Pearls on a Branch

by Najla Jraissaty Khoury

  Copyright © Najla Jraissaty Khoury 2013

  English translation copyright © Inea Bushnaq 2014

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Originally published as Hikayat wa Hikayat by Dar Al Adab, Lebanon, Beirut, 2014

  This edition published by arrangement with Rocking Chair Books and RAYA, the agency for Arabic literature

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request

  Ebook ISBN 9780914671893

  Cover art: Helen Zughaib

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  This book was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Translator’s Introduction

  The Farsheh

  Ahaa

  Abu Ali the Fox

  The Sun her Mother, The Moon her Father

  A House without Worries

  The Prince and the Goatherd

  Lady Tanaqeesh and the Eggs of the Tawawees

  The Olive Pit

  The Fly

  Pearls on a Branch

  Two Sisters

  O Palace Beautiful! O Fancy Friend!

  Who Ate the Wheat?

  The Vegetable-Seller’s Daughter

  A Cow called Joukha

  The Girl who had no Name

  The Frog and his Wife

  Jubayna the Fair

  Baldhead in the Garden

  King Solomon and the Queen of Birds

  Sitt Yadab

  Bir Brambir

  The Green Bird

  The Singing Turd

  The Mouse that Wanted a Husband

  The Drinking Fountain

  Thuraya with the long, long hair

  When Queen Mother Died

  The Nightingale that Speaks

  The Day it Rained Dumplings

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my grandmother told me a story every time I went to visit her. One day she said to me: “You know, when I was a little girl like you my grandmother used to tell me the stories I am telling you now.”

  I smiled without saying anything. What a joke! My grandmother a little girl!

  Here I am, a grandmother myself, maybe even older than she was at the time. I look back at myself as a little girl and again I smile.

  I remember the story of “Eleven.” I told my grandmother: I don’t understand how someone can name a newborn baby “11.”

  “It’s because those people already had ten children!” she replied. “There is an end to names. There is an end to everything.”

  The civil war in Lebanon broke out in 1975. It seemed endless. We waited for all of eleven years but still it did not end. It was not until 1990, after 15 years of shelters and darkness that the war finally came to an end.

  During that time, I founded a traveling theater company with some friends. We called it Sandouk el Fergeh, a kind of Box of Wonders, in recognition of the popular entertainment with the same name, which saw its best hours in the Middle East in the years before the advent of cinema. Our troupe of actors and marionettes produced plays for a good twenty years. Gradually we had to adapt to the war situation and we began to use shadow puppets to perform our stories. That way we were able to put on our shows in marginal areas where electricity was a luxury, in air raid shelters, Palestinian refugee camps, isolated villages, and of course on stage in the towns.

  Our plays were largely based on oral tales. I combed the country in search of stories. It was far from easy. Narratives were often muddled, memories failed, rhymes were incomplete. I had to prime the storytellers by prompting childhood memories, reciting the beginning of some rhyme or mentioning titles, like “Eleven.” Another problem was that people tend to be suspicious in wartime. I had to be introduced and accompanied by someone known to the tellers. Some women refused to be taped. More than anything I had to be patient.

  I often spent hours listening to the narrator – they were mostly women – tell me all about herself, her experiences during the war, her health problems, personal reminiscences, or even some cooking recipe…before I finally ventured to ask: “Who told you stories when you were a child? Which story did you like best?” I had to be on the lookout for stories read in books, seen on television or simply invented. In time I was able to spot these quite quickly. When I eventually found an “authentic” storyteller, I would write out or tape her story, delighted to be listening to it with all the digressions and comments. Almost always I would return to hear the same story again, hoping I would be allowed to tape the teller’s voice or at least fill any gaps in my hurriedly written notes.

  Whenever a story seemed suitable for a future production, I’d search for alternative versions in different regions and denominations. My goal was to produce a beautiful show. So I’d listen very carefully to every version of the same story. The differences lay more in the details than in the structure of the plot. It was interesting to hear the same story as told on the coast, in the mountains, in urban and rural centers. In border areas with Syria and Palestine, the differences tended to be more superficial.

  My friend and translator asked me to include the following incident:

  At one point while collecting stories, I happened to be recovering from back surgery and needed to sit upright on a chair. Arriving in one village with my tape recorder, I went to the house where I was expected and found that it consisted of a large room full of women and children. I was given a warm welcome and asked to sit down. But there were no chairs. When they found me a chair, I sat down, feeling confused and embarrassed – everyone else was hunkered down on the floor. The hosts were very sweet, interrupting the narrator time and again to pass around nuts and raisins, almonds, tea and coffee.

