Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt.

• Author: Somekh, S.

Those interested in the folk literature of the Arab world find themselves confronted with an enormous body of publications in Arabic, and a considerable amount in other languages. Some genres are more accessible than others: it is easier, for instance, to learn something about the epic cycles (Antara and the like) than it is to make sense of the various kinds of Bedouin poetry. In general the field remains in a rather disordered state. There is not a great deal of analytic work, and the quality of what there is often leaves much to be desired. Published texts are numerous, but they are often inadequate; those that are properly edited and fully explained are decidedly in a minority. One basic problem is that serious work generally demands a good understanding of colloquial Arabic, both at the practical and at the theoretical level, and the scholars best equipped from this point of view - the professional dialectologists - are usually more interested in ordinary speech than in verse and the like.

Pierre Cachia's topic, in this lucid and brilliant book, is one particular genre of Egyptian colloquial poetry, the narrative ballad. He describes such ballads as "stories told entirely in song" (p. 17). Cachia's book falls into two parts, a hundred-page-long analytic section, and two hundred and fifty pages of texts. Each part is a model of its kind.

Ballads of the sort that interest Cachia are lengthy works - a single one can fill up to a dozen pages - sung by more or less professional performers. Characteristically the ballads are sung at religious festivals, above all mulids, where there is a good deal of the atmosphere of a fair. The singers appear in the same way as do the other entertainers, the snake charmers, monkey trainers, belly dancers, and the like. Narrative ballads are only one among the various types of song that they sing.

A hundred years ago, it would appear, the themes of the songs were mainly religious. They told stories about scriptural characters and legends touching in some way on the life of Muhammad. Cachia's texts thus include a poem about Adam and one about Mary, mother of Jesus; he also has a ballad about a camel that carries its owner to visit the Prophet, and then speaks to the Prophet in order to save its owner from a false accusation made by the Jews. Ballads about saints, we are told, are surprisingly few; Cachia published one about Gharib, a saint who is buried in Suez. In the last half century or more, themes...