Veiled Sentiments

Abu-Lughod explains how the society’s sanctioned poetic discourse “violates the ideology of honor and modesty” that dominates Bedouin everyday thought (233). The social context in which poems emerge provides a critical clue to sorting this confusion.

Men and women alike share poems, but usually with people to whom they do not taḥashsham. The formality of ḥasham suggests “social distance,” and those around whom the distance is not necessary are close and trustworthy. “Poetry is the discourse of intimacy” (234), the marker of a lack of ḥasham. As such, “it usually does not cross the boundaries created by differential power and status” (234), especially the gender boundary, unless used in romance to “deliberately breach” that gap (235). Poetry can be, in this sense, a means by which one indicates one’s relationship to another.

Socially, poetry also binds those who share it: the vulnerability that it surfaces, and the secretiveness of the interaction, pulls those who share and those who listen to a greater level of intimacy. But Abu-Lughod warns against seeing the social (public) existence of the Awlad ‘Ali as a “structured [mask] worn for social approval” and the intimate, poetic existence “as simple [reflection] of personal experience” (237). Citing Erving Goffman, she points out that the “mask wearing” is not an “obligation” but “a matter of self-respect and pride” for individuals who are motivated “to be more or good” (237). Since “there is no life outside the group” (237), “respectability achieved through embodiment of the code’s virtues is isomorphic with self-respect” (238). Individuals want to support “the system” (238). There is no “need for overt violence or force” because the social demand is part of the authentic personal desire to be worthy of the community (238).

“Granting the authenticity of the discourse of everyday life means that nonpoetic public expressions cannot be dismissed as mere social masks hiding spontaneous inner feelings” (238).

In “Honor and Poetic Vulnerability” and “Modesty and the Poetry of Love,” Abu-Lughod establishes that poetry is intimate and personal. However, she recognizes that “neither ghinnāwas nor the ritualized mourning laments associated with them could be characterized as original, spontaneous expressions of sentiment” because they are “ready-made forms” (238). In this sense, ghinnāwas are highly social: deeply structured as a form, they draw from traditional culture as much as spontaneous, socially sanctioned, modest expressions do.

By providing its speakers with already-established and understood lines, “poetry cloaks statements in the veils of formula, convention, and tradition,” allowing it to “contravene the official cultural ideals” while dissociating the self from the sentiments expressed (239). Reciting poetry, instead of producing spontaneous lines, protects the poem’s teller from the possible implications of the sentiments expressed. Anonymity allows the speaker to deny the poem’s relationship to his or her own life.

Sharing ghinnāwas also “allows individuals to frame their experiences as similar to those of others” and to give their emotions “a semblance of social conformity” (239). Ghinnāwas’ ties to the mythic, story-world of folklore contextualize feeling into the constellation of fiction, a “culturally valued form” (240). These veils of convention and fiction create “a modest way” and “an honorable way” to be dependent and emotional (240).

Abu-Lughod suggests that poetry is not purely personal or aimless. In “The Meaning of Poetry,” she seeks to identify poetry’s aims in Bedouin society: “to win sympathy and to get help” (242). Poetry is active, and Abu-Lughod emphasizes that “Awlad ‘Ali themselves argue that reciting poetry moves people and brings about changes in their actions or attitudes” (242).

For the Awlad ‘Ali, poetry is self-exposure. The dependency that it creates renders the speaker childlike and vulnerable, and it draws in the sympathy of the “complementary” (243), or elder counterpart, operating like a family. Especially poems that explicitly ask for help or care evoke family relationships, building upon the hierarchies upon which Bedouin culture is structured. By adopting the voice of a child, who has not yet been socialized to the conventions of honor, the speaker of the poem asks her listener to “suspend the ordinary terms for judging moral worth” (244).