  That recording turned out to be noisy and incomprehensible. So I had to come back a few weeks later to hear the story told again by the same woman. It was a weekday morning and the children were in school. There were only three or four women present. I had to ask myself whether it was really the same story. When, in the narrative, a jar knocks off the long spout of a water pitcher, the women grinned knowingly; when I asked them why, they laughed outright. I was supposed to catch the sexual reference: a jar (feminine noun) snapping off the spout of the pitcher (masculine). In the earlier session, the storyteller had raced through the sentence, “Bathhouse of the Plants that restores virginity to married women” too fast to be properly understood. Now it was not only clearly pronounced but discussed and commented on.

  This made me go about collecting stories in a different way. On the pretext of some failure in my tape recorder or an electric power cut, I would return to ask for a story to be repeated. The second time I went to hear the story I mentioned before, the listeners were all adults with no children present. I paid close attention to the nuances in the choice of words, the comments and body language of the storyteller. It was a revelation: certain stories told by women were for women only.

  In these tales, women play the lead roles to the
disadvantage of men, especially husbands. Was this revenge for their situation in life? In a society where the men dominate, women use 1001 wiles to assert themselves. At the time when I was collecting the stories, starting in 1978, the average age of the storytellers was sixty. Their instructions were to tell a story exactly as they had heard it as children.

  Until the middle of the 20th century, the social structure in the Levant, or Bilad ash-Sham (Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine,) gave precedence to the male. Women, once their housework was done and the children put to bed, were confined (without the benefit of television) to their homes. The men could go out to the coffee house to hear the Hakawati, recite the old epics before a strictly male audience. The women visited each other and told stories; stories in which men are dependent on women who are sharper and more intelligent than they are, where women become the true heroines if only through their patience in the face of oppression.

  This is the scenario in stories that take place in settings of poverty. By contrast, among kings and rich merchants, men are the powerful “bosses.”

  Each story is distinctive, but its opening and final lines are often interchangeable rhymed verses. The opening, in particular, might expand over a number of lines or several pages, without a clear connection to the thread of the narrative. The purpose of this farsheh, or “mattress,” is to catch the listeners’ attention and announce that they are heading into an indeterminate elsewhere. “This is what the story will lie upon,” says the storyteller.

  After twenty years the final curtain was lowered on Sanduk el Fergeh. The pursuit of stories, however, continued for memory and for pleasure. These are stories that belong to the human heritage. They are expressions of a distinctive cultural milieu. The notions of good and evil, for example, are not as categorical in them as in Western folktales. Fairies and witches have no equivalent in Arabic; instead there are magicians, male and female, good and bad. An old woman or an ancient man are often ogres, addressed as “Uncle Ogre” or “Mother Ogre.” A hero can tame them through his courtesy and deeds.

  These stories have an identity all their own. I had no right to keep them hidden in my drawer; I felt it a duty to share them. I chose one hundred stories from among the most popular and published them in Arabic in 2014, exactly as I received them from the mouths of the storytellers, who told them as they had heard them from their parents and grandparents when they were children.

  Out of the hundred stories published in Arabic, Inea Bushnaq and I chose thirty for this book. I hope that they will give the reader as much pleasure as they gave me listening to them.

  — Najla Jraissaty Khoury

  TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

  THE FOLKTALES IN THIS COLLECTION, oral survivors from a pre-literate era, resemble a quilt made with the fabrics of well-loved clothes. Just as patches of cloth in a quilt are arranged in different combinations to form a design, traditional folk motifs appear and reappear in a variety of settings and plots to shape the stories. One prince falls in love with the grocer’s daughter next door, another can’t take his eyes off the Bedouin girl he sees on his way to the hunt, all to the horror of the royal mothers. Here a golden anklet, and there a voice heard out of an open window, inspire obsessive love for their unknown owners. A songbird with green feathers reveals one crime and a speaking nightingale another. In the stories, love conquers all, but inevitably there are obstacles on the way to the happy ending. These are tales told by women to women so, not surprisingly, the main characters often are young women with remarkable courage, wit, and endurance. Whatever their unfortunate circumstances at the beginning, whether poverty or oppression, they are the heroines in the end.

  The thirty texts gathered here have been chosen from one hundred tales, recorded and transcribed by Najla Jraissaty Khoury and published in Beirut in 2014. Captured on tape, these are verbatim renderings of the storytellers speaking. The present translation, like the transcriptions, adheres word for word to the Arabic original. The aim is to allow the English reader to listen in as the storytellers, older women living in Lebanon in the last quarter of the 20th century, pass on the stories they had heard in childhood. Only in the verses that ornament many of the stories does the English sometimes need a few added words to be comprehensible.

  “Once upon a time,” the opening to English and European tales seems to promise an account of actual happenings. The Arab narrator is not so certain; she begins her story with the phrase kan ya ma kan: it was or it was not – it happened or it did not. When magic and supernatural beings take part in human affairs, how can one be sure? Kan ya ma kan is generally followed by the rhyming fi qadim az-zaman, “in the oldness of time.” Often a few more verses with the same rhyme follow, questions to the audience – do they want to listen or do they prefer to go to bed? – as if asking permission to speak. At times, God, the Prophet, the Virgin Mary, or a local saint might be invoked in the introductory verses.

