PROLEGOMENA FOR A MUSICOLOGY OF THE ZAJAL
A contextualised comparison of forms
of colloquial strophic poetry
in Arabic musical culture in North
Africa, Egypt and Lebanon
Ed Emery
School of Oriental and African Studies
[SOAS, London]
2009
SECTION 1: ABSTRACT
The structural principles of the Andalusi strophic
song form known as zajal (in shorthand, aabbba with colloquial diction)
are strongly present in the medieval period. The cognate muwashshah form
maintains a distinct presence in religious, secular and art-music contexts to
the present day, but the presence of zajal becomes diluted virtually to
the point of disappearance. Simultaneously in Egypt and Lebanon, zajal
comes to stand non-specifically for colloquial poetry in general. However,
adducing examples from the religious North African repertoire and the
poetic/sung repertoires of Egypt and Lebanon, musical treatments of zajal throughout
its history are examined, to show that aabbba-type zajal material
was distinctively and continually present in repertoires into the twentieth
century. During the genre’s 1,000-year history bifurcations in performance
practice and social context of the zajal are to be expected, whereby
individual aspects of the zajal experience are valorised differently
depending on context. Four clusters of zajal behaviours are identified
and compared: the choral-religious, the personal-lyrical, the emulative-agonistic
(duelling) and the declamatory. The account is prefaced by a consideration of
metapoetic elements constitutive of the zajal phemonenon, and concludes
with a consideration of the zajal’s musicality. Archive materials are
assembled as text, sound and video files in the Appendices.
SECTION 2: INTRODUCTION
The zajal is an Arabic strophic verse-form
with disputed origins, initially native of 10th-century Andalus. Oral in its
early history, it subsequently becomes part of both literary and musical
culture. Its literary-musical cognate form (muwashshah) has enjoyed
popularity in religious and art music in the Arab world up to the present day,
and the zajal itself is found as a distinct entity also in Jewish sung
culture. Historically there has been inconclusive debate as to what
distinguishes a zajal from a muwashshah. For the purposes of the
present account the distinguishing structural features of zajal are
taken as the following: (a) strophic verses with varying end rhymes and furthermore
a propensity to internal rhyming; (b) an opening rhymed section (matla‘)
which may, however, be missing; (c) a tendency to include a refrain at
verse-ends, which may reprise the rhyme(s) of the opening section; (d) a
possible concluding verse in the form of envoi (known as kharja);
(e) the likely occurrence of a triplet section (aghsan, sing. ghusn)
with identical rhymes; and (f) colloquial speech – with many commentators
taking linguistic register as the prime distinguishing determinant.
Moving through the 1,000-year history of the zajal,
from the originary genetic material to the present day, we can expect to
find variation, bifurcations and adaptation to circumstances. The aim of this
study is to provide evidence of the persistence of aabbba-type zajal
in Arabic musical culture and to compare local zajal forms in relation
to their given contexts. Passing reference will also be made to the element of
dance, not generally considered in the literature. For shorthand I shall use
the term aabbba to characterise the matla‘+strophe+refrain
structure inherent in zajal¸ and the idea of "constitutive elements
of zajal" to identify core aspects of the verse-form that may or
may not persist through time.
Although well explored as a terrain of literary
examination, tawshih (the art encompassing both muwashshah and zajal)
is less well served in its musical aspect. Wulstan [1982] and Liu and Monroe
[1989] explore the historical record, principally in relation to possible
cross-overs between Arab and Western musical forms. Wright [1994] is framed in
similar terms, whereas Wright [2006] offers an account bringing muwashshah
up to the twentieth century; here the zajal is subsumed within the
general discussion of muwashshah and the question of its possibly
distinct and separate identity is not addressed, confirming a general trend in
other studies. In the research literature zajal is poorly served in
terms of its musical performance, and even more so in terms of the general
poetic behaviours which are a fundamental constitutive part of its
phenomenology. These include competition, improvisation, emulation, duelling,
contrafact, boasting, social comment and critical intelligence. A brief account
of these would be in order before proceeding to consider the historical trajectory
of zajal.
Competition:
The anecdotes gathered in Kitab al-Aghani
("Book of Songs") of al-Isbahani (897-967) suggest that competition
between musicians and singers was a feature of musical life in the Abbasid
court, with large sums of money sometimes hanging on the outcome. In Arabic
culture poetic competition may also take the form of duelling, whether informal
or formal, as exemplified in the story that "Jarir, one of the most famous
of early Arabian satirists, defeated a rival poet with a satire of eighty
stanzas, his opponent suffering such ignominy that Jarir made his name a byword
for hundreds of years afterward." A duelling-type exchange between five
poets is also reported by Ibn Khaldun, in this case involving the Andalusi
zajalist Ibn Quzman.
Improvisation:
The ability to improvise has also been highly
valued historically – among both musicians and poets. "If the audience
included a poet, he might have been asked to improvise verses on a given
situation, and the musician in turn was ordered to set it to music
immediately." Thus there exists "a strong tradition of double
improvisation: the composition of an impromptu text, followed immediately by an
improvised musical setting for it."
Imitation:
As described by Stern, imitation of a given
poem "is not uncommon in classical Arabic poetry. […] It was customary to
compose a response to a poem in the same metre and using the same rhyme – a
special case, of frequent occurrence, being the poetical epistle and its
reply." Stern cites one such poetic epistle, by ‘Abdallah Ibn al-Shamr,
and the reply by the Emir ‘Abd al-Rahman II, to be found in Nykl.
Here an element of competition is introduced,
and the poem as object moves from the sphere of individual creation into the
sphere of socialised discourse and – importantly for our study, since music and
tune was often the enabling vector of transmission – circulation.
Critical intelligence:
In the present day, in addition to other
constitutive elements such as boasting, praise of patrons, humour etc, the ethos
of zajal is also that of critical intelligence. As described by Nadia
Yaqub in the case of Palestine, and exemplified by Lebanese zajalist Mousa
Zgheyb in the interview at Appendix 10 below, the zajal performers know
about and comment upon current affairs and matters of social importance. which
they debate improvisationally in verse, sometimes even switching roles midway
through the duel. This is more than mere exercise of wit; it engages critically
with issues, whether local, national or (in the modern era) international.
Musical accompaniment to muwashshah and zajal:
Stern is firm in his statement of how music
functioned as the vector for circulation of the muwashshah: "There
is no doubt that here the main stimulus to imitation lay in the musical side of
the muwashshah. We have seen the great role music played in the
popularity of the genre. Each poem had its particular tune; melody and text
formed a close unit." Evidence of the role of music comes in the headings
contained in the manuscripts of many muwashshahāt, which indicated
the lahn. In other words, the poems were to be sung according to the
melodies of some other known poem. In the Diwan of the Jewish poet
Abraham Ibn Ezra, in addition to references to well-kown muwashshahāt,
there are 25 indications of lahn. Thus the musicality of the zajal
has to be understood both as object-in-performance and in terms of its
functional necessity as a medium for poetry’s circulation through time and
space.
In attempting to track the zajal through time
we are in a landscape of hazy outlines where nomenclature is imprecise and one
term may refer to differing phenomena. This study picks its way gently across
the landscape, picking up what traces are available. In that sense the
observations that follow are to be taken as prolegomena to a future study.
SECTION 3: EARLY DAYS
As a preliminary mapping of the early days of zajal
the five sub-sections that follow [3.1-3.5] document relevant instances of
musical practice in zajal from c.1100 to c.1300.
