Aswany Take 4
Voices on Trial: Al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah, Enregisterment and Polyphony
Abstract
Al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah (1970) are a collection of modern maqāmāt featuring a cast of characters from Cairo’s literary scene in the late 1960s. Written by the Egyptian lawyer and author ʻAbbās al-Aswānī (1926-1978), they were a casual iteration of the genre, even being adapted as a radio serial for Ṣawt al-ʿArab. But despite his lack of verbal showmanship or use of Egyptian dialect, al-Aswānī performs a satisfying linguistic satire worthy of the genre. Offering an alternative reading from common narratives of language standardization and the rise of monolingualism, this article looks to Asif Agha’s work on voice and enregisterment as a way to account for al-Aswānī’s use of registers and polyphony, suggesting a reevaluation of the way these concepts are currently used in the historiography of 20th century literary Arabic.Keywords
ʻAbbās al-Aswānī - maqāmāt - language ideology - register - polyphony
Introduction
Many of the bulaghāʾ that the ʻAbbās al-Aswānī runs into in his Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah(The Assemblies of al-Aswānī, 1970) share suspiciously similar biographies. While out carousing with friends he gets interrupted by the genre’s famous fast-talking characters, who proceed to tell him their life stories. Like him, they are aspiring authors, equally unsatisfied with their day jobs, hatching get-rich-quick schemes to financially support their writerly ambitions. One day while sitting at Cafe Bahwat, he makes the acquaintance of one Professor ʿAbd al-Salām, who is also a working lawyer with a penchant for embellishing words. In this episode entitled “Professor ʿAbd al-Salām...and the Embellishment of Speech” (الأستاذ عبد السلام...وتزويق الكلام), the professor explains to al-Aswānī how in the past he had only put his wordsmithery to use in the courtroom, helping a client get away with the murder of his wife on their wedding day by pleading insanity. His defense, in rhyming prose, is delivered with a clever mix of legal and literary rhetoric:
فليس على المريض حرج.. إذا هو عن طوره خرج! ويستعين بتقرير استشاري.. من الدكتور زخاري يفيد أن المتهم مصاب بانفصام.. يشعل فيه روح الخصام؟ وأن حالته غير سليمة.. وليس مسئولا عن الجريمة! فإذا تعارض هذا التقرير مع تقرير الطبيب الشرعي.. دفع المحامي باي دفع فرعي! واهتاج ولوى بوزه.. واستشهد بلمبروزو!
The lawyer’s tactics are as unscrupulous as his rhyme scheme, willing to present an agitated colloquial scowl (lawā būzahu) in order to work in the name of the phrenological criminologist and scientific racist Cesare Lombroso (bi-lambrūzū).
In the end Professor ʿAbd al-Salām decided to make some real money off of his way with words, figuring out how to charm a business owner too stupid to deserve his own wealth
أصبح يملك الألوف .. رغم أنه حلوف
ʿAbd al-Salām describes how he eventually talks his way into a marriage with the boss’s daughter and her inheritance using the rhymed aphorism:
أن الجاهل المغرور لا يسمح لك بالمرور الا إذا نفخت فيه حتى تكفيه
Not impressed with the Professor’s story, al-Aswānī claims to be disgusted by his unscrupulous cajolery.
فأحسست بالقرف من هذا المخلوق الحقير. الذى باع كرامته.. وأحنى هامته.. وامتهن ثقافته.. من أجل طعام يملأ بطنه بالعفن.ومال يتركه إذا اندفن..
But since al-Aswānī’s own literary ambitions were thwarted by mundane financial needs, one can only suspect that his disgust is caused in no small part by envy.
The real al-Aswānī was trained as a lawyer, a career he pursued his entire life. But just like the many characters in his maqāmāt, he always had bigger dreams. al-Aswānī did see moderate success as a writer of short stories, novels, poetry and especially with his popular radio shows, but nonetheless felt a sense of frustration at the insularity and nepotism of the literary field. According to him, too much of literature was centered around fake ideals of celebrity, too much art being made in the name of political crusades or personal aggrandizement. This frustration is reflected clearly in his maqāmāt, which feature a string of literary hucksters seeking fame through various literary schemes, with Professor ʿAbd al-Salām acting as one of many alter egos. Because of how much Professor ʿAbd al-Salām’s appears to be al-Aswānī's ironic doppelgänger, going so far as to both speak in his same prosimetric cadence, as well as the almost complete overlap between the biographical al-Aswānī and his fictional self, in the end one is left wondering whose voice they are in fact listening to.
This is not the first time that the identity of the rāwī and that of the balīgh have overlapped in a maqāmāt. According to Marilyn Booth, Bayram al-Tūnisī collapsed the two roles into one in a series of self-portraits whose rāwī tells on himself, so to speak, by committing those very same balīgh-like acts he condemns in his status-seeking and money-grubbing colleagues. But unlike the neo-classicist maqāmāt of the Nahḍa, al-Aswānī’s enterprise is decidedly more casual. He is not inventing duplicitous social stereotypes as much as rewriting stories from his own life into the maqāmah form. Whether drinking coffee with friends at Cafe Bahwat or mustering the will to buy an expensive glass of Otard cognac at the Semiramis hotel bar, al-Aswānī’s characters seem to share all the same haunts.
While al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah (The Assemblies of al-Aswānī, 1970) seem to adhere to the genre’s conventions in the technical sense—being written in rhyming prose (sajʿ), using a narratological framing device (isnād) and using the basic plot structure of eloquent tricksters swindling gullible victims—the work nevertheless comes off as decidedly nonchalant. Like any good balīgh, al-Aswānī has an immense lexicon at his command. But he rarely employs it unless stuck for a rhyme, or when hoping to give a little incongruous wink in the text. The haphazard, freestyle nature of the rhymes makes the maqāmāt sound like something he came up with off the top of his head while out drinking with friends. He shows a preference for low stakes humor over lexical showmanship, easygoing dialogue and half-baked colloquial poems, and seems less interested in social commentary than he is autobiographical gossip. But this seems to go against the essence of a genre known for firing off “bright, noisy linguistic fireworks.” The Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, as the quintessential example, “do not simply include some excessive verbal performance; excessive verbal performance is what they are about.” This has much to do with their social origins. Histories of the maqāmah genre have often explained their emergence as corresponding to periods of social turmoil, periods which are ripe for a cultural dethroning through linguistic satire and parody.
