© M. Suvorov, 2012

TEXT AND ITS CULTURAL INTERPRETATION

M. Suvorov

REPRESENTATION OF NATIONAL FOLKLORE AND CLASSICAL HISTORICAL NARRATIVES IN MODERN YEMENI PROSE

Before speaking about the representation of national folklore and classical historical narratives in modern Yemeni prose it seems necessary to give a very short outline of how this prose was developing in the 20th century.

The beginnings of modern prose-writing in Yemen go back to the 1940s, when after adopting ideas of the general Arab Renascence movement, or al-Nah a, some well-educated Adeni Arabs tried themselves in writing short stories of a didactic kind, in general similar to those short-stories, that had been written in the late 19th century by some Lebanese and Egyptian authors. This didactic style dominated in Yemeni prose until the mid-1950s, when the rapid spread of nationalist and anti-colonial ideas in Aden made local writers turn to social and political issues, and so there appeared a pro-foundly politicized realist trend. The armed struggle against the British that started in South Yemen in 1963 inspired some authors to start writing short-stories ro-manticizing heroic deeds of their compatriots.

After the foundation of two Yemeni independent states — YAR and PDRY — the mainstream in national prose changed into realism, but there also appeared a strong modernist tendency, caught up from the Egyp-tian, Lebanese and Syrian literature. In spite of the fact that the unification of Yemen in 1990 provided the Yemeni with more formal democracy, it also provoked a great deal of resentment, caused by steady deteriora-tion of national economy. This overwhelming frustration pushed some authors into applying post-modernist strategies, using total parody, and paying little, if any, attention to moral and religious norms and smashing all the literary taboos, that had existed previously.

Since the first Yemeni attempts to write mod-ern-style prose in the 1940s were in fact intended to somehow substitute oral folklore narratives and written s ras of the medieval kind, popular in traditionalist reli-gious circles, we don't find any signs of folklore or his-torical narratives in the short-stories of that period. The first occurrence of folklore motives can be traced only in

a few short-stories of romantic kind, written in the early 1970s by two most prominent Yemeni authors: Mu ammad ‘Abd al-Wal and Zayd Damm j. Using the plots of some folk-tales they depicted romantic heroes who fought cannibal-beasts, fantastic or real, like a demon in ‘Abd al-Wal 's short-story “The Demon” (al-Gh l), a lion and a kind of hyena in Damm j's “The Night in the Mountains” (Layl al-jabal) and “The Beast of al- awb n” ( hish al- awb n) [1]. Other motives apparently taken from national folklore are also apprehensible in some Yemeni short stories of the 1970–80s, though, it should be noted, there are very few stories of the kind.

As for historical narratives, which used to inspire many Arab novelists in the late 19th — early 20th century, in modern Yemeni prose they were not touched upon until very late, as it was also the case in other literatures of the Arabian Peninsula. The first rea-son for this situation is that Arab readers had already been well acquainted with Arab medieval history due to the novels written by Lebanese writers Sal m al-Bust n , Jam l al-Mudawwar, Jirj Zayd n, Ya‘q b arr f and later, in the 1930–40s, by Syrian Ma‘r f al-Arn ’ and Egyptians Mu ammad Ab ad d, ‘Al al-J rim, Mu ammad al-‘Ary n, ‘Al B kath r. Writers of Arabia, most of them having no profound knowledge of the medieval history, could hardly add anything new to what had already been written, at least at that level of enlightenment writing, where they all were. The second reason — and probably more profound — lies in the political and ideological changes that had occurred in the Arab world itself. Christians al-Bust n , al-Mudawwar and Zayd n wrote their novels at the time when Arab lands constituted a part of the Ottoman Empire and, rejecting the Ottoman rule, they all were at some extent adherents of Pan-Arabism, which made them turn to the national history of Arabs, where they tried to find sources for general edification and for the development of national consciousness. In the after-World War I Egypt, Lebanon and Syria writers' interest in the Arab

M. SUVOROV. Representation of National Folklore… 25

Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Fig. 3 Fig. 6

26 Manuscripta Orientalia. VOL. 18 NO. 2 DECEMBER 2012

Fig. 4Fig. 5

Fig. 7

M. SUVOROV. Representation of National Folklore… 27

past was also inspired by Arab nationalism, opposing European colonialism. But in the lands of Arabia, that received partial independence during the course of the War, the ideas of Pan-Arabism — not very popular here even before the War — gave place to local nationalisms, stimulating more interest in local history, than in general Arab history. Local history, though, had not been much studied by that time, and dealing with it took too much research efforts from the writer. For this reason, we can see very few historical novels written in Arabia before the early 1990s.