3.1. Ibn Quzman [c.1078-80 to 1160]
Analysis of the poems contained in the Diwan
of Ibn Quzman reveals many references to music as part of the general ambience
and also of the performance practice of the zajal.
The diwan contains about 190 zajals
and muwashshah-like zajals, a form in which the poet claims to
excel. He announces: "I make muwashshahāt and zajals; I
am a writer and a poet" (24.10.1-2). His poems are improvised ("I
never say a mudanza or a volta that is not improvised" –
119.8.4). They circulate widely ("my zajal seems to have flown to
all parts" – 78.12.3), even as far as Baghdad ("from here to
Baghdad" – 102.2.3; also "my illustrious zajal is heard in
Iraq; it is an inspired thing" – 65.10.1). Single phrases of the poems
(e.g. the outgoing kharja phrases) are adduced from sung sources
("and he sang the song of the impassioned lover" – 142.5.3; also
"a beautiful girl sang a handsome cobla", 76.7.1), and there
are also references which suggests that the zajal itself may have been
sung. ("I sang and she went into ecstasy" – 141.4.2)
At this point it would be appropriate to
observe that in Ibn Quzman the zajal was also associated with dance:
"I have finished the zajal, and it is sweeter than the breeze; the
cup-bearer sings it and the boon-companion dances it" (71.7.1). This
element of dance has a continuity in the dance-related contexts of poetic
duelling in today’s Saudi Arabia and Palestine where dance is intensely part of
the poetic duelling context, and also in the body movements of the Maghribi dhikr-tawshih
performances cited below.
Post-Quzmanian circulation of musical
treatments of tawshih verse extends into North Africa, where "[i]t
was taken up by the popular musicians of the towns [...] and became an
indispensable part of their repertoire of songs. There was established in North
Africa a traditional music system which varied little over the centuries [...]
As a companion to it, there were composed textbooks of songs, for the use of
musicians; these collections consist overwhelmingly of muwashshahs."
In passing, given the persistence of the Andalusi musical tradition in North
Africa, not least among the Sufi brotherhoods, Stern offered the thought that
through the Andalusi texts perhaps "echoes of the melodies composed by the
Andalusian musicians of old for the muwashshahs [might] be
retrieved" Since Stern, however, work in this field has been largely
inconclusive.
3.2. Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk [1155-1211]
The Egyptian tawshih aficionado Ibn
Sana’ al-Mulk spent years studying and analysing the muwashshah.The
biographical literature tells of him meeting a Moroccan [maghribī]
who introduced him to the secrets of both muwashshahāt and zajals.
Those hoping to find musical information about the zajal in his Dar
al-Tiraz will be disappointed, however, because there is no mention of zajal
in Sana’ al-Mulk. Disappointment may nevertheless be partially tempered by
a report that a 13th-century physician named Yahya ibn ‘Abdallah ibn al-Bahbada
"composed zajals as a caprice that people sing to the būq
[yughannūna bihā ‘alā al-būq]". The note is
significant for its association of the zajal with a particular
instrument. He then includes the text of a zajal of this type which was
nicknamed al-Tayyār (the Flyer).
3.3. Ibn al-‘Arabi [1165-1240]
The Andalusi Sufi mystic Ibn al-‘Arabi, writing poetry in a Sufi context,
led the way in appropriating secular musics into a religious context. In
addition to the poem cited above, he wrote 27 muwashshahāt which
were mostly based on popular songs of his day. For our present purposes we can
note that he wrote (only) one
zajal on religious themes, a poem for which he took the opening of an
Ibn Quzman poem (no. 85) and used it as his outgoing line (kharja).
3.4. Ibn Daniyal [1248-1311]
Mohammed Ibn Daniyal wrote shadow plays. He is useful as an early post-Quzmanian
marker of the continued potency of the zajal-type strophic verse in
Egypt in a context of biting and scurrilous satire, and within a framework of
music, dance and song.
In the Ibn Daniyal texts (a) the headings to some
strophic verses specify their metres (waafir, mutqaarib etc); and
(b) others are specified in the headings to songs as being either muwashshah
or zajal. Thus a distinction is made between muwashshah / zajal
and other metric forms, and also between muwashah and zajal
The first poem specified as zajal [Appendix
1(a) below] presents a matla’ rhyming in –āt, with a caesura
rhyme also in –āt. This is followed by three lines rhyming in –āl,
and a half-line refrain taking up the opening –āt rhyme. Thus aabbba.
The second zajal poem [Appendix 1 (b)
below] also has three-line verses, each with their own identical rhyme, and a
broadly identical opening line which is repeated as a refrain after each verse.
Here it is specified that the character "sings and dances to the rhythm of
a hand-drum (‘yarqus wa-yughanni ala iqa’ al-tabl’) and says the
poem". For the purposes of this study what is noteworthy is that the zajal
is located in a context of both music and dance.
3.5. Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtari [c.1213–69]
Ibn al-‘Arabi’s co-religionist and fellow
mystic Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtari is credited with having popularised the zajal
form as a vehicle for religious sentiment, using as models the popular songs of
his day. His Diwan contains numerous zajals in popular diction,
which were edited in a "pre-edition" by Corriente in 1988. As
reported in Alvarez’s forthcoming account, the al-Shushtari texts enjoy a
pervasive diffusion from North Africa to Syria, as suggested by the proliferation
of extant manuscripts. and are "prominently featured in the mystical
sessions of virtually every brotherhood".
This al-Shushtari repertoire and its placement
within Maghribi Sufi practice exemplifies a context-specific combination of zajal
elements that we can call "choral-religious". It is usefully
exemplified in a recent CD entitled "Dhikr y Sama' " issued by
the "Cofradía Al-Shushtari" of Morocco under the direction of Omar
Metioui, a collection of Sufi musical materials using texts written by, or attributed
to, Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtari.
These materials constitute a present-day
treatment of aabbba, situated in a local musical vernacular which is
framed within a rhetoric of continuity and is perceived by its practitioners to
be in a line of descent from medieval Andalus. However, despite the CD having
been produced "under the supervision of a Sufi sheikh", claims to
primordial authenticity should perhaps be treated with caution.
The CD comprises a repertoire of muwashshahāt,
zajals, mawwals and other genres. The programme moves from
Qur’anic invocation through ritual drumming and heavy-breathed invocation of
the name of Allah, to eventual closure, all within the framework of the system
of modes (tubu') and poetic genres characterising the present-day North
African nuba ("suite"). Following the opening ritual
invocations comes a central hadra section, a continuous piece lasting
for 26 minutes and featuring the maqams hijaz al-mashriqi, raml
l-maya and hamdan.
I have extracted from this hadra section
the four zajal and muwashshah items located at nos. 10-13 on the
CD, which are to be regarded as distinct from the other (metric) designations
and from each other as genres. (The full hadra list comprises 19
separate items. )
The tawshih items are as follows.
[0’
00"] ZAJAL – "Hayyamní Lammá Tayallá li-l-Fu‘ád"
[1’
07"] MUWASHSAH – "Law Kunta Dhá t-Tisáli"
[2’
29"] MUWASHSAH – "Al-Hubbu Afnání"
[3’
50"] ZAJAL – "Ta‘lam yá Jillí"
These items are appended as a single sound-file
at Appendix 11 (b) below, with sections of silence inserted to demarcate the
start-points of each item. For listening, purposes the Audacity programme is
recommended. Here I have indicated in square brackets their respective starting
points in the file.
