تأمّلات في الثقافة والفولكلور في لبنان

Reflections on Culture and Folklore in Lebanon

I. Culture and Folklore

Why reflections?

I do not think you expect me to indulge here in a learned definition of culture. Perhaps it is necessary to start with two points:

First, if the basic distinction at stake is that between culture and nature, then, folklore belongs to the first not the latter; indeed, folklore, as we shall see, constitutes the matrix of every culture.

Second, I am also not sure whether we can safely include folklore in the distinction between High and Low culture: one produced by the Khassa and the other, by the `Amma. In that case, Gilgamesh, Mythology, the Epic poems (the Illyad, among others) and the Thousands and One Nights should all be attributed to the latter. Indeed, folklore production proceeds from the bottom up in the social hierarchy, but in asmuch as it influences High culture (namely literary and artistic production) it has itself this faculty of digesting various elements of intellectual production at large, whether it be philosophic ideas or scientific discoveries.

On the other hand, with the proliferation of means of mass communication, we can safely speak of culture produced for, or addressed to, the `amma.

Rather than treat folklore as the domain of the picturesque and the exotic, our approach emphasizes outlooks, values and guides to action it vehicles. This is one possible definition of folklore:

“A number of common beliefs without a doctrine and a set of collective practices without a theory” (André Faraniac).

The emphasis, here, is on the common and the collective.

No wonder Vladimir Propp likened folklore to language because it has no author, rather its author is a collective historical being, much like language. Literature and art are individually produced. Popular poetry, folktales, folk-songs and folk-dances have whole peoples and whole generations for their authors.

We can also add that folklore is transmitted verbally, at times unconsciously: we do not exactly know how and when a young man learns to dance the dabkeh and a young girl to belly-dance. You can call this tradition, but improvision is envolved in it as much as immitation and reproduction.

Finally, a folkloric product, unlike a literary or art work, is never finished. It is constantly changing with time, generations and what performers add to it or make of it.

That is why, the study of folklore pertains also, if not primarily, to the realm of archeology and history.

By origin, many folkloric elements were related to rituals and later acquired their independence. Yet, they retain ritualistic elements and functions. The Dabkeh is a good illustration. This collective dance, common to all countries of the Machriq, goes probably back to pre-monotheistic times. The sacred in it, is manifest in the repetitive circular movement, from left to right. As for the music, steps, movement and songs they evoke an intimate affinity with fertility and rainmaking rites (istisqâ’). The continuous flowing sound of the flute which immitates rain contrasts with the scanded beats of the drum, emulating thunder. Many dabkeh songs emphasize this aspect: ‘Shatti ya Dinni’, of the Rahbanis, for one. The jump preceeding the stamping of the foot on the ground, from which the dance got its name, belongs to sympathetic magic found in practically all agriculturally-based cultures: the belief that the higher the young woman or young man can jump, the higher the wheat or corn will grow.

Speaking of rituals, we should add that religion, philosophy and morals are basic constituants of folklore. Not only has there always been Popular Religions which all share the fact that they are amalgams of pagan beliefs, either couched in the forms of monotheistic religions or openly divergent from them.

In that sense, folklore is the deposit of what Antonio Gramsci aptly calls ‘common sense’ throughout the ages. This is particularly found in proverbs and wise sayings.

It has been the habit to take a proverb and trace it back to a presumed or actual incident or story which gave rise to it. The proverb resumes the morale of the said incident or story. This has been particularly the case with the verbal communications (TV performances) and writings of Salam al-Rassi in Lebanon. However, we can treat proverbs in a totally different way. We can deal with them as relics, ruins and remnants of old tales which have acquired their independence, meaning and esthaetic value in themselves, as Walter Benjamin advises us. Indeed, we can re-read and re-interpret the various collections of Lebanese proverbs by Frayha (Mount Lebanon), Abella (South Lebanon) and many others by using a thematic, rather than the alphabetical, classification these authors use. We can thus classify them under the following topics:

– practical economics: e.g. the tens of proverbs on silkworm production

– social values and social relations: guides to behavior

– religion and values: absence of metaphysics and abstractions (a living ass better than a dead philosopher), pragmatic, functional approach to things spiritual, seeking direct results from religious teachings, direct debonnaire relationship with the Almighty, great distrust of men of religion,

• rich and poor
• rulers and ruled
• city and countryside
• men and women

Indeed proverbs are contradictory and ecclectic but they are not without some logic nor without a set of values imbued in them, values which are especially articulated around such the notions of freedom, independence and equality. Proverbs may sum you to depart from them out of dire necessity only.