In Yemeni prose pre-Islamic and medieval history of the country became a basis for a few novels, that ap-peared in the late 1990s — early 2000s as a kind of a literary reaction on the unification of Yemen. Most of these novels are written in a manner close to the manner of above mentioned Sal m al-Bust n , in whose writings a rather primitive love-story or an intrigue, if any, are intended only to enliven a kind of historical chronicle.

The novel “The House of Power” (fig. 1) written by Ramziyya al-Iry n , very small in volume, is devoted to the rule of a legendary Yemeni queen, Sayyida bint A mad (early 7th century AC) [2]. The novel is written in al-Bust n 's manner and is obviously intended to draw a parallel between the queen, who was gathering Yemeni lands in a centralized state, and the president ‘Al ‘Abd All h li , who leaded the process of the country's uni-fication. The same may be said about Anwar Mu ammad Kh lid's novel “The Vision of Shammar Yur‘ish, King of Saba’, Dh -Rayd n, a ramawt and Yaman t”, also written in al-Bust n 's manner and devoted to the rule of Shammar Yur‘ish (late 3rd century AC), a king of imyar, famous for his building a centralized state in Yemen [3]. In the preface the author mentions some historical documents that he has used for writing the book and — giving himself away — says that he had no intention to draw any parallels between the heroes of the novel and the leaders of modern Yemen in spite of evident similarity of the two epochs.

The novel “Incense Road” (fig. 2) written in the same manner by Mun r al l Ya y tells the story of Yemenis' struggle against the Roman army of Aelius Gallus, that invaded South Arabia in 24 BC [4]. Arabs' unity in the face of Roman invaders in the novel, which is no more than the author's invention, may be estimated as the author's desire to provide a kind of “historical” ground to the unification of modern Yemen.

One more novel, Bass m Shams al-D n's “The Sacred Circle” (fig. 3) is of a pseudo-historical kind [5]. The ac-tion takes place in Saba’, one of the ancient Yemeni king-doms, and in other parts of the ancient Near East. A col-ourful historical background, thoroughly depicted material life of the epoch, taking intrigues and, at the same time, static characters with no expression of their inner worlds — all these features of the novel resemble the writings of Jirj Zayd n, famed as Dumas of Arabs.

In the 1990s national folklore and historical narra-tives began to serve also as hypotexts for Yemeni prose-writing, forming what may be called two writing

strategies or two distinctive styles, in some cases inter-mixed.

The first of these styles, found in ‘Abd al-Kar m al-R zi 's collection of short-stories “The Death of the White Cow”, is that of magic realism, usually associated with Latin-American fiction, but not alien to the modern prose of Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Oman and probably other Arab countries [6]. The colourful realist picture of North-Yemeni pre-revolutionary country-side in al-R zi 's short-stories is dotted with flying donkeys, mysterious ant-stones, humanized trees, female-jinn who steal men's hearts and terrible demons of the darkness who kidnap children. The most remarkable in this re-spect is the story “The Goat's Head” (Ra’s al-tays), where al-R zi recounts how demons of the darkness called Jabart kidnapped a young woman Sa‘ud from the village, where she lived. Here is the description of what happened afterwards:

Horror was gripping the village, creeping into the win-dows of the houses and children's eyes. Mothers were re-plying to the questions of their frightened children by tell-ing them stories that fanned embers of horror in the chil-dren's hearts. For the first time the children learned that there is a kind of creatures called Jabart who come from the seaside to capture children and take them to the country of the darkness. They learned from their mothers that these Jabart kidnap children to turn their blood into gold and coins. In boats they carry children to the towns of the dark-ness located in the sea and there feed them, as if they were feast rams, by a kind of grass that increases the volume of blood in the children's veins. Then Jabart hang the children head over heels and put under each child a brass bowl to collect the blood dripping from the children's pierced fore-heads. With hearts pounding with horror the children were asking their mothers: Why do not they capture adults? And in reply they heard that it was only children's blood that could be turned into gold. And when the children were asking, why Jabart had kidnapped Sa‘ud, who hadn't been a child, the mothers were replying that Jabart's eyes are made of clay, and they had probably kidnapped her by mistake, because they are almost blind. Some children found it strange that Sa‘ud had submitted to Jabart and followed them without fighting or at least crying, but the mothers who were of complete knowledge were saying that Jabart make a child smell a magic powder and after that he follows them enchanted [7].