General observations:
Overall the hadra begins in the slow
mode and progresses to a final very fast mode, with movements of varied tempo
in-between, in accordance with the principle attributed to Ziryab of starting
the nuba with slow material and ending with fast. In this execution, as
signalled in the ritualistic (and largely non-verbal) heavy breathing present
throughout, the performance is designed to be read as functional to the
production of trance state.
This excerpted zajal / muwashshah section
has four items, each of about one minute apiece. They are distinguished
principally by alterations of pace (both between and within pieces), and are
performed by male singers, perhaps six, with one predominating, and a single
frame drum (possibly with snare).
Zajal No. 1: "Hayyamní Lammá Tayallá li-l-Fu‘ád"
Unison singing. An exclamatory "tail"
phrase (appearing twice at strophe ends) sung by chorus and one singer
descanting above them, confirming a general heterophonic quality to the
singing. Duple time, heavily pulsed on the first beat, with a syncopated feel
emphasised by the frame drum.The verses are delivered in sections of three
lines apiece, with rhyme at line-ends and also at caesura. Rhythm of 68 beats
per minute.
Muwashshah No. 1: "Law Kunta Dhá t-Tisáli"
Longer verse lines in AB structure, but
redoubled by repetition to become AABB. Metre: rajaz. Unison
singing, but with tenor lead singer having a greater vocal presence. Tendency
to one note per syllable except at line-ends. Steadier drum beat; pace slower
by half than the preceding item (and the rhythmic breathing likewise).
Processional quality. Same melody for matla‘ and ghusn material
alike; the poem is curtailed before the end of the strophe. This item occurs
among the Shushtari texts in Corriente’s edition, where it features as no. 62.
Muwashshah No. 2: "Al-Hubbu Afnání"
Begins at a similar pace, but becoming faster
at midway point. Binary AB opening again redoubles to become AABB by
repetition. Metre: basit. Followed by triplet lines rhyming at
line ends and also at caesura and having different melody. Unison singing
throughout, but with lead singer highlighted in triplet section.
This poem features as no. 89 in Corriente’s
edition. It is notable for the fact that its two-line kharja referring
to Ghaylan and Mayya reprises a verse from Ibn Quzman, which was also used by
Ibn al-‘Arabi in his Tarjuman al-Ashwaq in a famous verse invoking
inter-faith unity between Muslims, Christians and Jews, and is thus indicative
of a circulation of poetic material geographically and through time (over a
period of two centuries). In this performance, where each song runs to about a
minute in duration, the poem is truncated to half its original length.
Zajal No. 2: "Ta‘lam yá Jillí"
The pace now returns to that of the initial zajal.
This time making more use of the higher register. As in the preceding item, the
opening text is binary followed by triplet lines. This section ends abruptly,
leaving the breathing to abate before the performance proceeds into a more
peaceful mawwal with solo singer and without rhythmic breathing.
The CD distinguishes between zajal and muwashshah,
but the criteria are not obvious (despite his extensive forays into
classification Corriente eschews genre classification – an area of uncertainty
reflected in the very title of his book: "cejeles y/o
muwaššahāt"). The weighting of muwashshah and
zajal contained in this hadra performance indicates that they
each have a rhythmic functionality in relation to other forms (mawwal, tawil,
khafif etc) contained in the overall performance (for instance
differentiated as fast vs. slow, intensely-text-compacted vs.
prolonged-melismatic etc).
Textual content is subordinate to rhythmic
development and variation along the axis of the given performance, and is not
characterised by explication and sharpness of discourse. Sufi meanings are
anyway ambiguous, with copious use of metaphor, and are open to wide
interpretation. Authorship, furthermore, may be of dubious attribution or lost
entirely (Shushtari-attributed material on these Cofradía CDs is listed as
dubious in Corriente’s edition). The texts appear to be either curtailed /
excerpted or are already fragmentary in the repertoire.The textual material is
static and formulaic, not within an ethos of verbal improvisation, albeit open
to free treatment in musical terms. A hierarchical relationship is implicit in
the liturgical moment, in the relation between sheikh, singers of chorus lines,
and practicant congregation. The bodily movement implicit in the dhikr-tawshih
material contrasts with the bodily repose implicit in the mawwal sections.
SECTION 4: THE ZAJAL IN MODERNITY
4.1. Urban Bouriant
Continuing regional interest in maintaining a
corpus of tawshih material is evidenced in the c.1700 Kunnash el-Haïk,
a collection (without musical notation) which contains zajals –
hence testifying to a continuity of specifically zajal practice in North
Africa.; and in an earlier collection, the Al-‘Adhārā
al-mā’isāt, fi-l-azjāl wa-l-muwashshahāt, which, as its
title indicates, also contained zajals. These were followed in the
nineteenth century by the Egyptian muwashshah anthology of Shihab al-Din
Muhòammad ibn Isma‘īl [c.1795–c.1857] entitled Safinat al-Mulk, containing over 250 muwashshah
songs and testifying to Cairo being an important centre for the genre.
Given the attested long-term presence of tawshih
song in Egypt it would be reasonable to expect zajal to have a distinct
identity in that country. However when we seek aabbba-type zajal poetry
in present-day Egypt, the dominant view is that the term "zajal"
means nothing more than the general phenomenon of colloquial strophic poetry,
this by a metanymic process whereby the whole is named from the part. This is
the position expressed by Semah, and also by informed observers. However there
is a further Egyptian source available, dating from the 1890s, which adds a new
dimension to the picture.
In 1893 the Egyptologist Urbain Bouriant,
director of the French Archaeological Museum of Cairo, published a songbook
"based on the manuscripts of a Cairo street singer". This presents a
collection of 33 songs, which it specifies are in "Cairo dialect".
The significant fact for our present study is that most of the poems have headings
specifying that they are zajals. These include praise songs, comic songs
and love songs. Many of the songs have a rhyme scheme which can be
characterised as aabbba in the classic Andalusi manner. An example is
appended at Appendix 3 below.
Given that this was the repertoire of a Cairo
street singer in the early 1890s, can we can know anything about how it sounded
musically? Unlike the song collection of another French Orientalist,
Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, who was operating in the Near East twenty
years earlier, this collection provides no musical notation. However Bouriant’s
publication was contemporaneous with the birth of the recording industry and
with the appearance of the first phonograms in Cairo, where the Gramophone
company was active from 1903 servicing a hungry local market. For their home
markets the early record companies provided a plentiful fare of comic and
colloquial material, so something similar might have been expected in Egypt. It
appears that the early Arabic-catalogue materials of Odeon, Beka and others
have not yet been published; however a preliminary inspection of the early
recordings of the Egyptian singer Sheikh Yusuf al-Manyalawi (c.1843/53-1911)
and his contemporary ‘Abd al-Hayy Hilmi (1857-1912) reveals a repertoire
consisting of dors, qasidas, muwashshahs, mawwals, layalis
and taqtuqas. Regrettably there is nothing to indicate the presence in
these record catalogues of the kind of material featured in Bouriant’s
publication (humorous zajals etc).
