Poetry and Politics in Contemporary Bedouin Society

By Clive Holes & Said Salman Abu Athera

Format: Hardback

Page extent: 372pp

Size: 235 x 155mm

Imprint: Ithaca Press

ISBN: 978-0-86372-338-4

Published: January 2009

This book shows how colloquial Bedouin poetry remains a vibrant art that has manifold modern functions: commenting on world affairs (such as the Arab-Israeli wars, the Gulf War, the American invasion of Iraq); criticising the domestic policies of Arab states; highlighting poverty, discrimination, the corrupt practices of officialdom, and compliant local media.

Each of the forty-one poems presented within the book is transliterated and translated into English verse, with historical and contextual annotation. The tone is sometimes bitter, sometimes satirical, sometimes scurrilous, and often amusing. The poems are prefaced by an essay on the practice of modern Bedouin poetry.

The book is completed by appendices containing the Arabic script versions of the poems, extensive language notes, and a glossary of the vocabulary.

Recordings of some of the poems in the book can be listened to or downloaded free of charge at the bottom of this page.

About the authors

Clive Holes, Ph.D. (1981) in Linguistics, University of Cambridge, is Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on the Arabic language and its dialects, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Said Salman Abu Athera (Ph.D. Glasgow, 1995) is an independent researcher into Bedouin poetry and culture, who has published and broadcast extensively in Arabic and acted as a consultant for UNESCO. He is a founder member of the Jordanian National Committee for Cultural Heritage, and established the Centre for the Preservation of Bedouin Culture, a non-profit NGO.

Reviews

• "This is an extremely important collection of popular Arabic poetry, and for a number of reasons. … Above all however, it is the sheer excellence of the resulting English translations that linger in the mind, providing the reader with a clear picture of a brilliant and continuing tradition of popular improvised poetry that today maintains and fosters a heritage stretching back for centuries", Professor Roger Allen, University of Pennsylvania
• What to say about a book that Roger Allen in his Foreword to this book already qualifies as an extremely important collection of popular Arabic poetry? The authors have gathered, selected, recorded, translated and commented on 40 poems and one text in saj‘, composed by five Bedouin poets from Sinai and Southern Jordan. The language level of choice for these poets was their own dialect, which qualifies their poems as nabatı poetry. The present publication is not the first book in this field; as main contributors to this area of literary and linguistic studies the names of Sowayan, Kurpershoek and Palva come to mind, to name only a few Both authors are distinguished specialists in their fields of Arabic dialects, so expectations are high. In many respects these expectations are totally met, but the most outstanding feature of the present publication is its accessibility, which is mainly due to the lively and adequate translation of the Arabic texts; adequate first and foremost in the sense that these translations convey the tone and humour—sometimes cynical—of the original. Many non-Arabists might well be astonished to find these political and social views, witty and critical, that are widely held in the Arab world, but are hardly known in the West. This book is about nabatı poetry. It defines this kind of poetry as ‘an oral art, . . . poetry . . . composed in the vernacular’ (p. IX). This definition raises a few questions that are partly answered elsewhere, but some aspects deserve more elaboration. Some of the poems presented here are said to have been published in newspapers, which leaves open the question whether or not they were composed orally. Borg, Gert(2011) ‘Poetry and Politics in Contemporary Bedouin Society, by Clive Holes and Said, Salman Abu Athera’, Middle Eastern Literatures, 14: 1, 96 — 99, DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2011.550480

Recordings of the poems

Press play to start listening to the poems - there are ten poems available. You can also download a zip file containing MP3 files of all ten recordings by clicking here.