Crisis and Memory in the Theatre of the Rahbani Brothers and Fayrouz
Fawwaz Traboulsi
This paper is based on a forthcoming critical essay, in Arabic, on the musical theater of the Lebanese poets, composers and playwrights Assi and Mansour Rahbani and the Diva, Fayrouz.
The Rahbanis have been primarily studied and appreciated as poets and musical composers. It has been my task to study their work as playwrights. Among their many artistic contributions, the Rahbanis have been instrumental in creating the modern Arab musical, a tradition set by the Egyptian Sayyed Darwish. This aspect of their art has long been neglected. It should nevertheless be said that Fayrouz herself, who played the main character in almost all the musicals, proved to be a gifted and versatile actress. In addition, the Rahbani musicals are an extremely rich compendium of Lebanese popular culture and, indeed of the popular culture of the Arab East. This aspect of their work is also largely neglected and is worth a separate research.
In over twenty musicals, the Rahbanis have used a wide array of folklore genres (myths, tales, legends, rites, rituals, popular religion, superstitions, poetry, songs, dances, etc.) to illustrate major developments in Lebanese life and society for over two decades. Their musicals are thus one the richest records of the big transformations that the Lebanese society has witnessed during a crucial period of its history, as well as of its social, political and economic problems and conflicts. It is also no exaggeration to say that the Rahbanis and Fayrouz have been instrumental in the elaboration of a Lebanese identity, however problematic this identity remains. In my work, I have carried a content and narrative analysis of each of the Rahbani musicals, noting the major phases of their development, both in content and form, by relating that development to the dominant discourse as well as to the general mood of their public. In so doing, I have tried to show that most of them revolve around one major theme, that of the intricate, multifunctional relationship between the ‘stranger’, the ‘treasure’ and the ‘miracle’. Put in a simplified manner, all their musicals seem to present some form of treasure, or sacred value, vied by a stranger and, finally, saved by a miracle.
Most of the Rahbani musicals have been created during the period 1958-1977, that is, the period between the two civil wars of 1958 and 1975-90. Not only that, but their repertoire, as far as musicals are concerned, begins with a musical inspired by the armed crisis of the of 1958 and ends with one inspired by the ‘two years’ war’ of 1975-6. The first musical, Jisr al-Qamar, was first presented in Baalbek, Lebanon, 1962, the second, Petra, in Jordan, in 1977. After Petra, the Rahbani trio broke up as the couple Assi and Fayrouz were separated as husband and wife.
In the following pages, I will look into these two Rahbani musicals as they both deal with our general theme of crisis and memory. Crises, civil wars in this case, pose numerous problems concerning memory: What to remember? Should one remember at all? Is it not better to simply forget? In that case, what can one – more importantly, what can whole peoples – learn about/from the causes and lessons of wars? Should one forget? Forgive? But, what to forget and to what extent is forgiveness humanly possible? Finally, what to do with what might be termed ‘willfull forgetfullness’? The latter should be regarded as the opposite of amnesia. Ernest Renan has coined a new concept concerning memory and nation-building when he proposed that nations are built not only on common memories but also on common ‘oublis ’. Mahmoud Darwish, in his Memory of Forgetfullness, which relates the Palestinian experience during the Lebanese war of 1975, has confirmed this approach by suggesting that to forget is a concious act: you forget what you have remembered, however paradoxical that might seem at first sight?
It is not my contention to answer these vital questions in this paper. Rather they will serve as guidelines in investigating the way the Rahbanis present – and represent- the two major military crises that Lebanese society suffered in such a short period of time, the manner in which they were resolved and the extent to which have they inspired our authors any messages, be they moral or otherwise.