For the moment, given the absence of notation,
nothing can be concluded definitively about the musical treatment of Bouriant’s
zajal songs. However early archive recordings of muwashshah material
are now becoming available. Since the historical muwashshah and zajal
share common textual structural features, it is possible that the performances
by Bouriant’s "street singer" may have had elements in common with
the early muwashshah recordings made by the likes of Manyalawi and
al-Hilmi. Realistically, though, it is equally possible that the stylistic
content of those recordings was a hybrid mediated content determined by the
preferences of the recording companies and sound engineers, as well as by
Ottoman instrumental practice, time-constrained curtailment and the local taste
for European opera. (For instance one muwashshah recording by al-Hilmi
features duet-style "echo" singing reminiscent of European opera).
A closer match might be the genre of wholly
vocal (non-instrumental) muwashshah as recorded in the performance by
Sheikh ‘Ali Mahmud of " ‘Adhir dhikhra man ‘awar ". Since this
piece reappears in my discussion of Sheikh Imam below, it would be appropriate
to give a summary account of its musical elements.
Musical treatment:
Sheikh 'Ali Mahmud – Muwashshah – "
‘Adir dhikra man 'ahwa " [n.d.]
[Duration: 3’ 14"] Soundfile attached as Appendix 12.
This can be characterised as a
"personal-lyrical" style, distinctly different from the
"choral-religious" Maghribi style above. It is short song, not
functional to dhikr-style ecstasy, geared to the musical market and
influenced by the time limits of gramophone records. ‘Ali Mahmud (like Sheikh
Zakariyya Ahmad, Sheikh Sayyid Darwish and other protagonists of Egyptian
popular song) was taught music by Sheikh Darwish al-Hariri [1881-1957] – and
hence is in direct line of descent in a religious-popular sheikh-derived
musical tradition extending from the nineteenth century.
This is a purely vocal treatment, with no
musical instruments or percussion. The sheikh takes the lead, and extemporises.
A chorus of at least two male singers participates in singing all three
constitutive elements, matla‘, adwar and refrain. The opening
phrase is stated by the sheikh and chorus, in precise unison, then restated with
alternative material, with relatively few pitch changes per syllable. The dawr
material is then presented [0’ 20"], again sung in unison, proceeding to a
stepwise descending motif sung in refrain, possibly without the sheikh [0’
31"] This leads into several lines of dawr [0’ 41"] sung solo
by the sheikh, with spaces of silence after each phrase, closing with a
stepwise descending motif [1’ 25"] whereupon the chorus sings the refrain
[1’ 54"] in unison to close the strophe. Statements of refrain are followed
by clear pauses of silence. Here the sheikh’s vocalisations, extemporising
melodically over the chorus line, are relatively restrained, unlike his
performance on a related recording, of the muwashshah "Ahlan
bi-badri-t-timmi ruhi-l-gamal ", where the intensely melismatic
ornamentation bespeaks his role as the famous muezzin of the Al-Hussein mosque.
4.2. Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi [1893-1961]
Moving forward to the era of mass media, the
element of politics and critical intelligence implicit in the zajal’s
disputational (poetic duelling) aspect comes to the fore – the third of our zajal
ambits, which is distinctly different from that of the Maghribi
choral-religious zajal.
Although absent from early gramophone
recordings, zajal is present as a generic term (= colloquial strophic
poetry) at the foreground of literary production throughout the early
years of the recording industry. The question is: within this generality was
the aabbba-type zajal in fact wholly absent? Or was it subject to
the other form of extinction – namely exclusion from official accounts by
virtue of its vulgar provenance (in other words, present but invisible)? Or, as
a third option, had it transmuted into other forms? In answering this it is
helpful to examine the work of one of the leading figures of Egyptian literary zajal
production in the twentieth century, Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi.
In Egypt, from the 1870s onwards, the literary zajal
features as an integral part of contestational culture during the rise of
nationalism. Thus "popular zajal-type verses had served during the
1919 revolt to articulate nationalist sentiment, and a number of newspapers had
been founded by zajjals [zajalists], or employed ‘resident’ zajjals
as regular columnists." Modernity also brought new media. The zajalists’
output extended across satirical newspapers, film, gramophone recordings, song
performed in concert and on radio, radio serials, light operetta etc. Zajal
adopted verse forms other than the traditional. Bayram al-Tunisi (1893-1961),
exiled from Egypt in 1920 following his involvement in the 1919 Revolution, was
prominent in zajalist satirical culture. He returned in disguise in 1938, and
for a while worked at writing zajals for advertisements for a Belgian
fertiliser company in Alexandria (thus testifying to the genre’s flexibility).
From 1942 onwards he teamed up with the composer Zakariyya Ahmad (1896-1961)
and wrote a series of highly successful colloquial song lyrics for Um Kulthum.
As recounted by Danielson, this material
written for Um Kulthum was perceived by its audience to be zajal:
"Listeners also remember ‘Hulm’, ‘il-Ahaat’ and ‘Bi-ridaak’
as powerful examples of colloquial sung verse, zajal. [Um Kulthum’s]
performances lay close in style to the music ordinary people heard at weddings
and holidays and used to hear in coffeehouses where local singers plied their
trade." This prompts the question as to whether "Hulm"
can be read within the more closely-specified tradition of aabbba-type zajal.
Since, as noted above, zajal is cognate
with, but distinct from, muwashshah, its musical features can reasonably
be located alongside the widespread musical practices of muwashshah in
Egypt. At the start of the twentieth century, tawshih musical material
was readily available in musical culture in Egypt. Aleppo in Syria was
especially renowned as a centre of muwashshah production, which was
exported to Egypt. During this period composers produced muwashahāt in
their hundreds. The art of tawshih also featured in popular religious
culture in Egypt. Travelling religious singers performed repertoires including muwashshah
songs in which purely vocal performance was the norm. Many singers in Cairo had
trained originally as Qur’anic reciters, and worked in both religious and
secular genres – singing amorous qasa‘id as well as religious tawshih.
Performers such as Salama Hijazi, Zakariyya Ahmad and Sayyid Darwish moved
readily between the world of Qur’anic recitation and religious song and that of
urban stage and theatre. Um Kulthum was recognised as being firmly within this
sheikh-derived culture (min al-mashayikh).
4.3. "Hulm", as performed by Um
Kulthum
Sono Cairo SC-122. [Duration: 29’ 41" / 36’
18"]
A period of unconstrained eclecticism in
Egyptian music post-Cairo Congress (1932) led to all kinds of innovation in music
and song. At the same time, however, prominence was accorded to native Egyptian
and Arabic forms. The cluster of songs created for Um Kulthum in the period
1943-7 by Bayram al-Tunisi and Zakariyya Ahmad was a case in point. One of
their joint collaborations, the musical film Sallama, was "a tour
de force of Arabic song [...] Sallama [a slave girl, played by Um Kulthum] sang
a muwashshah, a qasida, a religious mawwal, a riddle-song,
and a lament similar in style to the songs of caravan drivers".
The song "Hulm" was recorded
in 1946. Only one recording is known to exist, and as far as is known (possibly
because of contractual issues between artist, writer and composer) it was not
performed again.
At first sight there is nothing zajal-like
about "Hulm". The song is a monologue (an extended concert-hall and
recorded song-form which found favour in Egypt), which moves in one motion from
beginning to end, without the chorus-refrains characteristic of tawshih
practice. That it shares characteristics of Andalusi verse is stating the
obvious (both being colloquial, strophic etc). However it could be argued that
it exhibits elements that are characteristic of aabbba-type zajal.