II. Modern folklore: The Rahbanis

Lebanon is one the earliest Arab countries, perhaps after Egypt, to produce modern folklore. This is related to such factors as rapid urbanisation, tourism and emigration. What the three factors have in common is the need for nostalgia. The cultivation of nostalgia is an old trait in Lebanese culture, it is aggravated in the case of its folklore.

At the turn of the century, Beirut-based francophone intellectuals of aristocratic or merchant stock started inventing an ideal and idyllic Mount Lebanon, designed to be ascetic (‘abode of the Spirit’) and self-sufficient, in which the peasant was glorified in his “happy misery” (Charles Corm). Significantly enough, this happened barely a few years after a famine mowed down tens of thousands of Lebanese (especially in ML). Those intellectuals called themselves the New Phoenicians.

From the fifties onwards, Lebanese folklore came to town, so to speak, in a rapid pace. Thus the divorce occured between the producers of popular culture and its consumers. Common people were no more producers and active participants in these arts, but passive watchers. Its producers were professional artists, musicians, performers and dancers.

The decisive impact of the Rahbani brothers and Fayrouz

– a compendium of all of Lebanese folklore

– the creation of a Lebanese school in Arabic music, to contrast with the Egyptian school, for example.

– the construction of a national space. Rahbani’s ‘Watan’ woven like a cocoon by the silky voice of Fayrouz. Who wouldn’t like to dwell in it? But as the poet Joseph Harb not so naïvely asked: where do we book tickets for it?

III. Post War

1. The fragmentation of culture has followed the fragmentation of society. From national space to local or communautarian space. You might ask: what is new in that? At least this: these folkloric elements are now laden with identitarian symbolism and assertion of the self vis-à-vis the ‘other’, whatever that local ‘other’ may be. Localization and provincialisation: the clan has reappeared, old Beiruti artifacts: the Tarboush and the narguileh.

Two obvious victims:

• the national space is atomized, despite Zaki Nassif’s naïvely optimistic marches and dabkehs or the songs-cum-prayers of a Majida al-Rumi
• time: Lebanon’s present and the recent past are the victims of this new folklore. ‘Beirut, an old city for the future’ (Solidere). We now know that if was a Phoenician city. Between this past and the future, there should be nothing to remember or learn from the country’s last seventy five years of existence

2. Privatization, commercialization and TV culture has split popular culture into two realms: its relegation to foreign actors and values on the one hand (in the name of globalisation and multiculturalism) and to private backward forces in the name of authenticity, on the other. The result is kitsch.

• the invasion of commercial ads which tell you that you can have long beautiful legs (like those of Nicole Ballan) if you wear this or that brand of stockings
• but we do not need ads to know that you can wear a ‘mandil shar`i’, commonly and improperly called ‘veil’, signed by YSL or Channel, even letting a lock of your hair, just out from the coiffeur, dangling from under it.
• the TV announcer greets you with ‘Bonsoir’, pronounces the ‘International’ in LBCInternational with a perfect American accent only to read the news in …. colloquial Lebanese!

3. a return to segregation and sexualization of women on which converge both western adds, and fundemantalist discourse (woman as fitna or `awra) and nostalgia-production (belly dancing).

4. the exaggerated values of conspicuous consumption transposed from Gulf rentier societies: cellular phones (fetichistic Lebanese transmutation par excellence of the war’s pistol into the post-war cellular phone, as pictured in a Saad Hajo cartoon, in al-Safir), 4- wheel drives which advertize themselves as costing $90.000 each, Sri Lankan maids (to whom a racist song has recently been dedicated) and feasts (weddings and otherwise). Can we boastfully call it ‘Arab generosity’? To my mind, it is closer to what Leonardo Sciascia tells us about Sicilian hospitality:

“In this pompous hospitality which characterises us, we can easily detect the desire to appear as we are not, to raise ourselves to the level of our visitors and guests, to give of ourselves the best image possible, though it might be far removed from the truth. This has nothing to do with generosity which is gratuitous and does not seek to deceive concerning appearances; it is rather a form of pride and of self-love”.

5. the ever-presence of the social, with the necessary reversals and caricatures in the famous Mexican TV serials where the recent innovation is that some do not speak classical Arabic, but colloquial Lebanase. Two successive ones have for titles: “The poor also cry” and “the Rich also cry” (guess who doesn’t?) Perhaps the middle class which, we are told does not exisit anymore. Not to speak of the Bold and the Beautiful and the upward mobility problems of lower-class American women (Sally Spectra and Brooke Logan) desparately trying to force themselves into acceptability by the established bourgeoisie.

IV. Ziad Rahbani: the anti-flokloric folklore

Ziad Rahbani, the most important and exciting cultural phenomenon that the Lebanon has produced in recent years.