But in this sense, al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah are an anachronism. They were written decades after the turn of the century, when an aesthetic reorientation amongst a new élite swung the pendulum away from ornamental formalism. What’s more, countless scholars have classified the language of literary Arabic at mid-century as relatively homogeneous, the result of the Nahḍa project and its “institution of a new privileging of formal coherency in language.” In his introduction to the English translation of Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded (2016), Youssef Rakha claims that the Nahḍah profoundly affected Arabic literature in the 20th century, subjecting it to a “tyranny of the serious” whereby “written Arabic was transformed from a multifarious living language in ever evolving conversation with its earlier (Qur’anic) form to a single, standardized simplification of said form, purposefully divorced from day-to-day speech.” Wielding neither the ornamental formalism of his predecessors nor seeming to benefit from the humor and vitality which comes from “the authenticity, continuity, and plausibility of Egyptian dialect as a written language,” how does al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah even function as a form of social satire and linguistic parody? What is the mechanism of irony and the carnivalesque if not heteroglossia?
In answering these questions, I hope to introduce the work of al-Aswānī and use it to pushback on an argument, implicit amongst Arabic literary historiography, that some ages carry more charge for linguistic parody than others. Al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah represent thoroughly modern maqāmāt, written in 20th century Arabic’s supposedly monoglossic literary register, but nevertheless able to invoke an array of social voices and sustain a tone of irony. Arabic literary studies interested in the question of language often work from an unacknowledged folk-linguistic understandings of dialect and register which seem them as static and fixed. Others see the phenomenon of heteroglossia in literature as dependent on the fortunes of literary innovation, whereby polyphony requires a certain “Bakhtinian” sensibility. Whether explaining the cultural conditions which give rise to the Maqāmah’s specific brand of verbal parody, reducing language politics to the “diglossia problem,” or praising literature's subaltern resistance to monoglossia through a polyphonic aesthetic, certain Arabic literary historiographies can give the mistaken impression of offering a type of linguistic teleology. By using Asif Agha’s concept of voicing effects, I will show instead how heteroglossia and polyphony are not historically or formalistically contingent. There are a number of textual strategies which can produce the contrastive individuation of voices without recourse to the fuṣḥa/ʿāmmiyyah binary, and even the smallest contrast between text segments within a seemingly monoglossic text will allow for a wide cast of social characters to emerge. By demonstrating how these textual strategies function within al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah, I aim to show how they still conform to the genre’s ability to perform multi-tiered parody, social satire, and the tropic use of language.
فليس على المريض حرج.. إذا هو عن طوره خرج! ويستعين بتقرير استشاري.. من الدكتور زخاري يفيد أن المتهم مصاب بانفصام.. يشعل فيه روح الخصام؟ وأن حالته غير سليمة.. وليس مسئولا عن الجريمة! فإذا تعارض هذا التقرير مع تقرير الطبيب الشرعي.. دفع المحامي باي دفع فرعي! واهتاج ولوى بوزه.. واستشهد بلمبروزو!
The lawyer’s tactics are as unscrupulous as his rhyme scheme, willing to present an agitated colloquial scowl (lawā būzahu) in order to work in the name of the phrenological criminologist and scientific racist Cesare Lombroso (bi-lambrūzū).
In the end Professor ʿAbd al-Salām decided to make some real money off of his way with words, figuring out how to charm a business owner too stupid to deserve his own wealth
أصبح يملك الألوف .. رغم أنه حلوف
ʿAbd al-Salām describes how he eventually talks his way into a marriage with the boss’s daughter and her inheritance using the rhymed aphorism:
أن الجاهل المغرور لا يسمح لك بالمرور الا إذا نفخت فيه حتى تكفيه
Not impressed with the Professor’s story, al-Aswānī claims to be disgusted by his unscrupulous cajolery.
فأحسست بالقرف من هذا المخلوق الحقير. الذى باع كرامته.. وأحنى هامته.. وامتهن ثقافته.. من أجل طعام يملأ بطنه بالعفن.ومال يتركه إذا اندفن..
But since al-Aswānī’s own literary ambitions were thwarted by mundane financial needs, one can only suspect that his disgust is caused in no small part by envy.
The real al-Aswānī was trained as a lawyer, a career he pursued his entire life. But just like the many characters in his maqāmāt, he always had bigger dreams. al-Aswānī did see moderate success as a writer of short stories, novels, poetry and especially with his popular radio shows, but nonetheless felt a sense of frustration at the insularity and nepotism of the literary field. According to him, too much of literature was centered around fake ideals of celebrity, too much art being made in the name of political crusades or personal aggrandizement. This frustration is reflected clearly in his maqāmāt, which feature a string of literary hucksters seeking fame through various literary schemes, with Professor ʿAbd al-Salām acting as one of many alter egos. Because of how much Professor ʿAbd al-Salām’s appears to be al-Aswānī's ironic doppelgänger, going so far as to both speak in his same prosimetric cadence, as well as the almost complete overlap between the biographical al-Aswānī and his fictional self, in the end one is left wondering whose voice they are in fact listening to.
This is not the first time that the identity of the rāwī and that of the balīgh have overlapped in a maqāmāt. According to Marilyn Booth, Bayram al-Tūnisī collapsed the two roles into one in a series of self-portraits whose rāwī tells on himself, so to speak, by committing those very same balīgh-like acts he condemns in his status-seeking and money-grubbing colleagues. But unlike the neo-classicist maqāmāt of the Nahḍa, al-Aswānī’s enterprise is decidedly more casual. He is not inventing duplicitous social stereotypes as much as rewriting stories from his own life into the maqāmah form. Whether drinking coffee with friends at Cafe Bahwat or mustering the will to buy an expensive glass of Otard cognac at the Semiramis hotel bar, al-Aswānī’s characters seem to share all the same haunts.