The song in performance is a complex fabric of
reiterations and elaborations of text, so the sung text takes some
disentangling. When subjected to parsing, we find that the poem, colloquial in
diction, has an opening section of sung text which is metrically and musically distinct. This one could read functionally as a
matla’ in the classic zajal sense. Furthermore the song has a
clearly marked structure of repeating strophes, albeit not all structurally
identical, with rhyming line-ends. It is also heavily marked by internal
rhyming, both at caesura points and in binary couplings (e.g. kalaam /
salaam). Additionally it has a very distinctive outgoing line. Coming in
all its simplicity, after the intensely complex and demanding vocal
elaborations which precede it, this envoi – "Nu‘aish fi salaam
wa law fi manaam" – seems quintessentially kharja, in the sense
of being a witty and stylish closure with a quotational bon mot feel.
Its structural strength in resolving the preceding textusal material is
striking.
The constitutive elements of zajal (matla‘+strophes+closure)
are here construed within the ethos of tarab that has prevailed in
Arabic music, both religious and secular, throughout the centuries. This
encapsulation within an ethos of tarab marks an additional bifurcation
in the development of zajalesque material and can be regarded as generically
distinct from (for instance) the "personal-lyrical" and the
"declamatory" modes.
In the light of the above, I suggest that
pending further analysis and allowing for a certain freedom of versification
induced by modernity "Hulm" does indeed contain constitutive
elements of aabbba-type zajal.
4.4. Bayram al-Tunisi – "il-Biladi"
Moving further along this path, and again
questioning the prevailing view that zajal in Egypt is only generic
strophic poetry, we might also ask whether there are zajal-elements (in
the sense of aabbba) to be found elsewhere in the poetry of the poet who
wrote "Hulm", the zajalist par excellence Bayram al-Tunisi.
An obvious first port of call is Marilyn
Booth’s study of al-Tunisi. At its heart lies a 140-page analysis of the poet’s
"satirical balladry", as exemplified in a set of quasi-anonymous
ballads published during 1923-4 in the Cairo journal al-Shahab. In
Booth’s account:
"the stanzaic narrative poems appearing
under the rubric ‘il-Baladi’ [...] drew upon a long tradition of
vernacular expression in Egypt during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century. This tradition is that of zajal, the history of which shows a
complex mixing of literary practices."
For our purposes the important point is that
Booth then specifies that Al-Tunisi’s verse form is the "mawwal ruba’i
(quatrain, based on basit metre)" which is "the tradition,
orally and cumulatively composed and transmitted, of the folk ballad". To
examine this ascription we can briefly examine a sample poem from il-Biladi.
I have taken the poem "Sheikh Zaydan". The Arabic text is printed at
Appendix 4. It is a 14-strophe stanzaic poem in colloquial Arabic. What is
evident is that it is in a bbba format similar to that of the zajal.
Although it does not have an opening matla‘, the ghusn section
has 3 lines rhyming identically, followed by a fourth simt line with a
separate rhyme which is maintained for the asmat of all subsequent
strophes. Thus:
Al-shaykh zaydān ‘āmil
tabīb rūhānī
bi-l-sufli qāl yaktub wa bi-l-siryānī
bayn al-nisā lihu sīt
adhīm jawānī
fa’īq ‘ala al-doktōr
shahīn wa-ziyāda
Contrary to the mawwal ascription of
these verses, however, is the fact that they appear to have none of the
characteristic and genre-specific features listed by Cachia as characterising mawwal.
Furthermore Booth’s allocation of the term mawwal to these writings
seems hesitant and is based on the fact that al-Tunisi’s narrative texts
"are not necessarily mawwal-like in form but were sometimes
known as that, as I was told".
The indeterminacy of this ascription raises the
possibility that in Bayram al-Tunisi this verse form in fact owes more to zajal
than it does to mawwal, thus signalling a continuing existence of a bbba-type
zajal form in Egypt. Attempting this kind of forensic rigour in
distinguishing genres might appear unnecessary were it not for the fact that we
are faced with a puzzling disappearance of aabbba-type zajal in
Egypt, or at least its subsumption into the generality of strophic colloquial
poetry.
4.5. Sheikh Imam 'Isa [1918-95]
As noted above, the second style in which the
constitutive elements of aabbba zajal come to be configured is
the personal-lyrical style. A more modern exemplification of this style
in Egypt can be found in two songs performed by the blind Egyptian singer and ‘ud-player
Sheikh Imam 'Isa – "Nixon baba" and "Al-bahri
bi-yedhak"
The singing of Sheikh Imam drew on both the
sacred and popular secular traditions. Having learned Qur'anic recitation with Sayyid al-Ghouri, in 1945 the Sheikh met
with Sheikh Darwish al-Hariri (see above), who taught him the fundamentals of
music and muwashshah. He earned his living with Qur'anic recitation,
also attending Sufi rites, to listen and sometimes to participate in the
singing. At this time he also learned ‘ud, and began to perform at
weddings and birthday events. He extended his repertoire into the popular songs
of Muhammad Uthman, Abduh Hamouli and Sayyid Darwish, and later joined a
religious chanters group For more than 30 years he enjoyed a friendship with
the composer Sheikh Zakariyya Ahmad.
In Egypt, as noted above, zajal comes to
be co-terminous with colloquial strophic verse in general. However I suggest
that these two songs conform to the distinctive structures of aabbba-type
zajal.
[a] Al-bahri bi-yedhak leyh ["The river is
smiling?" – n.d.]
This song, written by Najib Srour, is light in
tone but heavy with political import. The river is laughing as the girl goes to
fetch water. The river is like a running wound, and the wound is poverty and
suffering. The poor live in eternal desperate hope. The water that they carry
supplies only the rich, not themselves. But love can overcome the suffering and
the desperation.
Al-bahri bi-yedhak leyh-leyh-leyh
w-ana nazlah eddalla‘ amla al-qulal
al-bahri ghadban ma bi-yedhaksh
asl al-hikiayah mat tahhaksh
al-bahri garhuh ma bi-yedbalsh
wa garhena wa la ‘umru debel
al-bahri bi-yedhak leyh
w-ana nazlah eddalla‘ amla al-qulal.
The verse respects the conventions of the aabbba
format in the following respects: an opening matla‘, with –al as
its end-rhyme, followed by a 3-line ghusn section rhyming in –aksh
/ –haksh / –balsh; this is followed by a strophe-closure line
(simt) rhyming with the second hemistich of the matla‘ (–al
/ –el), and the strophe is completed with the matla‘ being
repeated as refrain. The matla‘ does not rhyme at the caesura. In performance
lines are reiterated. For reference I have sectioned out this individual
strophe+refrain as a separate sound-file in Appendix 14 (b).
In musical terms, the matla‘ has a first
melody, which is repeated in the refrain; the ghusn has a second melody.
The melody proceeds step-wise in a descending direction. What is notable is
that, perhaps contrary to expectation, the third ghusn line does not
have the same melody as the two preceding lines but is paired to the simt
melodically.
[b] "Nixon Baba" ["Papa
Nixon" – 1974]
Written by Ahmed Fu‘ad Negm, whose early
identification with the with the zajal writings of Bayram al-Tunisi has
been noted. One of Sheikh Imam’s most popular songs, this is a satirical poem
written to commemorate the visit to Cairo by US president Richard Nixon in
1974.