I- Jisr al-Qamar: The Ambivalent Functions of the Past
In the summer of 1958, Lebanon witnessed an armed insurrection against the pro-Western President of the Republic, Camille Chamoun, who was preparing for an unconstitutional renewal of his term of Presidency. The crisis was further aggravated by Chamoun’s authoritarianism, hostility to Arab Nationalism and Nasserism and his obvious bias toward the West, culminating in his adherence to the anti-Communist Eisenhower doctrine in 1957. Barely two days after the 14th of July 1958 revolution which overthrew the monarchy in Iraq, US marines and British paratroopers landed in Beirut and Amman respectively to bolster the two pro-Western governments of Jordan and Lebanon. Far from backing Chamoun in his claim for a new term of office, U.S. diplomacy finally engineered a compromise with Abdel Nasser, which put an end to the crisis. Thus Chamoun ended his constitutional term in office and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Fuad Shihab was elected President. He was to be immediately faced with a ‘counter-revolution’ led by the predominantly Christian Phalangist Party of Pierre Gemayel, in opposition to what it considered a pro-revolutionary Cabinet formed by Rashid Karameh, former leader of the insurrection in Tripoli. The rebels were Moslem in their najority, though rallying a number of Christian figures, notable among which, the Maronite Patriarch Meouchi. But, during these two months, events took a sectarian character between Moslems and Christians. A compromise put a term to the crisis according to which a more balanced cabinet was formed, including the leader of the Phalanges.
The story
The post-war official discourse produced three main slogans “Let bygones be bygones”, “No victor, no vanquished”, “Let water run again in its beds”. In 1962, when the Rahbani Brothers and Fayruz presented their first operetta at the Baalbek International Festival, they chose the theme of the recent civil strife. Jisr al-Qamar can be easily read as a dramatization of the three post-war slogans.
The story is set in the Lebanese mountains and uses the famous allegory of the dying man asking his sons to search for a treasure buried in the field. Two neighboring villages are in conflict over water. The village that controls the water supply cuts it off and deprives the other village from it. The bridge that relays the two villages is now deserted. On that bridge resides a spellbound Girl, a captive of the conflict and hatred among the villagers, who declares that she will not be freed unless love reunites them. One evening, she appears and announces that there is a treasure buried near the bridge. The villagers start their treasure hunt, resorting to all kinds of magic and withcraft, but to no avail. As tensions mount between the two villages and reach the point of armed conflict, the Girl appears again to inform them that the real treasure is love and coexistence among them. Thus the conflict is resolved: water resumes its course in the river bed. Circulation resumes over the bridge and the inhabitants of the two villages celebrate their renewed concord by dancing the traditional Dabkeh.
Creating forgetfulness
Jisr al-Qamar (Bridge of the Moon) makes use of two major elements of popular culture. The first is religious, compounding the Christian notion of the Miracle and the cult of the Virgin Mary. The play is a tale about a miracle. On the stage, Fayrouz, playing the role of the spellbound girl, does not enter nor exit, she ‘appears’ on it and disappears as in a miraculous appearance, motionless and clad in white and blue which are the two colors the Virgin Mary is supposedly dressed in. In fact, the analogy between Fairouz on the stage and Our Lady of Harrissa is striking. Mounted on a hill overlooking the bay of Jounieh, that miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary was reported to have turned around its base in order to face inland, during the 1958 events, whereas it was originally facing the sea.
The second element of popular culture is the tradition of tribal conflict and conflict resolution, to use a trendy term, a tradition characterized by wishing away the origins of the conflict once it is resolved.
How is the politico-military conflict of 1958 conflict presented in Jisr al-Qamar? It is presented as a dispute between two villages over the distribution of water (a traditional cause for rural and tribal conflict). Who is to blame? No one: both parties are held equally responsible for the conflict:
“They are strong and so are we
But our intentions led us astray
They agressed us and so did we agress them
We cut off the water that irrigated their properties
They cursed us in their evenings
We hated them and they hated us even more
Years passed and hatred increased…”
Since no party is really to blame for the conflict, it will not be surprising to know that the conflict was presented on the stage in the form of light comic scenes.
