must certainly be seen as an Orientalist product of some kind, but on another it challenges the primary models we have. Edward Said’s landmark study Orientalism addressed nineteenth-century European prejudices and fantasies about Arabs in apparently general terms, but his work tended to focus primarily on the colonization of Egypt, and the majority of subsequent writers have followed suit. As recent scholars have begun to indicate, however, and as I will elaborate further through the example of Dalman’s Diwan, in the nineteenth century the Palestinian region was viewed and treated quite differently from Egypt, received different types of researchers and travelers, and—because of how it was depicted in the Bible—had a very different place in the European imagination (Goren 2003; Kirchhoff 2005; Nassar 1997; Marchand 2009). Such theologically inspired work deserves fuller research today and may indeed set in motion further revisions to theories of Orientalism.

In the main part of the article I discuss how Palästinischer Diwan can be understood through three dominant facets of German Orientalist thought: linguistics, theology, and a field outside academia—namely, mission. In my fourth section I discuss Dalman’s actual collecting processes and indeed his contact with singing Palestinians. I close by reflecting briefly on the legacy of the type of research practiced by Dalman and others of his time that has remained alive in conceptions of Palestine ever since.

The Orientalist Diwan

Most obviously, Palästinischer Diwan is a collection of song texts gathered in the “Oriental” field. It is apparently, then, exemplary of Oriental linguistics, in which Dalman was well schooled and highly productive. He was indeed already an authority in classical Hebrew and Aramaic when he decided to study Arabic with the Swiss scholar Albert Socin in Leipzig. Socin, who had considerable pedigree as an Orientalist, had settled in Leipzig following a professorship in Oriental languages at Tübingen (1876–1889), had been instrumental in setting up the Deutscher Palästina Verein (German Society for the Exploration of Palestine) in 1877, and had published extensively and regularly in its journal. His Baedecker travel guide was regarded as a standard work for several decades. At the time that he was consulted by Dalman, he was working on the final stages of his monumental collection and analysis of Arabic poetry titled Diwan aus Centralarabien (Divan from Central Arabia, 1900), a classic piece of Orientalist linguistic philology. It can serve here as a useful window on that approach and as one context for Dalman’s book.

The 300 pages of its part 1 present 112 texts (a combination of poems, prose pieces, and stories collected by Socin in the field) and reproduces seven poems already in the public domain, with the addition of some corrections. Each of the texts is printed in Arabic script, with a transliteration on the opposite page, and is annotated with detailed notes about meter, language, dialect, and occasionally authorship and textual sources. The texts appear, almost without exception, in the order in which Socin collected them and are thus grouped according to the place of collection (Baghdad, Suk al-Shuyukh, Baghdad again, and Mardin). Also included in the volume is an “Excursus,” which consists of detailed notes about some objects and concepts encountered in the poems (camels and saddles, for instance, which are also provided with illustrations). Although some of this section relates to use of language, it is primarily contextual in a more material sense, thus offering quasi-ethnographic support for the reader.

Part 2, a further 146 pages, offers German translations of all the texts, with some annotations relating to the meanings of those texts. Part 3, another 350 pages, consists of the introduction, the glossary, indexes, bibliography, and an afterword by the book’s editor, Hans Stumme, a student of Socin who took over the final preparations for the publication directly after Socin’s death in 1899. Socin’s introduction gives an account of existing literature, his sources, and his method, and then goes on to analyze the corpus he has presented in terms of content, form, grammar, pronunciation, prosody, and syntax. Although it contains anecdotes about difficulties in collecting (with deprecating remarks about his informants), its emphasis is formal and focuses on the construction of a system through which the corpus can be rationally categorized. All of this is representative of German Orientalist scholarship of the time.

Dalman acknowledged Socin’s help in the introduction to his own Diwan, which comes in line with that of Socin by constructing a corpus. Additionally, conforming to Socin’s method, it includes materials from a combination of oral and textual sources. In obvious respects Dalman’s aim was analogous to that of Socin—namely, preservation and archive creation, a project that he understood as urgent in the context of European colonization of the region. Like Socin, Dalman provided an account of his methods, gave the locations of collection, and offered a classification of his results in terms of poetic content, song types, form, and language. All of this was positioned clearly with reference to scholarly work on Arabic poetry.

The first significant distinction between Socin and Dalman emerges from their selection of texts. Whereas Socin’s focus was on city poetry and posited an uncorrupted “original” composition for each of the elaborated poems he gathered from informants, Dalman presented the poetic practices of people he hoped were least influenced by composed poetry, art song, or city life. He sought out material from peasants and Bedouins and constructed it as a permanent accompaniment to their lives from cradle to grave. Where Socin valued original composition (art, even), Dalman sought nature. A second major difference between the two poets is that Dalman’s collection could actually contribute very little—perhaps not at all—to the detailed philological research represented by Socin’s Diwan. Not only is Dalman’s main commentary comparatively short (less than thirty-four pages), but also he does not present the poems in Arabic script, just in a transliteration and in German translation. Footnote annotations refer not to scholarly questions of dialect, but specifically to meaning. The textual content is also the basis for thematic groupings of poems.

Part 1, for instance, begins with “Auf Feld und Tenne” (In field and barn), moves through “Beim Pflügen” (Ploughing), “Bei der Ernte” (At harvest), “Beim Dreschen” (Threshing), toward the final “Auf der Pilgerfahrt” (Making a pilgrimage); part 2 passes through stages of human life from birth to death. Each individual song is also furnished with an individual title in its German version—titles that describe the songs’ content as if they were part of a Lieder song collection. The place where Dalman collected the song from is provided above the title, sometimes accompanied by the name of the informant, sometimes with the more general descriptor “farmer,” “Bedouin,” or “leper.” On occasion an anecdote is also included, something that would be completely out of place in Socin’s work. For instance, the song “Es ging ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: Do Palestinian Musicians Play Music or Politics?
• Part 1: Background
• Part 2: Identity
• Part 3: Resistance
• Contributors
• Index