While al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah (The Assemblies of al-Aswānī, 1970) seem to adhere to the genre’s conventions in the technical sense—being written in rhyming prose (sajʿ), using a narratological framing device (isnād) and using the basic plot structure of eloquent tricksters swindling gullible victims—the work nevertheless comes off as decidedly nonchalant. Like any good balīgh, al-Aswānī has an immense lexicon at his command. But he rarely employs it unless stuck for a rhyme, or when hoping to give a little incongruous wink in the text. The haphazard, freestyle nature of the rhymes makes the maqāmāt sound like something he came up with off the top of his head while out drinking with friends. He shows a preference for low stakes humor over lexical showmanship, easygoing dialogue and half-baked colloquial poems, and seems less interested in social commentary than he is autobiographical gossip. But this seems to go against the essence of a genre known for firing off “bright, noisy linguistic fireworks.” The Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, as the quintessential example, “do not simply include some excessive verbal performance; excessive verbal performance is what they are about.” This has much to do with their social origins. Histories of the maqāmah genre have often explained their emergence as corresponding to periods of social turmoil, periods which are ripe for a cultural dethroning through linguistic satire and parody.
But in this sense, al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah are an anachronism. They were written decades after the turn of the century, when an aesthetic reorientation amongst a new élite swung the pendulum away from ornamental formalism. What’s more, countless scholars have classified the language of literary Arabic at mid-century as relatively homogeneous, the result of the Nahḍa project and its “institution of a new privileging of formal coherency in language.” In his introduction to the English translation of Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded (2016), Youssef Rakha claims that the Nahḍah profoundly affected Arabic literature in the 20th century, subjecting it to a “tyranny of the serious” whereby “written Arabic was transformed from a multifarious living language in ever evolving conversation with its earlier (Qur’anic) form to a single, standardized simplification of said form, purposefully divorced from day-to-day speech.” Wielding neither the ornamental formalism of his predecessors nor seeming to benefit from the humor and vitality which comes from “the authenticity, continuity, and plausibility of Egyptian dialect as a written language,” how does al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah even function as a form of social satire and linguistic parody? What is the mechanism of irony and the carnivalesque if not heteroglossia?
In answering these questions, I hope to introduce the work of al-Aswānī and use it to pushback on an argument, implicit amongst Arabic literary historiography, that some ages carry more charge for linguistic parody than others. Al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah represent thoroughly modern maqāmāt, written in 20th century Arabic’s supposedly monoglossic literary register, but nevertheless able to invoke an array of social voices and sustain a tone of irony. Arabic literary studies interested in the question of language often work from an unacknowledged folk-linguistic understandings of dialect and register which seem them as static and fixed. Others see the phenomenon of heteroglossia in literature as dependent on the fortunes of literary innovation, whereby polyphony requires a certain “Bakhtinian” sensibility. Whether explaining the cultural conditions which give rise to the Maqāmah’s specific brand of verbal parody, reducing language politics to the “diglossia problem,” or praising literature's subaltern resistance to monoglossia through a polyphonic aesthetic, certain Arabic literary historiographies can give the mistaken impression of offering a type of linguistic teleology. By using Asif Agha’s concept of voicing effects, I will show instead how heteroglossia and polyphony are not historically or formalistically contingent. There are a number of textual strategies which can produce the contrastive individuation of voices without recourse to the fuṣḥa/ʿāmmiyyah binary, and even the smallest contrast between text segments within a seemingly monoglossic text will allow for a wide cast of social characters to emerge. By demonstrating how these textual strategies function within al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah, I aim to show how they still conform to the genre’s ability to perform multi-tiered parody, social satire, and the tropic use of language.
The Maqāmāt in Social and Linguistic History
Al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah were first published serially in the magazine Ṣabāḥ al-Khayr in the late 1960s, and were later adapted as a radio program, complete with its own theme song, for Ṣawt al-ʿArab. The Maqāmāt were well suited as mass media entertainment as they themselves address thoroughly approachable and modern topics: government corruption, television stars, casino-style nightclubs, and beach tourism. But Maqāmāt are always modern for the time in which they are written, always engaged with the language of its own society in order to break up what Northrop Frye calls its “lumber of stereotypes, fossilized beliefs, superstitious terrors, crank theories, pedantic dogmatisms, oppressive fashions.” In their particular strength as a meta-genre, the maqāmāt seem especially suited to periods of cultural disruption. In his study of the genre, Abdelfattah Kilito claims that their initial flourishing was tied to "le démembrement de l'empire Musulman et la décentralisation culturelle que en est résultée." Likewise, their revival in the 19th century—when, according to Sabry Hafez, more maqāmāt were written than in the previous 900 years—has also been understood as brought about by cultural dismemberment and crisis. Mohamed-Salah Omri claims that this Golden Age of maqāmāt revivals, which included works by Nāsif al-Yāzijī (1800-1871), Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī (1858-1930), and Bayram al-Tūnisī (1893-1961), can be explained by how the genre was ideally suited to the challenges posed by the European versions of the novel, and because its discursive strategies helped to “keep alive the Arab writers’ claim to ‘authenticity.’” William Granara details other instances of the “idea of a society in turmoil as an historically contextualizing meta-narrative to the composition of the maqama.”
If it is the case that there is a link between societal (and linguistic) turmoil, on the one hand, and the flourishing of Maqāmah authorship on the other, than how would one characterize the state of society and language at the time when al-Aswānī’s work appeared, coming as it did so many decades after the end of the linguistic reforms of the Nahḍah? The literary language in the mid-20th century has been characterized as the result of the Nahḍah’s efforts to streamline Arabic and turn it into a modern national language, one which could “present objective, scientific knowledge in a way that was not self-conscious or opaque.” Linguistic modernizers bequeathed a language where embellishment (tazwīq), prolix, and other ornate lumber were broken up in exchange for what Salāmah Mūsā called the “telegraphic style” (al-uslūb al-tilighrāfī). According to Yaseen Noorani, underlying this stylistic streamlining was the linguistic homogenization set in motion by the rise of nationality and national languages. Samah Selim in The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 (2004) claims that nationalist fervor in the wake of the 1919 revolution set off a campaign of “dismantling the linguistic hybridity of the nineteenth-century social text – ‘nationalizing’ it, so to speak – and hence unifying the language of narrative into a standard Arabic with minor variations of syntax and vocabulary that would mimic local speech patterns.”