As a composer of extraordinary talent, Ziad’s novelty is a departure from the ‘Lebanese school’ of his parents. His ‘Oriental Jazz’, an original and courageous venture in blending Jazz with traditional Arabic music. In it Ziad attempts to relate two musical traditions of the Third World which share in common a very potent and fertile characteristic: improvisation. Thus Ziad seeks to overturn the rules of the game as regards modernizing Arabic music and believes that with such ventures, Arabic music can and must legimately aspire to universality.

In his songs, Ziad not only looks for new themes, he also destabilises traditional ones. In rebellion against the prevailing evocation of love by contemporary Arabic singing- whether in its prude, romantic version of the Rahbanis and Fayruz or in the sufi, self-consuming Umm Kalthum version- Ziad seeks to convey the commonplace, everyday aspect of the relationship between man and woman. Insecure relationships, transient, even trivial or failed ones are the material for his lyrics, markedly anti-romantic and disrespectful towards established rules and taboos, social hierarchy (Marba al-Dalal) and the power of the State interfering between the to sexes (Ihtishmi). They are furthermore spelled out in the everyday language of the real lovers of today, of that new generation to which Ziad bolongs and which he tries to express. These lyrics, direct and sincere, do not, nevertheless, lack either poetry or warmth.

Ziad Rahbani also wrote, directed and played the main character in a number of plays, which primarily reveal Ziad’s talent as a comic actor. The character he created is a curious mixture between a Buster Keaton or a Charlie Chaplin and a Beiruti street urchin. Stammering, awkward, devoid of any charm, Ziad on stage is the antithesis of the self-assuredness and triumphalism discourse of the war. At times moody, stubborn and turbulent, but never moralising, this tense and agitated little man is always a burning question-mark that reveals the paradoxes and contradictions between pretention and reality, word and deed.

In the comedies, satyre and farce are but the means of ridiculizing the empty folkloric exagerations and the bombastic and self-contented discourse of the protagonists of the war, the self-made representations and presumed innocence of the confessions, and all that they hold for sacred. Ziad’s plays are the most forceful and uncompromising voice of dissent, denounciation and resistance against war, seen from the point of view of its victims. However, the comic is never an end in itself, and the ridiculisation of established myths and values is a means to slap people in the faces to wake up to their reality and their real selves.

On the eve of the civil war, when Lebanese society had reached a climax of social tensions and political conflicts, Ziad produces Nazl al-Surur (Inn of Merriness-1974) a premonitory musical which opposes the romantic vision of social change with the disruptions and distortions it suffers at the hands of the realities of a society dominated by the monetary values of trade and services. The revolutionaries are finally corrupted and recuperated by the regime they had set out to overthrow.

In Bil-Nisbi la-Bukra, Shu? (What about tomorrow?-1977), a young couple are employed in a bar. The husband casts a blind eye on the escapades of his barmaid wife with the customers, in return for the financial rewards she brings back which both use to climb the social ladder. A tragi-comedy on the conflict between status and honour, social promotion and love, the play tells of the revolt of a young man torn between the promises and petty privileges of modern consumers’ society and the concommitant humiliations they impose on his pride and humanity.

Film Amriki Tawil (A Long American Film-1980) is Ziad’s play on the war itself. Set in a psychiatric ward which caters for the victims of psychic disorders resulting from the war, the play contrasts thells the reality of a war-torn society, infested with all sorts of prejudices and hatred- as represented and related by the patients. It contrast it with the repressive, self-delluded, self-contented and hypocritical discourse imposed by the ‘sane’ elements of society and those who pretend it is their role to ‘cure’.

Shi Fashil (Something Amiss-1983) recounts the adventures of a theatre director entangled in the innumerable difficulties and adventures of setting a play in a situation of alleged ‘return to normalcy’ after the Israeli invasion of 1982. The plot is a caricature of Lebanese ‘soap operas’: a harmonious, prosperous and idyllic village is coveted by a ‘stranger’ about to steal the jar containing its ‘treasure’ and, by so doing, destabilise its prosperity. The misfortunes that befall the plot, the actors and the director are the occasion for a biting satyre on the incapacity of building peace with the same mental and human material that initially started the war.

During the past years, his new songs follow the same tradition as his plays. They vehicle an angry critique of the war lords and the hypocrisy and corruption of the politicians, not sparing those leaders who pretend to work for change and justice. With a deep feeling for the common people, Ziad’s songs denounce the confessionalist system and the deep social inequalities that the war has exacerbated. They, on the other hand, celebrate the ordinary citizen, his tenacity, patience and above all his ingenuity in overcoming death with hope and in creatively dealing with the tragic challenges and difficulties of everyday life.

No wonder young people identify themselves with his music and words. The point to be made is that a few of the older generation share their feelings too!

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