Presumably, the listener of the poem also knows the ghinnāwa teller’s public discourse. He or she is expected to let the two “exist side by side” in an “interplay” that “is essential to their meaning” (244). Using poetry, rather than spontaneous speech, is considered a form of ‘agl, or self-control. The one who wields poetry in this way understands social context.

Ultimately, Abu-Lughod decides, the individual who can reveal deep emotions through poetry admits to the deep difficulty of living an honorable life. Abu-Lughod explains that “a proper member of Awlad ‘Ali society” can command “the greatest respect,” for he or she can “creatively [manage]” even the most profound challenge, “despite struggles with powerful vulnerabilities and passions” (246). By showing vulnerability, poems cast the erstwhile strength of their tellers into relief: honor, they reveal, is hard-won.

Abu-Lughod, in “The Politics of Sentiment,” presents poetry as “antistructure,” a “discourse of opposition to the system and of defiance of those who represent it” (251). The problem that remains, for her, is why the Awlad ‘Ali glorify this subversive poetry by including it in culturally valuable stories and why they sanction the daily use of such poetry. Abu-Lughod estimates that despite its message, the art form of poetry redeems it, for “Bedouins cherish poetry and other verbal arts” (251). To them, “poetry represents what is best in their culture, what they consider distinctively Bedouin” (251).

Poetry brings a “thrill” in that ghinnāwas are “risqué, against religion, and slightly improper,” like any “antistructural” mode (252). In this sense, rather than embodying an oppositional spirit to the dominant social discourse, poetic discourse “symbolizes freedom—the ultimate value of the system and the essential entailment of the honor code” (252). The action of embracing poetry is thus “a declaration of autonomy” especially accessible to “those denied autonomy in Awlad ‘Ali society” (252).

For Abu-Lughod, “ambivalence” about poetry “may derive from an uneasy recognition that the system of hierarchy within the lineage and the family violates the basic tenets of [a] political system” that prizes tribal and family autonomy (253). Poetry “expresses” the “problem” of Bedouin society in that it calls independence its greatest value, but it allows for independence unequally. Poetry plays an important historical role for the Bedouins, reminding them “of their noble past” in literature and form (255).

Abu-Lughod worries that as younger Bedouins increasingly embrace Egyptian culture, knowledge of poetry has dwindled. Even though it is preserved at the time of writing as a reminder of past glory, she recognizes that its power, as an element of the complex ideology of honor, may fade too.

In her last section, Abu-Lughod takes up the question of how the two discourses that discuss self in Bedouin society, the social and the poetic, relate to individual experience. Abu-Lughod writes that because “anthropologies commonly assume that describing the ideology or the culture is equivalent to describing the behavior and experience” of a society (255), it is easy to assume that the ideology of honor would dominate behavior among the Bedouin.

Using a framework developed by Bourdieu, Abu-Lughod presents the possibility that poetry can “stand for the freedom to experience that which is outside the official system” (256), or for the freedom to have experiences outside of just that sanctioned ideology. As such, they are not only “extracultural” but also “precultural” (257), associated with childhood. This poetry alludes to a common longing for intimacy that sustains its place in a “developed” (257), or adult, ideological world.

Abu-Lughod notes that the problem with this framework is that poems, because they follow culturally valuable forms, are sanctioned, and therefore not extra- or outside the norms of the community. “The contours” of poetic discourse “are culturally given” (257). Thus, the Awlad ‘Ali possess multiple discourses that are actually “languages that people can use to express themselves, [to] express experiences, [and] to feel those experiences” (258).

To Abu-Lughod, poetry is an opportunity for creativity—for combining and creating new sentiments with old forms—and for correcting “an obsession with morality and an overzealous adherence to the ideology of honor” (259). Instead of the possibly violent or “belligerent” response to such a menacing culture, the art of poetry “reminds people of another way of being” by encouraging “another way of being” (259). Abu-Lughod suggests that it is the marginalized who keep poetry alive, cherishing it as a way for “human experience” in a system that would be otherwise too overbearing to sustain (259).