Sharafti yā nīxōn
bābā // yā btā‘ al-wātergeit
‘amalūlak qīma wa-sīma
// salatīn al-fūl wa-l-zeit
fa-rashūlak ’awsa‘ sekka
min rā’s-at-tīn ‘ala
mekka
wa-hināk tinfid ‘ala
akkā
wa-yaqūlū ‘alayk hageit.
wā hūwa mawlid
sāyyīr dāyyīr shīlāh yā sahāb al-beit
The versification as sung is complex (including
reiterations), the language is street language, and the style is raucous and
boisterous. This poem too
respects the aabbba conventions: an opening matla‘ with
end-rhymes AA and a quasi-rhyme at the caesura (bābā / sīma);
the triplets of the ghusn
(rhyming BBB); a closing simt (rhyming A), plus the additional rhythmic
refrain. For reference I have
sectioned out this individual strophe+refrain as sound-file Appendix 15 (b).
The two lines of the matla‘ share a
similar melody. The first two ghusn lines have an identical melodic
progression. The third line, as in "Al-bahri" above, is
melodically associated with the simt, in a continuous stepwise
descending motion.
Here the text material is treated lyrically,
solistically and ironically, with the meanings both elucidated and elaborated.
This distinguishes it from the Maghribi choral-religious treatment.
General observations:
I have treated these two songs as a
stylistically similar pair. The question is, are they within the tawshih
tradition? At this point it would be appropriate to return to the early
20th-century recording of the muwashshah "Adir dhikra man ahwa"
by Sheikh ‘Ali Mahmud, cited in Section 4.1 above. As sung text the muwashshah
is treated similarly to "Nixon" and "Bahri". What binds
the three songs together in terms of genre is the very distinctive stepwise
descending final refrain style common to all three. I notate this at Appendix 7
(d); it is also represented in the sound-file on the DVD at Appendix 16 where
the three refrains are excerpted into a single file for comparison (Adir
dhikra, followed by Nixon baba and then al-Bahri). Hence I
would argue that as well as being zajal in the general sense of
"Egyptian colloquial political song", "Bahri" and
"Nixon" are also zajal in the aabbba sense, within the
general tradition of tawshih.
SECTION 5: THE ZAJAL IN LEBANON
From its beginnings the zajal has been performative
and emulative. These elements of its constitution are particularly highly
valued in Lebanon, where the poet-duelling aspect of zajal has been
elevated to the status of a national art form.
Its ascendancy was in the 19th century, with
many poets contributing to its refinement in content and form, and with a
parallel tradition in Palestine, which has been thoroughly documented by Nadia
Yaqub. The format of the modern Lebanese zajal evening was set in the
1930s, mostly by the innovative master poet As‘ad Al-Khuri Al-Fghali
(1894-1937), known as Shahrur al-Wadi ("Merle of the Valley"). As
popular performance its heyday was in the 1960-70s, when audiences of up to
40,000 were recorded, and nowadays zajal has become staple fare on
television.
In Haydar’s account a typical mubarah (contest)
has two teams and opens with a qasīda, recited by each of the team
leaders (part of which praises the country, the host and the audience). The leaders
then boast about their team, and dare their opponents into a duel. At this
point the audience is asked to suggest a topic for the duel, which is usually
in the form of an opposition (e.g. "the pen or the sword"). All the
poets then treat the topic, in duelling fashion, in ma’annā, a different metre from the opening qasid.
In this section of the performance the supporting members in the team (the
claque or raddādah) back up the poets, clapping rhythmically and
playing tambourine (daff) and perhaps also a hand drum (darbuka).
At the end of each stanza they pick up the last hemistich and sing it two
or more times, the frequency of repetitions depending on whether the poet is
ready to answer his opponent. In the event of the poets sensing audience boredom
they may change metre, for instance to the strict-rhythm light musical qarrādi
metre. Zajal is a rigorous and demanding art, with sessions
involving up to 3-4 hours of intensive poeteering.
5.1. Tali‘ Hamdan and Mousa Zgheyb
In Lebanon (as in Egypt) the genre-specific
term zajal comes to stand for the generality of colloquial poetry. Since
one purpose of the present study is to identify metapoetic (e.g. performance,
emulation etc) elements of zajal in modern poetic culture, I offer a
brief account of live hafla performances involving Mousa Zgheyb and
Tali‘ Hamdan, who are also the subjects of two interviews contained at
Appendices 9 and 10 below. The two performances – one live and one televised –
date from the 1970s. They were made available to me by zajal aficionado
Mahmoud Mehdi, who maintains an archival website for amateur recordings of hafla
contests. The two files are appended as video files on the accompanying DVD.
[a] Haflet Jbeil – Tali‘ Hamdan and Mousa
Zgheyb – the Khitem
The first is the closing section of a hafla
which took place at Jbeil (Biblos) in the 1970s [n.d.]. [Duration 8’ 27"]
Video clip filed at Appendix 20.
A live public performance broadcast on
television. A hot evening. The performance involves two poets (zajjal)
and their respective claques. The poets, soberly dressed, sit at a draped table
on a raised stage facing the audience. Minimal props – in this case, bottles of
water, possibly also raki. Floral décor. A large mixed audience of men
and women, early middle-aged, dressed casually.
A brief musical introduction (synthesiser
accompanied by darbuka and clapping). Mousa opens with the melodic
traditional opening – "ouf - ouf – ouf - ouf!". The claque and
audience respond with an "ouf" and a rattle on the darbuka. Mousa
then embarks on his verses, evidently improvised. He utters one phrase, and
then repeats it while creating the next in his mind. He works through the
strophes, finding the words and the rhymes, and arrives at end-points which are
greeted by applause, smiles of appreciation and shouts of approval from the
audience.
When he finishes, his opponent Tali‘ rises from
his seat, embraces Mousa warmly and kisses him.
[b] Studio TV performance – Tali‘ Hamdan –
"Haflat Teleliban"
The second is a section of a televised hafla
session from the 1970s, involving four poets and featuring Tali‘ Hamdan. [n.d.]
[Duration: 2’ 41"] Video clip filed at Appendix 21.
Lunchtime studio performance. Four poets,
soberly dressed, seated at a table, plus an accompanying claque (radadah)
of six men, supplying percussion in the form of rhythmic clapping and a single
drum (darbuka) and calling out appreciation of telling phrases and
perorations. Each of the four poets also has a daff. Floral décor. The
performance structure is as above, except that the verses appear to be
precomposed.
The third of my examples is a separate audio
file taken from the 1970s Jbeil hafla (as above).
[c] Haflet Jbeil – Tali‘ Hamdan and Mousa
Zgheyb – the Duel
This file has been excerpted from the overall
content of the Jbeil hafla because it exemplifies the constitutive
elements of aabbba in a third aspect of their development – poetic
duelling, as distinct from the "choral-religious" Maghribi
material and the "personal-lyrical" Egyptian material outlined above.
The sound-file (poor-quality audio) was made available to me by Mahmoud Mehdi,
who unfortunately possesses no video recording of the event.
The performance context appears to be the same
as those of the video of the Jbeil hafla exchange described above.
However the pace and rhythm of this exchange are markedly more intense. Here
the distinctive aspect is that the words of the opening section (matla‘)
are taken up by the claque and sung as a refrain at the ends of strophes.
Tali‘ Hamdan opens this section of the contest.
He begins with a matla‘ of two lines, rhyming at the line-ends (lā
qīnī / tatfīnī), and also at the caesura (jabbar
/ nar).
