The poet's tale - an Egyptian village - great epics; heroic tales of man and superman

The itinerant poet pays his annual visit to an Egyptian village, with memorable consequences...

The poet's tale

WE were waiting impatiently for the return of summer, for the rains to stop, for school to liberate us from its constraints. Our families would then let us run around the village streets from daybreak until long after sunset, without supervision or rebuke--unless one of us got hurt in a fight or an accident.

Summer also meant harvest time, and harvest time meant weddings. All those who lived off the land, from the smallest farmer to the wealthiest landowner, were waiting for the harvest to be gathered in and sold. This was virtually the only time of the year when the peasants had any money and could go to town and buy, each according to his means, a trousseau for the future bride. Only with her trousseau would a girl be ready to leave her father's home for that of her husband.

For the children--at a time when radio was rare and television unknown--weddings meant that troupes of musicians and actors would be coming to the village. Above all they meant the arrival of a visitor that we awaited with joyful anticipation for weeks in advance--the poet.

The poet usually officiated at the "night of the henna"--the eve of the wedding, when the hands and feet of the bride were painted with henna. The musicians would play all the next afternoon during the presentation of the trousseau And then the theatre troupe would follow in the evening, associating the whole village with the joy of the families which had just been linked by marriage.

We thrilled to every instant of the festivities. We loved the familiar music, unchanged since pharaonic times; and we split our sides laughing at the twists and turns of these comedies whose plots turned on conjugal infidelity and just punishment of the guilty. But for us the highlight of the entertainment, the moment of jubilation, was when the poet came on.

We talked about him in the singular, as if there was only one poet, but actually he was never alone. He had one or more partners, who accompanied him on the viol or joined him in reciting some couplets in time to a rhythm.

The arrival of the poet

The poet usually turned up during the afternoon. A few local dignitaries and nearly all the children would be waiting for him by the roadside at the entrance to the village. The former would greet him with words of welcome, the latter with cheering and clapping. Then, amidst cries of joy, as if he were the future husband, he would be escorted to the home of the host family.

There the poet was hidden from our sight. But news of him constantly filtered out from inside the house via a few well-informed friends who were either members of the host family or the kind of pushy children who go everywhere even if they haven't been invited.

The reports were intermittent or continuous, depending on the impudence of the informers...right now the poet is drinking syrup or coffee...now he's taking a nap to set him up for the long evening ahead...now he's having his supper...he's tuning his instruments.

We seized upon this precious information and discussed its every detail. Every snippet was a sign that the long-awaited moment was drawing closer--or getting further away--when the poet would at long last take the stage.

A moment increasingly rare and precious since more and more families were hesitating to invite the poet...and the minute that one family finally did so we felt an unspoken anxiety spread through the village and increase until the day of the poet's arrival.

We also noted that special arrangements were made in preparation for the evening entertainment; that meetings were held to try somehow or other to divide up the space reserved for the audience between the people of our village and guests from villages nearby; that the local police were ready for action; that many guests from the surrounding countryside, especially the young ones, were armed with clubs and obstinately refused to hand them over, in spite of the objections of the village dignitaries and elders.

Only gradually did we connect the tension which reigned among the adults, and the precautionary measures they took, with the later events which upset all their calculations and put paid to their plans to keep events under control.

The performance took place in the village square, where a platform was set up for the poet and his troupe. Mats had been placed around the platform for the guests--with the exception of the omdah and the dignitaries, for whom seats of honour were reserved, specially placed at points where their occupants could leave the square at the first sign of danger.

The poet appeared on the platform shortly after the evening prayer, giving the guests time to make their way to the square after performing their religious duty. We children took our places long before, as soon as the lighting of the street lamps made the evening air shimmer magically. We crowded as close to the platform as we could, never giving a thought to what was causing so much concern to those around us.

We greeted the poet with cries of joy, attentive to his slightest change of expression. We noticed the proud smiles which our warm welcome brought to his features; and we even caught the silent questioning glance which from time to time betrayed his feelings as he glanced round the square, as if to detect the places where danger might be lurking.

Whoever he was, whatever his age, the poet always told the story of Abou Zeid El Hilali--even though there are many other popular heroes in the Arab and Egyptian repertoire, such as Seif Ibn Yazan, Zir Salem, and Ali El Zeibaq. But the epic of Abou Zeid El Hilali, the Hilaliyya, was invariably chosen by the poet.

The Hilaliyya is the incident-packed epic poem of the Banou Hilal tribe, one of those which left the Arabian peninsula in the aftermath of the conquests sparked off by the successors of the Prophet, and moved north, east and west to build what would become the Muslim world.

The poet (whichever one he was) never began the story at the beginning, just as he never reached the end. We would leave the square without ever learning where the Hilalian advance ended. The poet (always) opened and closed his narrative somewhere in "Ifriquia",(*) at the site of a city whose people were determined to hold out against the conquering tribe, whatever the cost.