How is the conflict resolved? It is resolved by a Miracle. The girl on the bridge is the victim of the conflict and its solution. In her final ‘appearance’, she resolves the conflict and liberates herself from the spell. But, if the conflict appears so trivial on the stage, the question arises: why did it require the intervention of a supernatural power (the Miracle) to stop it? The likely answer is because the conflict in real life was neither trivial nor comic as it was represented on the stage. This is the ambivalent function of the play: it seeks both to diminish the importance of the 1958 events and to propose, at the same time, that no less than a miracle saved Lebanon from its dangers.
Herein resides the play’s cathartic function: to lessen the impact of the crisis and create forgetfulness and forgiveness (“Let Bygones be bygones”). Memory is thus invited to skip over, as it were, that ‘unatural’ episode in Lebanon’s life. “Water should return to its beds”, says the motto of the post-1958 events. In the play, this necessity becomes ‘reality’. Water does indeed return to its beds after the reconciliation between the two villages. Water is, of course, multi-symbolic. But the first figurative meaning of ‘water returning to its beds”, is the return to a ‘natural’ order of things: let us go back to how we were before the conflict erupted. But there is more to that concerning memory and the past in Jisr al-Qamar. The past itself is divided in two pasts, as it were: a past to be forgotten (the immediate past of conflict) and a past to be remembered and revived (the past of peace and concord that preceded the conflict). What is, of course, suppressed is the question: why did that ‘natural’ past of peace and concord lead to that ‘aberration’ which is the immediate past of conflict?
Yet, the above-mentioned ambivalence cannot be understood without reference to the split in the narrative between the causes of the war and the solution of the armed conflict. Each has a function radically different from the other. The trivalized conflict seems to block any attempt to investigate or analyse its causes. Inasmuch as both parties are held equally responsible for it, none is responsible for it, better, no one is to blame. On the other hand, the solution to the conflict seems to require no less than a miracle, precisely because the message of the play is to preach the existence and permanance of a miracle in Lebanon’s life.
To begin with, the play is structured around the notion of a miracle. Its narrative and tempo are determined by it. The Girl appears for the first time to declare her plight:
“On a moony night,
I was spellbound by the moon
On the Bridge of the Moon…”
Then the Girl on the Bridge appears a second time to declare the existence of a buried treasure. The villagers are preoccupied with the treasure hunt as tension mounts between them reaching the brink of armed confrontation. At this very moment, the Girl makes her final appearance to stop the imminent clash among the armed men of the two villages and uncover the treasure:
“Let each dig into the ground around him
And he will find the treasure
The sound of the spade is more pleasant
Than the ratteling of the sword
And Peace is the Treasure of all Treasures”
Thus the two villages are reconciliated and peace and concord reign among them. The Girl on the Bridge is liberated and can now participate in the collective celebrations of joy and reunion.
The play, as can be seen is structured according to a simplistic plot which consists of a set of antimonies in which each is transmuted into the other by means of the Miracle:
the villagers are in conflict /the villagers are in concord
the treasure is buried / the treasure is revealed
the Girl is spellbound / the Girl is liberated
water is contained / water runs freely in its river bed
the Bridge is the frontline between the two warring factions / the Bridge becomes the passageway for peace and concord among the two reconciled villages.