Then opens a new section (labelled as dawr
in the text) consisting of three lines, each with the same end-rhyme (lams
/ hams / shams); each of these line also rhymes at the caesura (al-īd
/ jadīd / ‘naqīd)
The final line of the strophe resumes the
end-line of the matl‘a (qaninī), and has a caesura rhyme
which resumes the caesura rhyme from the three-line section (inbīd).
Thus:
matla‘
ya mousa in kannak jabbar //
wali‘ nār wa lā qīnī
bi-wali‘ nār bi-tafī nār
// wa mā fī nār tatfīnī
dawr:
law bi-l-mos thalj bi-hā al-īd
// jamr bi-yūla‘ ba‘da al-lams
bi-hmos hams bi-shi‘r jadīd
// al-layl bi-yū‘a bi-yihkī hams
hawasht al-fajr ‘nāqīd //
hiya wa ‘am tghīb al-shams
‘ssart al-shams al-hamra inbīd
// al-bahr ‘miltū qanīnī
Mousa Zgheyb then responds with a dawr that
maintains the same metre, and the same rhyme pattern, using different
rhyme-sounds ( -īk and -ār) but using a final
strophe-end rhyme that is the same as that of Tali‘ Hamdan (yi‘nīnī).
Here we have a basic aabbba, but with a new
element introduced. Instead of going on to trade dawr for dawr
consecutively throughout the poem, Hamdan responds with a dawr in the
same rhyme scheme as the previous dawr and then offers an additional
two-line verse which set up a new pattern to which his opponent must respond.
At the caesura this two-line verse continues the caesura rhyme from his dawr;
the first line-ends resume the line-end rhymes of the dawr. In short,
the initial and traditional structural challenge (aabbba) is further
complicated by Tali‘.
Thus challenged, Musa Zgheyb responds with an
identical verse form, with new rhymes, except that the rhyme of the simt
("sha’nīnī") remains the same as that of the matla‘
("tatfīnī"). This verse ("qannīnit
karmit aylūl") can be viewed as the third strophe in Appendix 8
(b). This further-complicated
structure is then maintained for the remainder of this section of the hafla.
General considerations
The purpose of introducing these three texts
has been to exemplify by living examples the tradition of agonistic emulation
(poetic duelling) which has always been part of the zajal experience, and
also to show how the classical Andalusi aabbba structure persists at the
heart of this tradition. Drawing on the hafla texts, and also the
interviews with Hamdan and Zgheyb contained at Appendices 9 and 10, the
following considerations can be proposed.
In Lebanon zajal is a local phenomenon
which develops to become a national (and nationalised) art form. Originating in
the villages and in the mountains, its practitioners tend to be from the
Shi’ite, Christian and Maronite communities, and it is less present in the
Sunni and Orthodox communities of the coast. In its village aspect it plays an
important role in rites of passage (weddings, funerals etc), and comes under
local sponsors. Potentially this could make it a space of sectarian interests,
but zajal is strongly marked by reference to the inter-confessional
unity of Lebanon (between Christians and Muslims etc), and to Lebanon’s stand
against its detractors. Its practitioners see it as a poetry of national unity.
This self-view was tempered, however, when the Lebanese Right began to use zajal
as a vehicle for promoting local dialect against classical Arabic. The Arabic
antecedents of Lebanese zajal have also been challenged by commentators
who trace its metrics back to early Christian monks.
The discourse is spoken song, or sung poetry.
Half-sung rather than sung, and hence not characterised by development of
melody. The musical element is strongly located in percussive rhythm and
clapping. The performers’ daff tambourines are bearers of symbolic
values of shared confrontation, collaboration, poeteering and also authority
(when used by the team leader). Zajalists have collections of personal
tambourines, exchanged with fellow poets and commemorating particular
encounters. [See illustration on front cover]
Physical movement and gesture are a vital part
of the poet’s style repertoire. The seated body moves with the periodisation of
the recitation. The poet’s hands mobilise, gather in, punctuate, emphasise,
amplify and dismiss, and are multifunctional as props to the poetic
performance. The objective is the delivery of telling and palpable hits on
one’s opponent. A premium is also set on strength of poetic imagery, wit, speed
of improvisation and spontaneity. Not total improvisation but improvisation
within established conventions. Constitutive elements include praise, actuality
(knowledge of current affairs), relationship with locality, colloquialism and
play with foreign words, and intelligent use of proverbs. The Mousa Zgheyb interview expresses usefully
the poets’ perennial interest in continual evolution (to maintain audience
interest), and the constant pressure of patrons (here restaurant owners and TV)
"intervening in the art itself" to encourage innovation.
Elements within which Lebanese zajal may
exhibit a continuity with the millennial zajal tradition include the
following: the "boasting" mode in which one poet belittles the other;
the use of material of a proverbial nature; texts predicated on a high level of
culture and political awareness, in both poets and audiences; intimate
knowledge of local culture, since references are sometimes intensely local (and
also productive of locality); a stylised language of hostility; an inherent
critical intelligence – zajal as a place from which the people can
"speak to power"; constant interplay of the spoken and the written;
innovation vs. tradition; issues of recognition and preservation of authorship
(through book publication etc).
As in other traditional musical forms, its
practitioners are afflicted by anxieties of loss in the face of globalisation,
but more especially by the effects of war and violence. Since zajal is
an art form that both constructs and expresses locality, the effects of war in
breaking up the organic communities which are its seedbed can be dramatic. The
Arab-Israeli wars (1948, 1967, 1973), the Lebanese civil war and the two
Israeli invasions of Lebanon have all had a disruptive effect on zajal
teams, social networks and performance possibilities. For example nowadays
Palestinian practitioners are cut off from the flourishing scene in Lebanon.
Furthermore, exile, enforced migration and/or imprisonment have been part and
parcel of the zajal experience from Ibn al-‘Arabi to Bayram al-Tunisi
and on down to Sheikh Imam and Negm.
Since zajal expresses specifically
Lebanese sentiment and issues, it is strongly valued in the diaspora as a
vehicle for cultural-social nostalgia and discussion of national politics
(there are regular tours of Lebanese artists to Canada and Australia, and 2004
saw a major zajal event hosted in New York, subsequently posted in its
entirety on the Internet). Zaghloul’s 130 tours abroad are emblematic of this
interest. Here, as in the case of the recuperation of early Arabic music
recordings, a key archiving role is played by enlightened amateurs, arguably
giving them droit de séjour among the ranks of ethnomusicologists.
In social terms Lebanese zajal functions
as a space of socialisation in which people – particularly the young – learn to
debate and spar with ideas. The conventionalised sparring dressed in the garb of war may be socially useful
in neutralising local conflicts. In gender terms, zajal is dominated by men, although women
zajalists do exist (for instance Awdit Khouri). It is notable that the
audiences in our 1970s video clips are mixed male and female, whereas in recent
screenings by Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV the audiences appear to be wholly male.
Anxieties of loss are further expressed about the tendency of zajal to
move up-market and perform in restaurants, implying a loss of vitality and
rootedness. In addition the performers are ageing. They are mostly old men now
– and while they express hopes they have no certainty of a younger generation
emerging.