In the end of the story a group of men from the vil-lage descend from the slope of a mountain with the help of ropes and enter the cave, where the demons have stayed to sleep. Two of them remain on the top. In the cave the descended men meet not only the sleeping mon-sters themselves, but also the kidnapped girl, who is in labour, delivering frog-like babies, one after another. For some unclear reason the men fail to free the girl from the demons and perish in the cave. Meanwhile the two, who were still on the top of the mountain with the ropes, turned with time into two stony horns that gave the mountain its present name: “The goat's head”. So, the

28 Manuscripta Orientalia. VOL. 18 NO. 2 DECEMBER 2012

author in this story seems to have used some local legend as a kind of parody.

The world of local myths and legends, though not easily interpreted by foreign reader, may also be found in ‘Abd al-Fatt ‘Abd al-Wal 's collection “The Tree of al-H r t Village” [8]. In his stories the author exten-sively uses folk songs and sayings.

The other of the two mentioned styles presents a post-modern trend, in which themes, imagery, charac-ters, certain literary techniques and devices taken from folklore and historical narratives are set in modern con-text and become the subject of parody for no obvious reason other than playing the game of hypertextuality.

The exponent of the trend is Wajd al-Ahdal (fig. 4), who often ironically gives his punning short texts a scent of medieval scholarly work by imitating isn d, adding vast footnote commentaries and writing in rhymed prose (saj‘). These features of al-Ahdal's writings appeared as early as in his first collection of short stories titled “The Flower of the Traveller” [9]. The style of this title itself reminds, in a way, the style of traditional titling in Arab medieval treatises. Some of the texts in the collection are obvious parodies to medieval Islamic narratives, as, for example, the text “The Letter from the Bedouin” (Ris lat al-I‘r b ). See the complete text below:

The wall gurgled frantically and my portrait, hanging on it, addressed me by saying:

– H r n al-Rash d was said once to require Ab Ma‘shar al-Falak to extract from the afterworld the infor-mation about the most important events that would occur in the Arab world in every century ahead. So the astrologer did and having reached the 20th century he delivered the following discourse:

–…Then a Bedouin enters the Assembly Hall of the American president and asks the president to give him the rule over Arabs. The president replies:

– I swear by God, many people had asked me for what you asked. But none of them had offered me in return what Arabs are worth of in my eyes. So, what do you pay for the rule over Arabs?

Suddenly the Bedouin gives such a loud and fetid fart, that all President's Assembly Hall trembles. The president shouts to his chamberlains:

– Kick him out of here! I swear by God, I was about to give him the rule over Arabs, but that is how he appreci-ated it!

In a while my portrait continued from the wall: – They say that H r n al-Rash d ordered his slaughter

man Masr r to chop Ab Ma‘shar al-Falak 's head off, as he was annoyed by what he had learned from the astrologer about Arab's future.

Commentaries H r n al-Rash d: an ‘Abb sid Caliph, who ruled from

786 to 809 AD. During his rule the Arab-Moslem Empire reached the culmination of its greatness and flourishing.

Ab Ma‘shar al-Falak : an im m and astrologer, the author of useful treatises on astrology, an arabized Greek philosopher, one of the prominent figures of the 9th century AD. His writings are considered to be among the most popular books in the modern Arab world.

The portrait hanging on the wall: the portrait on the wall is said to be the portrait of the Bedouin himself and that at a certain moment and under the effect of some nar-cotic, which he regularly took, he felt as if his photo-portrait spoke to him. And allegedly, when he ap-proached the portrait, the frame gripped him, and he found himself being drawn into it. It was like if he had entered one of the secret corridors of the universe. Finally he found himself thrown on the floor in the Castle of Eternity in Baghd d, with the Caliph H r n al-Rash d cursing him and the slaughter man Masr r chopping his head off.

