Stories of the World and Palestine, Two researchers have been collecting fairy tales for 4 decades

Sherif Kanaana, a historian of Palestinian folklore

Ramallah -  In their new book "Tales of the World", Palestinian researchers Sherif Kanana and Nabil Alqam present the tale of "The One-Half Boy", one of the popular fairy tales in Korea (when it was united), and the story revolves around an elderly couple without children. The wife dreams that An old woman gave her 3 persimmon fruit (persimmon) and she eats two and her husband shares with her by eating half of the third, and she becomes pregnant and gives birth to 3 male twins, one of whom is half a boy with an eye, an ear, a leg and one hand.

The story of the half-boy continues, who grows up strong and has morals, unlike his two brothers who try to exploit him and then get rid of him, but every time he can outdo them.

Palestinian folk tale

This tale is similar to the Palestinian folk tale "Nass Nasais", which the researchers also document in the Encyclopedia of Palestinian Fairy Tales, the last part of which was published at the beginning of 2022.

The Palestinian story begins when 3 brothers got married in one day, two of them gave birth to a "boy", and the third did not, and his wife remained in her grief until she heard one day a street vendor selling apples on his donkey and calling "Dua for the rope", so she bought an apple, but her husband, who returned The house was hungry, he ate half of it, leaving her only half. The days passed, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a small boy, whom they called "Nas Nass", who grew up and became, despite his very small size, stronger and smarter than his cousins.

Although the two tales are similar, the other East Asian tales that were translated and presented with an analysis in the book are not similar to the Palestinian tales. The similarity was more with European tales, especially Greek, which is what the researcher Alqam (77 years) returns to the existence of mutual historical relations between Palestine and Greece .

The two researchers’ completion of this encyclopedia in its five parts (the last part of which was published in January 2022) in conjunction with the publication of the book “Tales of the World” was not a coincidence, for during 40 years they have worked to collect Palestinian fairy tales from all of historical Palestine, and it was necessary to see On the experiences of other peoples whose tales were collected, especially that the 86-year-old researcher Kanaana has specialized in collecting folk tales since his return to Palestine after studying anthropology in 1978, and establishing the first course to be taught at Birzeit University, which is the aspect of humanities that did not receive sufficient attention. in Palestine until now.

Kanaana chose 109 folk tales from 5 regions in the world (the islands of the Pacific Ocean, South and Latin America, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa), and translated them, provided analysis and linkage between them and identified points of convergence and difference with the Palestinian tale.

Through the analysis, the researchers found that each country has its own characteristics, as Alqam tells AJ Net. European tales note an inferior view of women, while the tales of the Red Indians were legendary and explanatory, such as "the legend of the Cherokee tribe,how the land was formed", while the Japanese tales were very practical. , and black tales laced with humor and humor.

Women's tales

The Palestinian fairy tale has its own characteristics as well. They are women's tales par excellence, in which the woman is the main player, even if behind the scenes, she is always intelligent, cunning, and sometimes cunning.

Kanana told AJ Net, "The Palestinian fairy tale is all that women tell. While the man would go out to the cafe or the courtyard to meet with the men, the women would tell these stories to her family."

The two researchers began joint work at the beginning of the eighties within the Heritage Preservation Committee formed by the Family Revival Society to respond to an Israeli airline using the Palestinian dress for its flight attendants, through the book "Palestinian Folk Clothes".

With the outbreak of the first intifada, the Israeli press published, on the authority of the army commanders, that the Palestinians do not care about their children who throw stones at checkpoints and get killed. Their second book was a study on “Reproduction and Childhood, a Study in Popular Heritage,” which includes everything related to childbearing and the Palestinians’ interest in it from before marriage to the years. The first of the child's life.

Then came another joint book about the joke in the folklore, and it bears the name of a joke invented by the Palestinians in the first intifada from the names of the military vehicles used by the Israeli army to arrest and suppress young men: “Lesh al-Shatouh (small military jeep) Talaq Aziza (large military jeep designated for arrest).”

Despite the 45-year cooperation, the most important of these achievements is the encyclopedia of fairy tales, due to the accompanying penalties and difficulty in reaching the owners of the tales with all the circumstances and geographical divisions imposed by the occupation.

Kanaana collected tales of Galilee - his birthplace - which he heard many of in his childhood. He is the son of the village of Araba Al-Batouf in the Upper Galilee, and from the city of Ramallah, where he lived and worked, while he used his students at the university from other Palestinian regions to collect their tales. Closed to them, even if someone remembers these tales, few would like to tell them.

During the 40-year journey, the researchers collected 800 tales, some of which were repeated with different flavors according to the environment. While the place in the tales of Galilee was under the olive or lemon and mentioned Tiberias and Acre, the tales of Gaza and the coastal cities took the hero of the tale to the sea.

400 stories

The researchers chose about 400 stories and were divided into 5 parts, the first is about the relationship between husband and wife, the second is about the relationship between “concubines” and the relationship between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law, the third is about the relationship between fathers and sons, the fourth part is about the relationship between brothers and sisters, and the fifth part is about the relationship between family and community members.

The source of some of the stories were the books of orientalists, specifically two books by a German orientalist before the year 1900, during which he collected stories from Jerusalem and the village of Birzeit in the middle of the West Bank.

While the refugees in the camps circulated tales of their countries of origin, the tales differed between the city and the village, the first being more ornate and containing more details and complexity, and the tales of the village were simple and focused on the differences of the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. In Christian towns, the story was the same, but instead of the word “God” that the Muslim says in his story, the Christian repeats “Oh, virgin.”

Among the tales that most stuck in Kanaana's mind are tales he collected from the mother of his companion, Alqam, who is from the town of Turmusaya, north of Ramallah. It is the story of "Zina Al-Dar Sitt Al-Kul", which is the story of a husband who married a beautiful girl, and after marriage he discovered that she was a fool.

The wife did not like her name, and one day she decided to buy a new name for her, and when one of the street vendors passed by, she asked him to sell her a beautiful name in exchange for a piece of land, so he called her “the home of the house will be all.” And when her husband returns and finds out what she did, he leaves the house and says to her, "If I find an asshole from you, I will return you."

This same story is told in the Nablus area in the northern West Bank, but the husband discovers his wife’s stupidity when he asks her to “cook a lentil,” in reference to the small amount, so the wife cooks one lentil, and when she tastes it, she eats it and offers her husband water without lentils, and he gets angry and leaves the house in search Who is "the asshole".

Kanana says, "In Palestinian tales, there is a balance in presenting the image of women. She is neither the smartest nor the most beautiful, but she is also not the weakest and most inferior, unlike the image of women in the folklore of other peoples."

Pinnacle of achievement

And about their efforts in this encyclopedia and the collection of these stories; The two researchers, Kanaana and Alqam, won the Palestine Prize for Social Studies and Human Sciences, which is awarded each year by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture.

Kanaana and Alqam considered their completion of the collection of these tales "the height of achievement"; Collecting these tales over the course of all these years was not easy, says Alqam, "In our Palestinian case, collecting folk tales is not a luxury, but rather a necessity, as it is part of our Palestinian narrative."

Alqam points out that the Palestinian archive contains 12,000 Arab stories, of which 290 are Palestinian stories that the occupation is trying to attribute to him.

For the researchers, this encyclopedia will not be their last work, as they are now in the process of collecting tales related to popular Palestinian beliefs, such as "coffee cup", "hand itch" and others.