However, the solution offered by homogenization seemingly left behind another lingering issue: that of Arabic’s “diglossia” problem. Debates on Arabic literature betray an unshakable anxiety over the fundamental split in the language between its historical and literary mode, on the one hand, and its popular and regional diversity on the other. In his book Arab Culture and the Novel (2007), Muhammad Siddiq positions the diglossia divide at “the roots of two major and abiding variable opposites in modern Arab identity: local/regional vs. Pan-Arab, and non-standardized, spoken dialects vs. the written fuṣḥa.” Likewise, Samah Selim argues that diglossia became increasingly emblematic of the binary categories of nationalist discourse—city/village, individual/community, alienation/authenticity, tradition/modernity— with language as a field of battle between the nationalist imagination and the dissonant cultures and voices that it attempts to suppress. Against this homogenizing power of national language, literature “fought back” through “subaltern textual language, occasionally and strategically employed by uneducated women, urban riff-raff and, of course, the peasant.” Throughout the 20th century, ʿāmmiyyah was on defiant display in the dialogue of feminist novels like Laṭīfah al-Zayyāt’s al-Bāb al-Maftūḥ (1960) and village novels like ʻAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sharqāwī’s al-Arḍ (1954), or in colloquial poetry such as the working class ajzāl of Fatḥī Aḥmad al-Maghribī and the rubāʿiyāt of Ṣalāḥ Jahīn. As Marilyn booth says “the potential import of writing literarily in colloquial Arabic derives from a situation of diglossia or perhaps multiglossia: the presence of multiple and distinct “levels” of language, coupled with a consciousness among its users that each level present a different, if overlapping, communication sphere.”
This interest in the literary potential of multiglossia extends from the social back to the formal, with scholars locating a swinging back of the formalistic pendulum in the late 1960s. Take, for example, the way that both Stefan Meyer and Fabio Caiani employ the term ‘polyphony’ to mark a decisive turn in novel production in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the hegemony of monolingualism and its concomitant forms of telegraphic-style realism in fiction was finally broken by a renewed ‘Bakhtinaian spirit’ in literature. In his book The Experimental Arabic Novel (2001) he explains the effects of the string of cultural defeats such as the failure of the Nasserist revolution and the Six-Day War on literary language by claiming that modernist strategies were introduced in the 1960s which marked “a democratisation of narration, or polyphony.” Fabio Caiani in Contemporary Arab Fiction (2007) takes exception of what he sees as Mayer’s limited use of Bakhtin’s theories, and tries to offer a more complete list of narrative strategies for identifying multivoiced Arabic novels. But his own survey of literary innovation in Arabic is itself “paired with a preoccupation with historiography.” For his part, Caiani attempts to offer a series of caveats for his own periodization, acknowledging that use of the naksa as a literary turning point is merely a convention used to simplify what is a complex historical reality. The problem however, is not with the precision with which the Bakhtinian aesthetic is brought to bear on literary history, but the way that the phenomenon of multivoicedness is used as though it is historically contingent.
Like the use of dialect and register, the presence of polyphony and heteroglossia have been used as historiographically by scholars to construct narratives about the course of the Arabic literary language. But for all of this metalinguistic attention, many of these narratives rest on unexamined assumptions about how language, and specifically the social meaning of variation, actually functions. By reframing the concept of register according to the insights of linguistic anthropology, we can move beyond the anxiety of diglossia or monoglossia towards a more robust account of how both social speech types and individual voices emerge from within a literary text.
If it is the case that there is a link between societal (and linguistic) turmoil, on the one hand, and the flourishing of Maqāmah authorship on the other, than how would one characterize the state of society and language at the time when al-Aswānī’s work appeared, coming as it did so many decades after the end of the linguistic reforms of the Nahḍah? The literary language in the mid-20th century has been characterized as the result of the Nahḍah’s efforts to streamline Arabic and turn it into a modern national language, one which could “present objective, scientific knowledge in a way that was not self-conscious or opaque.” Linguistic modernizers bequeathed a language where embellishment (tazwīq), prolix, and other ornate lumber were broken up in exchange for what Salāmah Mūsā called the “telegraphic style” (al-uslūb al-tilighrāfī). According to Yaseen Noorani, underlying this stylistic streamlining was the linguistic homogenization set in motion by the rise of nationality and national languages. Samah Selim in The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 (2004) claims that nationalist fervor in the wake of the 1919 revolution set off a campaign of “dismantling the linguistic hybridity of the nineteenth-century social text – ‘nationalizing’ it, so to speak – and hence unifying the language of narrative into a standard Arabic with minor variations of syntax and vocabulary that would mimic local speech patterns.”
However, the solution offered by homogenization seemingly left behind another lingering issue: that of Arabic’s “diglossia” problem. Debates on Arabic literature betray an unshakable anxiety over the fundamental split in the language between its historical and literary mode, on the one hand, and its popular and regional diversity on the other. In his book Arab Culture and the Novel (2007), Muhammad Siddiq positions the diglossia divide at “the roots of two major and abiding variable opposites in modern Arab identity: local/regional vs. Pan-Arab, and non-standardized, spoken dialects vs. the written fuṣḥa.” Likewise, Samah Selim argues that diglossia became increasingly emblematic of the binary categories of nationalist discourse—city/village, individual/community, alienation/authenticity, tradition/modernity— with language as a field of battle between the nationalist imagination and the dissonant cultures and voices that it attempts to suppress. Against this homogenizing power of national language, literature “fought back” through “subaltern textual language, occasionally and strategically employed by uneducated women, urban riff-raff and, of course, the peasant.” Throughout the 20th century, ʿāmmiyyah was on defiant display in the dialogue of feminist novels like Laṭīfah al-Zayyāt’s al-Bāb al-Maftūḥ (1960) and village novels like ʻAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sharqāwī’s al-Arḍ (1954), or in colloquial poetry such as the working class ajzāl of Fatḥī Aḥmad al-Maghribī and the rubāʿiyāt of Ṣalāḥ Jahīn. As Marilyn booth says “the potential import of writing literarily in colloquial Arabic derives from a situation of diglossia or perhaps multiglossia: the presence of multiple and distinct “levels” of language, coupled with a consciousness among its users that each level present a different, if overlapping, communication sphere.”
