In memory of Miran Nahas,
Who was in love with Fayrouz
On Fayrouz’s holiday, stories are brought to us without permission, those that emerge from the songs of this brilliant lady, giving things meanings as if they were not from this
world. The story of Fayrouz’s songs, with the story, is time for her to be told in detail. Much has been said regarding the fact that songs in the Arab East before the Rahbani brothers were a kind of sent speech, the subject of which was the expression of anguish and grief. This does not deduce from this, of course, that there were no exceptions, whether in Egypt or in the Levant. However, the Rahbani brothers made the story in the Turquoise song the issue of issues, and raised it to the ranks of the literary genre that constitutes the strength of this song, so that the narration becomes the place where the dramatic movement unfolds and the feelings explode without its intensity distracting us from the coquettishness of the story. This Rahbanian-Turquoise shift was, in its spatial and temporal context, very novel. Even today, it is still looking for something that can match or compete with it in poetic-musical production, searching and not finding.
There are turquoise songs that are a tale, or a short story, in a poetic form, from the first word in it to the last word. Perhaps Fayrouz’s masterpiece “Shadi” is the most accurate and deepest expression of this lyrical genre that was not familiar in the East before Fayrouz. Here, the traditional lyrical style, consisting of odes and couplets, recedes to be replaced by a short, interconnected tale that often culminates in a remarkable poetic shot: “And I’m getting older/Shady is still a little enemy/He’s playing with snow.”And it, here, may be a kind of pun that refers us to Shadi’s death. The song-the story tells us also in “Habibi Bedouin Al-Qamar”, which is characterized by a rare dramatic escalation: “Afraid that we will fall asleep/ and the moon will come down/ and meet me asleep/ and you will steal our neighbor/ who will annoy us/ and give it to my beloved/ and my beloved will love/ and I will become a stranger.”. It is worth noting that both poetic tales lead to a kind of pending question mixed with heartburn, as if it were a restoration of an ancient Greek myth, unlike many popular stories that conclude with a happy ending.
Although the song-the story is strongly present in the Rahbani-Turquoise heritage, what seems to dominate this heritage is the song that consists of several stories, i.e. in which each syllable, or what is known as a couplet, constitutes a short story that stands in itself and does not exceed its scope. Most of the time, the four poetic lines: “He is dizzy as he goes to pick basil/ And in the days of the harvest, his heart burns/ She told me I saw you writing papers/ They told me all these poems are for you.”. Where does this tendency to intensify come from? There is no doubt that the interest in the story stems from the Rahbani brothers’ literary taste. However, their ability to include a single poetic syllable is a story that reaches its climax in the last verse. Perhaps it is due to Zajal in our country, who knows the phenomenon of the four-line stanza (meaning, poem, and admonition), which must reach a moral and emotional climax in the last verse, before handing over the poetic series to Another saying. We have a remarkable example of this from the Rahbani Zajli tradition: “They were young and their age was a soft enemy / No one knew they loved them or who knew / They said in their pockets that the wind plays with you / And your eyes write that they are arrogant.”.
If this intuition is correct, then the turquoise song constitutes a blatant expression of the narration’s adaptation to the requirements of the short story, and what this requires of the agility of narration and dramatic escalation until reaching the climax, as well as making the narration and the story together in the service of a type of composition and composition that liberated the Arabic song from its stereotyped and thoroughness. In the poetic theme’s rotation around itself: “And the bride came out picking figs/The caretaker laughed and his heart was sad/She waved her eyes with a gesture full of reproaches/He was lost in the wilderness and the sound of the reeds barked.”
It goes without saying that the implementation of what this new poetic-lyrical vision required had to seek the help of a wide range of graphic and creative mechanisms that there is no room for ramifications on here.
(See: Metaphor in the Poetry of the Rahbani Brothers Al-Ami, Al-Modon 6/12/2020). However, what is remarkable regarding the Rahbani-Turquoise heritage is its semi-permanent resort to repetition, which entails the creation of an internal rhythmic movement that accompanies the external rhythm arising from the poetic meter and does not contradict it, but it remains different from it and does not identify with it, as in the last verse of the second couplet from “Teach Me.” »:
“Oh, bird of longing, your family has circled/ In the sky, and I do not know where they have become/ They have guided me to the path of love and have flown/ On the path of patience, they have not guided me.”. The repetition reaches one of its highest peaks when the moral employment is different:
“Wake up when they went / Our families are a journey / They left us and left / They said young children / And the house turned around us / And we are young children / Passion brought us together and passion separated us.”. “They said young children” is an expression of the parents’ confidence that nothing will happen between the two poles of poetic melancholy. This confidence is followed by a beautiful pun that refers to the incident of love: “And the house revolved around us.” And then comes the repetition, “We are young children,” which does not refer us here to the trust of the parents, which was overlooked by the dramatic narrative movement, but rather to the inability of the poetic poles of us to comprehend what they both experienced of the intensity and madness of love.
On Fayrouz’s holiday, stories come to us without permission to tell us, in Mahmoud Darwish’s words, that “there is something on this earth that deserves life.” Happy new year to the brilliant lady…