The symbolism of water and the bridge deserves special attention. The symbolism of the Miracle permeates ideological representations about Lebanon. One dominant theme claims that the ‘Lebanese Miracle’ consists in that unexplainable relationship in Lebanon’s life between economic prosperity (based on free international trade and services) and political stability (resulting from the coexistence of its politicized religious sects). The latter leads to the former. If water represents economic prosperity, the bridge represents simultaneously the coexistence between the religious sects and the link between Lebanon and the rest of the world. In the finale, Fayrouz celebrates this notion of the bridge in the following terms:
“As long as there are bridges
Still standing on this Earth,
People will continue to visit one another
And the whole world will visit us
And we will continue to visit them”
The bridge is a double link: a link among the Lebanese themselves (= coexistence between their various religious sects) inasmuch as it constitutes a link between Lebanon and the rest of the world (Lebanon as an extroverted services economy between the Arab hinterland and the world market). In other words, peace, security and coexistence among the religious sects is the condition for the continuation of the economic Miracle. But there is another aspect of this economic Miracle: Lebanon’s role as an economic and cultural intermediary between Arab World and rest of the World (bridge between Lebanon and rest of the world). The formula is clear: sectarian concord (political stability) is the condition for economic prosperity. Clear but not very convincing since it establishes a unilateral relationship between the two. For it does not answer the question: what role does the absence of economic prosperity have in generating sectarian conflict and consequently destroying political stability? This is the blind spot of the Rahbani play.
II. Petra: Civil War as National Liberation
First presented in Jordan 1977, the theme of Petra is the first episode of the Lebanese civil war of 1975-6. The choice of the title is in itself highly evocative. Petra (presently situated in Jordan) was a prosperous caravan station, built by the Nabtean Arabs, that controlled the regional commerce between Arabia and the Mediterranean during last two centuries B.C. until it was annexed by the Roman Emperor Trajan in 120 A.D. It was also known to have been often in conflict with its neighbors, particularly the Hebrews.
In the play, Petra is at war with Rome, King Malik leaves his kingdom at the head of his armies to fight the legions of the Empire, entrusting his rule to his faithful wife, Queen Shequilla. Unable to sow division amomg the people of Petra, Roman enemy agents (with allusions to them being modern Israeli spies), feeling that their country was about to lose the war, abduct the Royal family’s daughter (also called Petra) and blackmail the Queen to surrender or else her daughter will be killed. Shequilla refuses, and the girl is ultimately killed. King Malik returns victorious from his war against Roman troops unaware of the high price he and the kingdom paid for the victory. The play ends as the Queen, unwilling to spoil her husband’s triumph, keeps the tragic result of the adventure to herself whispering:
“Petra, the kingdom has won
And Petra, my daughter, is dead!”
Let us proceed by posing the same questions as above. How is the conflict presented? The question is best answered if we compare the play to its antecedent. Jisr al-Qamar tells the story of the 1958 crisis in which the Lebanese government of President Camille Chamoun officially accused the United Arab Republic (the unity of Syria and Egypt under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1958-1961) of direct military intervention in the Lebanese conflict. The risk of the collapse of Chamoun necessitated the landing of thousands of U.S. marines in Lebanon and brought the whole world to the brink of a nuclear war as the Soviet Union sent a severe warning to the USA demanding the immediate immediate immediate withdrawl of its troops. Yet in the play this conflict, which developed into a regional and international crisis, is represented as merely an internal crisis between two villages. Strangely enough, in Petra, which has for theme the more violent and bloody civil of 1975-76 war which created deeper divisions among the Lebanese, the Lebanese are presented as a united people foiling a foreign conspiracy and winning a war of liberation against a much superior foreign power.
But what is the conflict about? The 1975-1976 war has often been described as a Palestinian-Christian war. Is this the Rahbani version of it? Not exactly. The conflict in ‘Petra’ is presented solely in external terms: as an Israeli-engineered conspiracy against Lebanon, the outcome of which is the victory of the united Lebanese against that conspiracy. But that is not all. We are in 1977. Southern Lebanon is the scene of an ongoing struggle between the Palestinian commandos and Israel. Looking at it from another perspective, that part of Lebanese territory, under the control of the commandos of the PLO, can be seen to have been sustracted from Lebanese sovereignty. In their 1977 play, as in their play of 1962, the Rahbanis strictly adhere to the official discourse. President Elias Sarkis, elected only a few months before the play was written, launched a carefully constructed, seemingly balanced, yet very ambiguious formula which states that: “Each should reclaim his own land”. The play merely echoes this formula:
“This is our land
Each should reclaim his own land”
What does that mean? Obviously that the Palestinians should liberate their land and the Lebanese should liberate theirs. Granted that the Palestinians should liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation. From whom should the Lebanese liberate theirs? The most likely interpretation is that they should reclaim their land from the Palestinian commandos of the PLO. Lebanese unity should be reclaimed from Israel and the South should be reclaimed from the PLO. In effect, one of the key decisions of the Arab summits in Riyad and Cairo, in 1976, that brought Sarkis to power and declared the termination of the ‘two-years war’ was that the Lebanese army should be deployed in Southern Lebanon with the help of the Syrian-dominated Arab deterrent Force.