Sources 1. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization (Cairo: The

Committee for Literature, Translation and Publishing Press), xiii, p. 90.

2. Ab Ma‘shar al-Falak , The Great Book of Ab Ma‘shar al-Falak (Teheran: Scientific Books Publishing House, 1905).

3. The daily “Al-Thawra” published in an‘ ’, issue No. 15500, 07.07.2007, section of criminal events, con-veying the following:

“According to a certain source, the police go on with the investigation of a case of a very obscure assassination that took place in a drug den. A number of witnesses said that the said Bedouin having finished his story (taken from the Anecdotes of the Lords) was struck by some awful form of madness and had been hallucinating for several minutes, then he was seen approaching his photo-portrait hanging on the wall, and finally he threw himself on the floor his blood spurting out of his neck” [10].

The most obvious use of national folklore and his-torical narratives in the sense of parody al-Ahdal made in his first novel titled “Mountain Boats” and partly in his third novel titled “The Philosopher of al-Karant -na” [11]. Both novels are saturated with caricature pres-entations of subjects and characters that go back to Yemeni and general Arabic historical legends.

In “Mountain Boats” the action takes place in the re-alistically depicted interior of modern an‘ ’, with all its specific social and cultural features. Nevertheless, the main line resembles a fairy-tale love-story of a prince and a princess.

The story starts, when a young beggar Sa‘ da gets captured by an Ethiopian refugee Abraha, who is a mod-ern incarnation of a fairy-tale dragon or ogre. Sayf, a scion of a noble Sanaani family, here playing the role of a fairy-tale prince, kills the monster with the help of four brave guys and takes Sa‘ da to his family castle. At this point one may expect a happy marriage, but things are too far from what the reader could suppose.

The author parodizes this typical fairy-tale plot. The “princess” Sa‘ da suffers from a kind of epileptic attacks, during which she bites her hand at people's disgust. The “monster” Abraha earns his living by cleaning pass-ing-by cars. The “prince” Sayf, oppressed by his step-father, an arms dealer, is in constant depression and soothes himself by going outdoors and shouting indecent words. All of the four brave guys appear to be homo-sexuals. Sa‘ da fails to marry Sayf, who is eventually murdered by his step-father. Instead the heroine marries

M. SUVOROV. Representation of National Folklore… 29

the im m of the Central mosque, being in fact bought by him.

Interestingly, the names of the personages may be interpreted as certain historical symbols. Sa‘ da, whose name means “happy”, may symbolize Yemen, famed in the medieval times as Arabia Felix, or Happy Ara-bia. Sayf may symbolize the legendary Yemeni pre-Islamic leader Sayf Dh Yazan, who became a hero of Arab epics. Abraha may symbolize the Ethio-pian ruler of pre-Islamic Yemen, who once tried to conquer Mecca.

There are also other parody details alluding the reader to national folklore and historical narratives. For example, Sayf's step-father plans to clone the Queen of Sheba, whose bones his servants happened to dig out from sands, while looking for their arms cache whose location they had forgotten. An eagle soaring in the sky takes Sayf's step-father's bold head for a serpent's egg and drops a heavy stone on it. This situation is reminis-cent of the birds ab b l of the Qur’ n, which stoned Abraha's army. A young woman, who is just released from prison, pokes her hand into a crack in the Old city's gate B b al-Yemen and gets pulled into the world of jinn. The jinn put the woman into a cage in the zoo and register her sad story in a “Black Book”. The book is then distributed for free among the visitors for the pur-pose of squeezing out tears from them that are given to the women to drink.

Another Yemeni writer, who sticks to the similar post-modernist trend, is Hind Haytham (fig. 5). In her novels “The Kings of the Heavens of Dreams and De-sires” and “Affability and Savageness” (fig. 6) she makes the heroes, medieval Arab Caliphs, commanders and poets, act in modern reality, imitating by their modern relationships what really happened in the past [12]. What takes place in the novels is, in fact, a parody to medieval history of the Arabs.