5.2. Antoine Barsouna ["Ya Isra'il" –
2006]
Finally, the last of the four categories which
I propose as characterising the trajectory of the zajal is the "declamatory
style". Declamation runs as a historical constant from the boastful
utterances of Ibn Quzman in the early days to some of the recorded work of Sheikh
Imam and Ahmed Fu‘ad Negm, and en route includes the Egyptian worker poets who
declaimed zajal poetry in the 1950s. Although not musical, the
declamatory zajal shares stylistic elements with the half-sung zajal
of the Lebanese platform performances, so it seems appropriate to append a
declamatory zajal. This style is well represented in the Lebanese
diaspora by the poet Antoine Barsouna. Each week he creates for "Marhaba
Lubnan" (an internet radio station operating out of Melbourne, Australia)
a pre-composed political zajal commenting on issues of the day. His most
powerful poems were produced at the time of the second Israeli invasion of
Lebanon in 2006. One of these is appended on the DVD as a sound-file at
Appendix 18.
SECTION 6: MUSICALITY OF THE ZAJAL
The identification of a musicality of the zajal
must first be predicated upon a distinction (whether musical or
textual/structural) between the zajal and muwashshah. This is by
no means easy to achieve. The indeterminacy is already evident in the title of
Corriente’s Shushtari volume: "cejeles y/o muwaššahāt".
Distinction by linguistic register ("colloquial" vs.
"classical") has proved something of a minefield (see Abu Haydar at
Note 3 below), so we are left principally with Stern’s distinction in terms of
symmetrical (muwashshah) and asymmetrical (zajal: simt =
half of the matla‘). Alvarez makes the point that "Arab scholars
[...] aware of the myriad problems arising from such taxonomic impulses, have
generally avoided making these sorts of classifications." However from the
medieval Ibn Daniyal to the present-day Cofradía al-Shushtari (the headings of
songs, in both cases) it is clear that practitioners do operate a distinction.
In elucidating these distinctions, it is worth
noting that seventy-seven years after the last great assemblage of Arabic
musical materials (the Cairo Congress of 1932) we have entered an exciting new
era for the availability of research materials. In principle the thousands of
hours of recorded Sufi material archived and publicly available at two websites
– that of the Fes Festival of Sacred Music and that of Radio Medi1 – should
provide future researchers with sufficient source material to enable broad
generalisations to be made about Andalusi music in North Africa and the relative
treatments of muwashshah and zajal.
Three simple points regarding musical
treatments can be made here: (a) Wulstan brings together a useful quadripartite
assemblage of verses in Arabic and Hebrew (Ibn Baqi, Ibn Quzman, Yehuda Halevi,
Ibn Ezra) to show a self-evident truth, namely that in sung performance prosody
tends to be overdetermined by musicality (i.e. songsters take liberties with
verse); (b) in the classical canon muwashshah is associated with maqamic
and rhythmic complexity, which is not the case with the zajals examined
here; (c) in our Maghribi example, muwashshahāt are slow, zajals
are fast.
As might be expected, the musical aspect of the zajal
appears differently in different social contexts. To summarise: In Egypt we
have it as small-group (solo/duet) lyrical performance with instrumental
accompaniment, in secular contexts but associated with the sheikh-derived
traditions arising out of Qur’anic schools. In Sufi practice in Morocco it
lives in a pre-defined slot within a larger programme of various vocal genres
involving soloists, chorale, percussion, and sometimes instrumentalists, and is
therefore part of a "large-scale musical form" with its own rules and
conventions. In Lebanon it appears as the genre-specific intensive poetry duel
at the heart of the hafla, involving two (or experimentally four) poets,
and it is half-sung, to the accompaniment of percussion and clapping provided
by a claque of supporting players and/or audience; here melodic exploration
takes second place to the elaboration of complex word-plays with varying
degrees of self-imposed difficulty.
Facing the self-evident fact of the zajal’s
longevity, we necessarily have to assume that there are reasons for this
longevity. One reason must be its very great capacity for variegation
(extension and internal fragmentation of the poetic line) within an essentially
simple iterating binary structure of matla‘ / refrain and aghsan.
Socially it provides a space for a relatively skilled lead voice, and a general
sing-along choral part, thus a moment of participatory social cohesion and
little requirement of skill. Musically it can be rendered solely by human
voices, or with very simple instrumentation (percussion; ‘ud), and
hence, among other things, is not patronage-dependent. Liturgically, in the
Maghribi example, it is the focal point of intensity of the tarab
moment, and in our other examples it is upbeat and operates in relatively
higher registers – in short, it is jolly. In some locations (Lebanon and
Palestine) it becomes embedded at the heart of traditional culture (e.g.
weddings and funerals) where it has wide-ranging metapoetic functionalities.
Musical Problems
The present study was conceived with a limited
agenda. The broader zajalic canvas invites examination of a number of
problems. Polemicists for the relative supremacy of Arab over Romance culture
(or vice-versa) continue to be exercised over questions of the Romance or
Arabic origins of tawshih, with an important sub-polemic relating to
Hebrew precedence in creation of the zajal. This ground is explored in
Wulstan [1982], in Monroe [various] and Liu and Monroe [1989]. The relation
between tawshih song and the Alfonsine Cantigas de Santa María
and the Portuguese-Galician cantigas de amico (and thus early European
song) remains an open field, explored in Wulstan [1982] and Wright [1992]. The
tension between classical Arabic metrics, non-Arabic metrics and musical rhythm
(setting of song-texts) provides a fertile and interesting ground for analysis,
addressed in Haydar [1989] among others, and within this comes the suggestion
in Wright [2004] that the musical structure of the medieval muwashshah
may not have been particularly distinctive. As to the extent to which the zajal
is musically distinct from muwashshah, this remains an open field of
analysis which would benefit from examination (and archaeology) of the recorded
archives of current Maghribi practice, and from continued research into the
Egyptian repertoires at the onset of the recording industry c.1904 and
thereafter.
CONCLUSION
In a landscape where the specificity of aabbba-type
zajal appeared to have been diffused into a generality of
"colloquial strophic poetry", this study has identified its
persistence within three separate traditions (Maghribi, Egyptian and Lebanese).
The zajal’s development through time has involved bifurcations in which
different aspects are valorised in different contexts. The present study has
identified these as the choral-religious, the personal-lyrical, the
agonistic-emulative and the declamatory, with dance and bodily movement often
being implicit in performance.
The relative weightings of musical versus textual
content (and oral-improvised versus pre-composed) vary from context to context.
On the present-day zajal the English-language literature is sparse,
particularly in the area of musical treatments. However our study suggests that
a zajal repertoire distinct from the muwashshah repertoire can be
identified, and indicates the availability of listenable archive resources,
detailed analysis of which might reveal useful patterns traced across distances
of time and space.
Epilogue
The essence of tawshih, in the view of
some, is to have a witty and engaging envoi, preferably with quotational
material from other authors. In that spirit I close this account with a brief
video clip. Three young Lebanese, dressed as old men, sit behind a table like zajal
poets at a hafla. The recorded voice of an old zajalist poet plays
quotationally as soundtrack, and they mime mockingly the gestures of poetic
duelling. Like elderly buffoons, smoking, drinking, eating and generally being
old. Halfway through, the zajalist soundtrack is suddenly replaced by a modern
hip-hop track. They leap from their seats, become young, become themselves, and
dance to the pulsating rhythm. The implication is clear – a rejection of aged
and outworn local traditions and a celebration of a new and globalised
counterculture. Reassuringly, however, both the old (zajal) and the new
(hip-hop) testify to the continuing strength of the millennial tradition of
poetic duelling.
NOTES
[The
notes are not included in this posting, but the full text with notes and
appendices can be requested by e-mail]
E-mail:
ed.emery @
soas.ac.uk
Universitas
adversitatis
15.viii.2012
.