Whereas the conflict in Jisr al-Qamar takes the form of harmless quarrels between the strongmen men of both parties, death creeps into Petra. Victory was wrenched at a very heavy price: the death of the royal child Petra.
Granted that the function of literary criticism is not to investigate into the author’s intentions, yet we may still claim the right to ponder on the ambiguous connotations of the child’s death. To begin with, Petra-the-child would obviously symbolize all the innocent victims of the 1975-76 civil war. It could also be construed that her death announces the death of innocence in a fierce and bloody civil war. But there is more to that. The capture/raptured child can be construed also to represent kidnapped South Lebanon under the mercy of Israeli agression (the Israeli occupation of a part of South Lebanon will occur a year later) but most importantly for that period, and for the Rahbani discourse, under Palestinian armed control. The key to such an interpretation resides in the lament ‘Ya Zahrat al-Junub’ (O, Flower of the South) sung by Fairuz after Petra’s capture. In it, the raptured daughter is amalgamated with the captured South, evoking a complex of feelings of loss, of guilt for having neglected the Flower of the South in addition to an imploration of forgiveness. This central song in the play evokes ‘Lebanon’ lamenting the loss of Southern Lebanon, a dear part of its territory that it had neglected for so long. But it can also be interpreted as a lament for a personal more intimate ‘loss’ suffered by the Rahbanis themseves. Ziad, the son of Assi and Fayrouz, had recently crossed over from Eastern Beirut, where the family lived, to Western Beirut, as a sign of protest against the policies of the right-wing Lebanese Front, especially their siege of the Palestinian camp of Tall al-Zaatar.
Jisr al-Qamar was set in a Lebanese village. The Lebanon of the operetta Petra has been transposed to historical Petra. The same idea of the univocal relationship between peace and economic prosperity is repeated. War- political strife- endangers economic prosperity. Because of the war, the caravan routes have been diverted away from Petra, and prosperity has vanished. The implication is that the end of the war -victory in this case- will necessarily lead to the return of economic prosperity.
But in the triangular relationship The Stranger – The Treasure – The Miracle, the musical Petra lays more emphasis on the Treasure which is threatened by a mighty Stranger. The small commercial city-state of Petra is, of course, another representation for Lebanon: a caravan station and refuge for the wealth and treasures fleeing Roman injustice, struggling against the Mighty of this Earth to save civilization from barbarism. The conflict in Petra has taken a different turn: the city-state is fighting for another kind of Treasure, one in which are amalgamated capitalist free trade and civilization:
“Rome seeks to rob peoples of their treasures. Petra will not allow the East to be robbed of its civilization, of Money, of jewels and of statues sculpted by Man’s genius. That is why we have opened our safes as a refuge for the treasures fleeing the regions under Roman occupation. The safes of Petra have become Liberation and have become the Struggle…”
It is quite difficult to imagine how a safe, with its obvious connotations of enclosure, can come to to symbolize liberation, or struggle for that matter. What concerns us more is that the Rahbani theatre had matured, over the two decades separating the two plays. Its dramatic construction is more evident, its conflicts more complex and ambiguous and its manipulation of memory more sophisticated.
Cf: Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Paris, 1992; Mahmud Darwish, Dhakirah li-l-Nissyan, Beirut, 1987.