National folklore became a basis of short-stories written by Arw ‘Abduh ‘Uthm n (fig. 7), who is one of the leading Yemeni scholars in the field of folklore studies. The title of her collection of short-stories “What Happens in Tank , the Mosquito Country” puts the reader in the remembrance of a magic country of Yem-eni folklore, from where no traveller has returned so far [13]. The action of each short-story takes place in this magic country which due to many specific details may be easily identified with Yemen. Throughout the texts the author employs typical folklore subjects, characters and old-women's speech style, intentionally revealing at the same time pure parody functions of all these attrib-utes. As an example of this strategy the following pas-sage may be taken from the story “Here I am before You” (Shabbayka labbayka):

He started begging God day and night for a wife, any wife, be it a dog, or a hen, or a worm, or any other animal, only to get married. And God heard his prayers and gave him the wife — a dog. At first he felt sorry: why after all his patience did God give him no more than a dog? But he thanked God anyway and soon accepted his fate [14].

To conclude, I would suggest that when initially the modern prose writing appeared in Yemen in 1940s, it seemed to be opposing itself against the traditional me-dieval classical genres and oral folklore. The result was a long time abandonment and persistent unwillingness of modern prose-writers to exploit classical historical and folklore themes. But when — after long following realist and modernist trends of western type — Yemeni literature started losing its national identity in the face of globalized literature, the authors seem to have returned to the coun-try's historical and folklore heritage — often in the sense of parody — to regain this national literary identity by attaching to their works recognizable Yemeni touch.

N o t e s

1. See: Mu ammad ‘Abd al-Wal , Al-Ar y Salm (Our land, Salm ) (Bayr t, 1986); Zayd Damm j, hish al- awb n (The Beast of al- awb n) (al-Q hira, 1973).

2. Ramziyya al-Iry n , D r al-sal ana (The House of Power) ( an‘ ’, 1998). 3. Anwar Mu ammad Kh lid, Ru’yat Shammar Yur‘ish malik Saba’ wa Dh -Rayd n wa a ramawt wa Yaman t (The Vision

of Shammar Yur‘ish, King of Saba’, Dh -Rayd n, a ramawt and Yaman t) (Bayr t, 1994). 4. Mun r al l Ya y , ar q al-bukh r (Incense Road) ( an‘ ’, 2004). 5. Bass m Shams al-D n, Al-D ’ra al-muqaddasa (The Sacred Circle) ( an‘ ’, 2008). 6. ‘Abd al-Kar m al-R zi , Mawt al-baqara al-bay ’ (The Death of the White Cow) (Bayr t, 1991). 7. Ibid., pp. 97—8. 8. ‘Abd al-Fatt ‘Abd al-Wal , Suqamat al-H r t (The Tree of al-H r t Village) (Dimashq, 1997). 9. Wajd al-Ahdal, Zahrat al-‘ bir (The Flower of the Traveller) ( an‘ ’, 1998). 10. Ibid., pp. 29—30. 11. Al-Ahdal, Qaw rib jabaliyya (Mountain Boats) ( an‘ ’, 2002); idem, Faylas f al-Karant na (The Philosopher of

al-Karant na) ( an‘ ’, 2007). 12. Hind Haytham. Mul k li-Sam ’ al-A l m wa al-Am n (The Kings of the Heavens of Dreams and Desires) ( an‘ ’, 2003);

eadem, Al-Uns wa al-wa sha (Affability and Savageness) ( an‘ ’, 2006). 13. Arw ‘Abduh ‘Uthm n, Ya duth f Tank bil d al-n mis (What Happens in Tanka, the Mosquito Country) ( an‘ ’, 2003). 14. Ibid., p. 55.

30 Manuscripta Orientalia. VOL. 18 NO. 2 DECEMBER 2012

I l l u s t r a t i o n s

Fig. 1. Cover of the book D r al-sal ana (The House of Power). Fig. 2. Cover of the book ar q al-bukh r (Incense Road). Fig. 3. Cover of the book al-D ’ra al-muqaddasa (The Sacred Circle). Fig. 4. Wajd al-Ahdal. Photo by the author. Fig. 5. Hind Haytham. Photo by the author. Fig. 6. Cover of the book Al-Uns wa al-wa sha (Affability and Savageness). Fig. 7. Arw ‘Abduh ‘Uthm n. From the author's archive.

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