He related, in his own fashion, some of the episodes of the confrontation between the besieged city and its assailants. The narrative was punctuated by musical interludes in which the heroes of the two sides spoke out in turn. Opposing Abou Zeid was the chief of the surrounded tribe, El Zeinati Khalifa. But there were countless other characters, and anyone listening to the tale for the first time had a hard time keeping up with it.

Many romances blossomed between the girls of one camp and the warriors of the other, complicating the issues of a struggle in which the audience's preferences gradually became inextricably confused. The poet skilfully divided his emotional flights between the two opposing sides. Whenever he praised the courage of one side, he went on to recount a new episode which glorified the other. And when a Banou Hilal woman declared her love for a Banou Khalifa man, the poet immediately described the passion of a Banou Khalifa woman for a Banou Hilal man.

The storm breaks

The poet's art lay in his capacity to hold his listeners' rapt attention by channelling their sympathies first to one side, then to the other...by playing on their feelings of joy in victory and sadness in defeat, by striking a balance between the tenderness of the love scenes and the violence of the battle scenes, between the wisdom of the elders and the audacity of the young.

But this skilled game of checks and balances could not prevent the audience from splitting sooner or later into two camps, one taking the part of the Banou Hilal, the other that of the Banou Khalifa. Moreover, the supporters of each side were always virtually equal in number, heaven knows why. It was as if they were mysteriously reflecting the equilibrium sought by the poet.

However, from that moment, the tensions which permeated the story began to spread through the audience. The spectators became involved. As soon as the poet swung the story one way, the supporters of that side shouted with joy, while the supporters of the other side jeered their disapproval.

The task of the poet became increasingly delicate, his mastery of the situation increasingly uncertain. The "night of the henna" rarely ended with a round of applause. Instead of the audience dispersing quietly into the night, and the poet and his troupe peacefully settling into the beds which had been prepared for them, the evening ended in an explosion of violence.

It was impossible to pinpoint the moment when emotion degenerated into confrontation. Even today we search our memories in vain trying to establish the sequence of cause and effect which suddenly turned the festivities sour. A predictable but unfathomable chain of events led to a conflict which was all the more strange and brutal since it had been expected, planned almost, for days. A word was uttered by someone in the crowd, in a hollow, scornful voice. There was an immediate menacing riposte, and a club was raised, then two, then three...

In the twinkling of an eye, the storm broke. Blows rained down from all directions. It was as though the audience had been seized by an irresistible need to give vent to a terrible, long-pent-up frustration. No one dreamt of asking where this frustration originated nor how far things would go now that the dam had burst.

The village dignitaries slipped away. The poet and his companions tiptoed off. A cacophony of police whistles pierced the nocturnal silence. Street lamps were broken and went out. But the scuffle continued in the dark--blind, relentless, breathless, until everyone was exhausted, until the calming of the anger for which the poet's tale was merely the occasion, its real reasons being buried in the past, in the silent march of the centuries.

The passing of an era

The years have gone by. The city has removed us from the slow rhythm of the country. Study and travel, cinema and television, have slowly reduced to a faint memory those evenings when the heroic acts of Abou Zeid and Zeinati came to life so vividly. The "night of the henna" is celebrated less and less in the villages. As for the poets, the children no longer wait at the roadside for them. They have gone, never to return.

Thanks to books and films we have discovered other epics; other heroes from many lands compete for our affections with those of the Hilaliyya. Certain episodes from different epics seem to merge curiously with others, and a resemblance between certain characters has appeared. Coincidence, mutual influence, a common source? How can one help but find in the besieged city of the Banou Khalifa a replica of the city of Troy, and in numerous episodes of the Hilaliyya a striking resemblance to parts of the Iliad?

Surely the atmosphere in which the poets of the Egyptian countryside recited their works is comparable to that in which the ancient Greek poets must have recited their epic songs? Didn't the Greek poets of old also modify their narrative to suit their audience, expanding or compressing certain scenes in response to the preferences they discerned in their listeners?

Perhaps that is what we miss today. In literature and in film, we learn and understand thousands of new things each day, a thousand things which only yesterday were beyond us. But we do not find, nor will we ever find again, the collective embrace of a stifling square where we hung on every word of an itinerant poet, whisked away as if by magic to remote cities where we exorcised the realities of the present by reliving mythical times.

PHOTO : An Egyptian village storyteller accompanies himself on a stringed instrument, the rabab.

PHOTO : Two episodes from the Hilaliyya. Above, one of the heroes of the epic, El Zeinati Khalifa

PHOTO : (left).

PHOTO : The village of Takruna, near Zaghwan in Tunisia, the "Ifriquia" that features in the epic

PHOTO : poem of the Banou Hilal.

PHOTO : The Egyptian village of Qurna.

(*)In present-day Tunisia. Editor

MAHMOUD HUSSEIN is the pen name of two Egyptian writers who have published several books of political sociology, most recently Versant sud de la liberte, Essai sur l'emergence de l'individu dans le tiers monde ("The Southern Face of Liberty, an essay on the emergence of the individual in the Third World", La Decouverte, Paris, 1989).

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