  It is still customary among older people in Arabic-speaking countries to pronounce the name of God, bismillah, as a blessing, before embarking on any enterprise: starting the car for a journey or preparing to knead bread at home. Over the entrance of houses one often sees, as a blessing or for protection, the words, “It is by the will of God”, ma sha’ Allah i.e. built not by the hand of man alone. In one of the stories, a woman sings praises of her niece’s house then automatically repeats, “It is God’s will!” This is almost a required expression after praise, when admiring a baby, congratulating a graduate, or celebrating any other success. It invokes divine protection and averts the evil eye of envy. All the more then, would a storyteller feel the need for blessing and protection when embarking on a story involving powerful jinns – beings believed to exist invisibly alongside human beings.

  More elaborate than the handful of rhymes following kan ma kan, there is a long stretch of fantasy and nonsense rhyme called the farsheh. Literally, the farsheh is the soft bedding stored in a corner during the day and rolled out onto the floor at night, turning the living space into a bedroom. It is the equivalent of a red carpet rolled out for the stories about to be heard. At a storytelling session, it is the prelude to the main event. In the manner of a traditional evening’s entertainment, a sample farsheh precedes the rest of the narratives in the book. This particular text was part of a much longer recited verse. A number of the tales have their own, shorter introductory nonsense rhymes. Even without paying full attention to the words, listeners settling into their places for the storytelling would enjoy the lilt of the farsheh’s rhyme.

  In classical Arabic poetry, a single rhyme can be sustained for hundreds of verses, delighting and surprising listeners with the skill of the poet in achieving the repeated echo. Such an attempt in English, were it even possible, would be monotonous. Arabic has the advantage of considerable flexibility. Almost all words grow out of three-letter and, to a lesser extent, four-letter roots. The root letters can be extended and tweaked to have very different meanings; a single word can express number, gender, case, and tense all at the same time. This facilitates word play and rhyme, both of which are popular oral arts. There are competitions held for ex-tempore versifying, and even at an informal dinner table, guests might engage in a round of ad lib verse, teasing those present or commenting on the politics of the day. In folktales, simple verses with homespun images, some formulaic, some playful, are inserted to highlight moments of drama.

  Folktales everywhere address the same human needs and passions. The differing cultures, however, lend their separate coloring to the way their stories express love and hate, achieve justice, defeat oppression. A distinctive feature of the Arabic-speaking countries was the patriarchal family system. For centuries it served as the individual’s main support in the community. In return, personal aspirations had to cede before the demands of family welfare; family honor and property had to be preserved at all costs. To that end marriage between first cousins was the preferred arrangement. In stories, like “The Girl Who Had No Name,” where a youth chooses
a stranger as his bride, the resentment of his rejected first cousins is the trigger for the unlikely events that propel the plot. Whether they are blood relatives or not, fathers- and mothers-in-law are called ‘Paternal Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’ because that is the assumed norm for the relationship. Adults, once they are parents, are identified by the name of their firstborn son rather than by their own names as in Abu Suleyman and Umm Suleyman, Father-of Suleyman and Mother-of-Suleyman. One of the worst curses in Arabic is to wish childlessness upon a person. Interestingly, childless women in the stories pray for baby girls. Fathers want sons and one father, having no male child, sends his daughter to school as he would a boy; girls in the stories are taught at home. As if family were the sole model for relationships, strangers are called Brother, Sister, Aunt, Granny, depending on the age and gender of the person addressed.

  The woman in the patriarchal family is regarded as a protégée of her men folk, her father and her brothers. Certainly the stories demonstrate loyalty and protectiveness among siblings: brothers ready to face ogres and hazardous travels for the sake of a sister and sisters refusing marriage in order to devote themselves to prayer for a sick brother’s recovery. To this day, fathers, protectors of the family, keep a sharp eye on their daughters, especially as any hint of misbehavior by an unmarried young woman can stain her family’s honor. In the stories, the father, fond and indulgent as he may be towards his daughter, becomes suddenly harsh when he suspects her of unseemliness. A recurring theme is the bold young woman who resists her father’s will and takes matters into her own hands. She rides away dressed in men’s clothes, or pretends to be a humble serving girl and devises any number of ingenious tricks to achieve her goal and eventually marry the man of her choice. Beyond the success of her plans, the girl’s ultimate vindication is to see her father’s tears and remorse when the family is finally reunited. To be sure, the sons in the stories also create problems. However, when they fall in love with the wrong girl, they are not forced into lengthy struggles or harrowing adventures; their mothers quickly relent and go themselves to ask for the girl’s hand on behalf of their sons.