This interest in the literary potential of multiglossia extends from the social back to the formal, with scholars locating a swinging back of the formalistic pendulum in the late 1960s. Take, for example, the way that both Stefan Meyer and Fabio Caiani employ the term ‘polyphony’ to mark a decisive turn in novel production in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the hegemony of monolingualism and its concomitant forms of telegraphic-style realism in fiction was finally broken by a renewed ‘Bakhtinaian spirit’ in literature. In his book The Experimental Arabic Novel (2001) he explains the effects of the string of cultural defeats such as the failure of the Nasserist revolution and the Six-Day War on literary language by claiming that modernist strategies were introduced in the 1960s which marked “a democratisation of narration, or polyphony.” Fabio Caiani in Contemporary Arab Fiction (2007) takes exception of what he sees as Mayer’s limited use of Bakhtin’s theories, and tries to offer a more complete list of narrative strategies for identifying multivoiced Arabic novels. But his own survey of literary innovation in Arabic is itself “paired with a preoccupation with historiography.” For his part, Caiani attempts to offer a series of caveats for his own periodization, acknowledging that use of the naksa as a literary turning point is merely a convention used to simplify what is a complex historical reality. The problem however, is not with the precision with which the Bakhtinian aesthetic is brought to bear on literary history, but the way that the phenomenon of multivoicedness is used as though it is historically contingent.
Like the use of dialect and register, the presence of polyphony and heteroglossia have been used as historiographically by scholars to construct narratives about the course of the Arabic literary language. But for all of this metalinguistic attention, many of these narratives rest on unexamined assumptions about how language, and specifically the social meaning of variation, actually functions. By reframing the concept of register according to the insights of linguistic anthropology, we can move beyond the anxiety of diglossia or monoglossia towards a more robust account of how both social speech types and individual voices emerge from within a literary text.
Voice and Enregisterment
In his article “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment” (2005) Asif Agha seeks to expand on Bakhtin’s account of how individual and social voices appear in literary texts by using new insights from linguistic anthropology. Agha shows how utterances index social stererotypes through allusions to speech registers and how the impression of individual voices emerges through the flexible and subtle semiotics of voicing contrasts. Rather than conceiving of registers as discrete and exhaustive grammars, one should instead see them as interpretations of speech choices made when there are “distinct, indexically contrastive ways of saying what counts as the “same thing.” The cumulative effect of different co-occurring linguistic features clustering together in such a way as to create the impression of a distinct style or level of language. This process, whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized, is what Agha refers to as enregisterment. These enregistered voices can then be used to index stereotypic social personae.
In a similar way, texts can use metrical contrasts between chunks of text to create a contrastive individuation of voices, which motivates evaluations of sameness or difference of speaker. These contrasts appear through “a vast range of text-forming devices—parentheticals, tense, person, mood, report frames of varying degrees of fragmentariness” which draw implicit text-internal boundaries that don’t always correspond to specific biographical identities. Agha refers to these contrasts as being entextualized because of how they are “emergent and nondetachable: They are figure-ground contrasts that are individuable only in relation to an unfolding text structure (hence emergent) and are not preserved under decontextualization (hence nondetachable).”
Returning to the maqāmāh from the introduction, we see that Professor ʿAbd al-Salām and ʻAbbās al-Aswānī voice themselves as two separate persons even though both speak in more or less fuṣḥa-conforming rhymed prose. But Professor ʿAbd al-Salām's choice of technical vocabulary and cunning use of rhetorical devices corresponds to a more specific linguistic stereotype, that of showboating legalese, which enregisters him as lawyers. Likewise, with his inventive insults and rapid-fire rhymes, ʻAbbās al-Aswānī keeps up the role as maqāmah narrator. A focus only on diglossia misses this fact, and would assign Professor ʿAbd al-Salām and al-Aswānī to the same team, linguistically speaking. A model of language politics reliant on a model of two distinct registers overlooks the incredible diversity of enregistered voices, and fails specifically to see how these two characters’ voices are meant to simultaneously overlap and contradict.
And they do in fact overlap, with al-Aswānī himself being a lawyer, and Professor ʿAbd al-Salām delivering his fair share of rhyming jabs. They have stereotypical social identities because their voices are enregistered, but their voices are distinct from one another thanks to entextualized voicing contrasts. There are moments, for example, when we can clearly tell whether it is al-Aswānī explaining ʿAbd al-Salām’s despicable schemes or ʿAbd al-Salām praising his own ingenious plots merely by whether the adjectives used to describe them are pejorative or complimentary. The very sense that ʿAbd al-Salām is able to offer his side of the story is precisely what Bakhtin means by polyphony. Al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah exemplify this “collective quality of an individual utterance, that is, the capacity of my utterance to embody someone else's utterance even while it is mine” because it uses several text-forming devices beyond using dialect to create voicing contrasts.
Agha also recommends the term “virtual speaking personae” to help move away from the somatic metaphoricity of the term ‘voicing,’ allowing us to more accurately reflect the indeterminate nature of voicing contrasts. Oftentimes we cannot peg a voice to a specific character in the text, and oftentimes the voice being alluded to doesn’t belong to a person at all. Quoting Bakhtin himself, Agha reminds us that “dialogic relations are manifest in oral conversation but also in a variety of other discursive and semiotic genres, including novels, other literary works, even “images belonging to different art forms” as long as they are “expressed in some semiotic material.” For this reason, it is misleading to speak of certain novel as having some appropriately “multivoiced structure.” Al-Aswānī simultaneously builds a dialogic relationship between his characters, bickering within and around the scaffolding of sajʿ, while rhymed prose itself creates a dialogic relationship with the maqāmah genre.
The maqāmah has always been a genre which puts on display the diversity of not just persons and groups, but literary styles which can be brought forth through enregisterment. Each time and place has its own menagerie of speech genres, subcultures, and social types which can be mined for material. Abdelfattah Kilito explains how
le texte des séances, qui suit les métamorphoses du personnage dans un miroitement de discours, est aussi un hypokalamon. Le problème de l’identité se pose dans les mêmes termes pour le texte et pour le personnage: si Abu l-Fath est le support de virtualités d’existence qui passent à l’acte, le séance est le cadre qui accueille divers genres, pas seulement les genres poétiques traditionnels, mais aussi la devinette, le propos de table, la controverse, le parallèle, etc.
The invocation of hypokalamon (moiré cloth/chameleon) as a metaphor for the way that virtual speaking personae are reflected in discourses should remind us that it is not always possible to precisely identify the figure reflected in the shimmer of parody. It is rather like the schemata of Agha, whereby the maqāmah is a cacophony of voicing contrasts, even within the unified stylistics of the single work. As I will now show using examples from al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah, there are constant glimmerings of a whole range of other discursive artifacts: ranging from oral narratives, to commercial jingles, to medieval prose genres like the maqāmah itself.
Al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah
Sartre wears a Galābiyyah and speaks Arabic
The opening maqāmah “Sartre Wears a Galābiyyah and Speaks Arabic” (سارتر يرتدى الجلابية ويتكلم العربية) begins with al-Aswānī trying to meet Jean-Paul Sartre during the latter’s visit to Egypt. Sartre had actually visited the country during the run-up to the Six Day War, and was greeted at the airport by the who’s who of Egyptian intellectual life: Luīs ʿAwaḍ, ʿAnīs Manṣūr, Luṭfī al-Khūlī, and even Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (although Ṭaha Husayn did not receive an invite). Sartre loomed large in Egyptian intellectual culture and in the late 1960s represented the ideal of the literary star and public intellectual. And so, of course, al-Aswānī is intent on meeting him. Because he doesn’t receive any of the many social invitations which would provide the opportunity, he has to come up with his own plan.
فرسمت للقائه خطة..ورحت أتمسح كالقطة..ووقفت عند باب الدخول أتلصص..وبقدومه أتربص.
When he goes to see Sartre speak at a theatre (presumably at the auditorium of Cairo University, where the real Sartre gave a lecture during his visit), the French intellectual is too thronged by crowds to be approached. Every time al-Aswānī tries to catch a glimpse of him, Sartre disappears. Despite his stealthy efforts, al-Aswānī never ends up meeting the literary icon.
Lying in bed one night, he wonders why he failed in his efforts. He is, after all, erudite and well read, and deserving of an invite.
وألا توجه إلى الدعوات..كأنني من الأموات.. مع أننى أديب قراري..ليل ونهاري..أعرف الأدب الأوروبي.. وأجلس في جروبي.. وأتناول المايونيز..وأقرأ اللتر فرانسيز
Peppering one’s speech with French phrases and name dropping elite publications are the quickest ways, linguistically speaking, to index oneself as being part of the cognoscenti. Al-Aswānī transliterates the name of the magazine into Arabic in such a way that one can practically hear the tell-tale guttural ‘r’ in French being earnestly pronounced. This reference to “Les Lettres Françaises” is a perfect example of what Asif Agha refers to as a text segment. A text segment is the ever so brief keying into a metalinguistic stereotype, an imaginary voicing that is activated by the slightest allusion to the way that social types—in this case Gallophilic Egyptian intellectuals— are thought to speak. Social characters are invoked through mutually understood allusions to other jointly known social personae, rather than through exhaustive characterization or consistent linguistic costuming. One conspicuous turn of phrase can be enough to hint at the full imaginary offered in a social stereotype.
Al-Aswānī eventually nods off, and in his dreams he finally comes across the famous French philosopher walking down the beach.
وفجأة أبصرت سارتر أمامي .. فكدت أفيق من منامي .. فقلت له بونسوار..لأننا في الليل ولا النهار ..قال الكاتب المشهور .. وأنا برؤيته مسحور ..مساء الخير .. في لغة عربية فصيحة قاهرية مليحة ..فتملكتني اندهاشة ..سألته بشاشة ..هل تعرف اللغة العربية.. قال..وألبس قبل النوم جلابية .. لأنها من ناحية الصحة والسلامة .. أفضل من البيجاما
speaking a handsome and elegant Cairene Arabic, Sartre has the perfectly befitting linguistic garb to match his quintessentially Egyptian outfit. His performance of Egyptian identity is above reproach, able to name drop Egypt’s cultural figures, both high and low. Of note is how many of these words and phrases, presumably belonging to different registers, are presented together within the unifying flow of the sajʿ: Sartre rhymes the narrator's "al-ʿarabiyyah" with the Egyptian "galābiyyah," and the familiar Egyptian "al-siḥḥah wa-l-salāmah" rhymes with the European “bījāmā,” (which is itself actually a Persian/Urdu loan-word). The sing-song of the rhymed prose is matched by what Agha calls the metrical iconism of co-occurring text segments—the likeness or unlikeness of co-occurring chunks of text.
Pressed on how he is able to speak perfect Arabic, Sartre says he’s read everybody from ʿAmr Bin Kalthūm to Umm Kulthūm, from ʿAntarah ibn Shaddad to ʻAbbās al-Aqqād, which is highly ironic given the role the actual Sartre and his ideas of literary engagement (iltizām)played in bringing about the “Fall of the Udabāʾ”, the idols of Arabic literature in the mid-century. But in the dream, Sartre not only admires the old guard, but he even shares their linguistic prejudices when asked about his opinion of writing in ʿāmmiyyah, calling it an illusory lie (“اكذوبة وهمية”).
While as al-Aswānī takes pains to invoke “Les Lettres Françaises” in order to perform his register competence of the speech repertoire of the typical Egyptian intellectual, quite often enregistered voices are used against expectations. While al-Aswānī speaks congruently to the linguistic stereotypes associated with him, his version of Sartre is comical precisely because of the non-congruence of his enregistered voice. When al-Aswānī expresses his disbelief at Sartre’s ability to speak Arabic, Sartre responds:
ليس هذا ذنبي.. فكل أديب قابلىني .. عذبني وأرهقني.. وكلمني بفرنسية.. تبعث على الأسية.. وأقسم
بعزة الخالق..وليرميني من حالق
Sartre’s use of standard Arabic only becomes legible as being tropic in context of the rest of the text. He is able to employ a series of articulate and superlative synonyms for being annoyed, give a flowery religious invocation, and coopts an idiomatic expression (من حالق, from above) in order to match the rules of sajʿ. Not content to merely speak Arabic, Sartre performs his competence of the register. The more competently he does so, the better the gag. He is able to respond to al-Aswānī’s questions with rhymes, demonstrating his understanding of local references by speaking about local authors by their first names (“Nagīb” for Nagīb Maḥfūẓ and “ʼIḥsān” for ʼIḥsān ʻAbd al-Quddūs), and even complaining about his problems with contemporary literary culture.
وإن زادت في تعبي.. لأن النقد عندكم.. مجاملة.. كأنه سلوك ومعاملة
Sartre speaks like a typical Egyptian literati, except that he is arguably one of the country’s most famous foreigners. He is using an enregistered voice, performing metapragmatic stereotypes, but against the grain.
This performance is what Agha means by saying that voice contrasts are “nondetachable.” That is to say, one cannot recognize a voice as a social stereotype in isolation, but only within the context in which it is being used. The larger context surrounding an enregistered voice has the effect of making it either an example of appropriate use or, if the speech is non-congruent, an interactional trope. Sartre’s way of speaking in this chapter is tropic because of the oddness between co-occuring signs, i.e. the sign of him being Sartre vs. the register signs of a Cairene literarati. The humorous irony is created not by the juxtaposition between figures speaking across fuṣḥa/ ʿammiyya binary, but by the competent use of fuṣḥa by the wrong characterological figure.
فرسمت للقائه خطة..ورحت أتمسح كالقطة..ووقفت عند باب الدخول أتلصص..وبقدومه أتربص.
When he goes to see Sartre speak at a theatre (presumably at the auditorium of Cairo University, where the real Sartre gave a lecture during his visit), the French intellectual is too thronged by crowds to be approached. Every time al-Aswānī tries to catch a glimpse of him, Sartre disappears. Despite his stealthy efforts, al-Aswānī never ends up meeting the literary icon.
Lying in bed one night, he wonders why he failed in his efforts. He is, after all, erudite and well read, and deserving of an invite.
وألا توجه إلى الدعوات..كأنني من الأموات.. مع أننى أديب قراري..ليل ونهاري..أعرف الأدب الأوروبي.. وأجلس في جروبي.. وأتناول المايونيز..وأقرأ اللتر فرانسيز
Peppering one’s speech with French phrases and name dropping elite publications are the quickest ways, linguistically speaking, to index oneself as being part of the cognoscenti. Al-Aswānī transliterates the name of the magazine into Arabic in such a way that one can practically hear the tell-tale guttural ‘r’ in French being earnestly pronounced. This reference to “Les Lettres Françaises” is a perfect example of what Asif Agha refers to as a text segment. A text segment is the ever so brief keying into a metalinguistic stereotype, an imaginary voicing that is activated by the slightest allusion to the way that social types—in this case Gallophilic Egyptian intellectuals— are thought to speak. Social characters are invoked through mutually understood allusions to other jointly known social personae, rather than through exhaustive characterization or consistent linguistic costuming. One conspicuous turn of phrase can be enough to hint at the full imaginary offered in a social stereotype.
Al-Aswānī eventually nods off, and in his dreams he finally comes across the famous French philosopher walking down the beach.
وفجأة أبصرت سارتر أمامي .. فكدت أفيق من منامي .. فقلت له بونسوار..لأننا في الليل ولا النهار ..قال الكاتب المشهور .. وأنا برؤيته مسحور ..مساء الخير .. في لغة عربية فصيحة قاهرية مليحة ..فتملكتني اندهاشة ..سألته بشاشة ..هل تعرف اللغة العربية.. قال..وألبس قبل النوم جلابية .. لأنها من ناحية الصحة والسلامة .. أفضل من البيجاما
speaking a handsome and elegant Cairene Arabic, Sartre has the perfectly befitting linguistic garb to match his quintessentially Egyptian outfit. His performance of Egyptian identity is above reproach, able to name drop Egypt’s cultural figures, both high and low. Of note is how many of these words and phrases, presumably belonging to different registers, are presented together within the unifying flow of the sajʿ: Sartre rhymes the narrator's "al-ʿarabiyyah" with the Egyptian "galābiyyah," and the familiar Egyptian "al-siḥḥah wa-l-salāmah" rhymes with the European “bījāmā,” (which is itself actually a Persian/Urdu loan-word). The sing-song of the rhymed prose is matched by what Agha calls the metrical iconism of co-occurring text segments—the likeness or unlikeness of co-occurring chunks of text.
Pressed on how he is able to speak perfect Arabic, Sartre says he’s read everybody from ʿAmr Bin Kalthūm to Umm Kulthūm, from ʿAntarah ibn Shaddad to ʻAbbās al-Aqqād, which is highly ironic given the role the actual Sartre and his ideas of literary engagement (iltizām)played in bringing about the “Fall of the Udabāʾ”, the idols of Arabic literature in the mid-century. But in the dream, Sartre not only admires the old guard, but he even shares their linguistic prejudices when asked about his opinion of writing in ʿāmmiyyah, calling it an illusory lie (“اكذوبة وهمية”).
While as al-Aswānī takes pains to invoke “Les Lettres Françaises” in order to perform his register competence of the speech repertoire of the typical Egyptian intellectual, quite often enregistered voices are used against expectations. While al-Aswānī speaks congruently to the linguistic stereotypes associated with him, his version of Sartre is comical precisely because of the non-congruence of his enregistered voice. When al-Aswānī expresses his disbelief at Sartre’s ability to speak Arabic, Sartre responds:
ليس هذا ذنبي.. فكل أديب قابلىني .. عذبني وأرهقني.. وكلمني بفرنسية.. تبعث على الأسية.. وأقسم
بعزة الخالق..وليرميني من حالق
Sartre’s use of standard Arabic only becomes legible as being tropic in context of the rest of the text. He is able to employ a series of articulate and superlative synonyms for being annoyed, give a flowery religious invocation, and coopts an idiomatic expression (من حالق, from above) in order to match the rules of sajʿ. Not content to merely speak Arabic, Sartre performs his competence of the register. The more competently he does so, the better the gag. He is able to respond to al-Aswānī’s questions with rhymes, demonstrating his understanding of local references by speaking about local authors by their first names (“Nagīb” for Nagīb Maḥfūẓ and “ʼIḥsān” for ʼIḥsān ʻAbd al-Quddūs), and even complaining about his problems with contemporary literary culture.
وإن زادت في تعبي.. لأن النقد عندكم.. مجاملة.. كأنه سلوك ومعاملة
Sartre speaks like a typical Egyptian literati, except that he is arguably one of the country’s most famous foreigners. He is using an enregistered voice, performing metapragmatic stereotypes, but against the grain.
This performance is what Agha means by saying that voice contrasts are “nondetachable.” That is to say, one cannot recognize a voice as a social stereotype in isolation, but only within the context in which it is being used. The larger context surrounding an enregistered voice has the effect of making it either an example of appropriate use or, if the speech is non-congruent, an interactional trope. Sartre’s way of speaking in this chapter is tropic because of the oddness between co-occuring signs, i.e. the sign of him being Sartre vs. the register signs of a Cairene literarati. The humorous irony is created not by the juxtaposition between figures speaking across fuṣḥa/ ʿammiyya binary, but by the competent use of fuṣḥa by the wrong characterological figure.
The Trial of a Critic Biased Against the Plain Truth
Keeping true to the maqāmah’s metaliterary spirit, a great many of al-Aswānī’s episodes deal with the state of literary production in Egypt in the late 1960s. But while many scholars have focused on how the cultural traumas of the Six Day War—not to mention the terrible effects of censorship, state coercion and control of the literary class—marked a decisive turning point in aesthetics orientation, al-Aswānī’s many tales of unlucky artists reflect more personal and mundane issues like that of inspiration, mediocrity, and simply making ends meet. There is a maqāmah about a talented zajal writer who can’t feed his family on a poet’s income.
الزجل وحده لا يكفي لضمان العيش..فانا أرعى أسرة كالجيش
In another maqāmah, Professor Sail (أستاذ شراعة)dreams of becoming a famous writer of radio serials.
منذ قطعت عن الرضاعة. وأنا مولع بسماع الإذاعة
Stories like these are less an ambitious meditation on the role of literature in society than an intimate poking fun at writers’ delusions of grandeur and the minor dreams of a literary field which was far less recognized or self-assured than it would seem from the outside. The number of ambitious bulaghāʾ that al-Aswānī encounters in his text satirize literary language by betraying a sense of their own imposter syndrome.
The feeling of literary fraudulence is put on trial, literally, in the maqāmah “The Trial of a Critic Biased Against the Plain Truth” (محاكمة ناقد مغرض عن الحقيقة معرض). In it, a literary critic named Ibrāhīm Ibn Jinnī is sent to the fictional “Arts Court” at the House of Fine Arts. When Ibn Jinnī is brought to court, the judge sits in front of an illuminated, buzzing neon light which reads “الفن لا يهون” (“art cannot be made light of”). It is here in the courtroom where the ambiguity of multi-voicedness is really put on display. In this instance voicing contrasts are not merely indicated by shifts in register as much as by a shift in topical referents, represented speakers, and even subtle changes in stances and attitudes. The prosecutor stands to give his case:
فقام وكيل نيابة الفن.. وقال في تأن: ان ما ذكره المتهم..وعدده على أنه من مزاياه.. هو دليل دناياه.. ان المحكمة تعلم أن النقد السليم للفن دعامة.. وعلى ازدهاره علامة..ولكن المتهم في هذه القضية الهامة.. شخصية سامة
In this short excerpt, there are several subtle shifts both in the subject of the speech, and the voice in which it’s given. It begins with the narrator describing the prosecutor, and then gives a clear signal that the voice is shifting through the cue ““قال” (he said) as well as the use of a colon. But when the prosecutor then speaks, he first demeans Ibn Jinnī through strong rhetorical language, but then actually speaks on behalf of the court by saying that it is the “court” which knows that good criticism is a support of the arts and a sign of its flourishing. This argumentum ad populum, beyond being a typical strategy which marks the prosecutor’s speech as lawyerly, is an example of how frequently unnamed voices enter the text through entextualization. It is not actually clear if “the court” here is meant as a metonym referring to the the presiding officer or officials, or as a synechdoche for the greater intellectual community and its other literary institutions. But while it’s the prosecutor speaking, he is channelling another unnamed voice. After this statement, the prosecutor follows up by claiming that the defendant is a poisonous character. But there isn’t any marker drawing the reader back from the court’s opinion to the prosecutor’s claim. We know it instead based on the nature of the information: that it is a specific statement pertaining to the defendant, and not a general one about the nature of art, and so most likely belonging to the prosecutor. Along with linguistic differences between text segments, we also recognize contrast between stance and affect.
After the calling of several witnesses, and the submission of expert testimony and written reports, the Judge eventually issues his ruling:
حكمت المحكمة على ابن جنى بأبعاده عن الحقل الفني.. على أن تنشر صورته في كل جريدة أياما عديدة.. ويكتب تحتها.. هذا وصولى. حاقد .. ليس للفن ناقد.. يهاجم عزيزة .. من أجل بريزة وينكر جهد سلامة.. في قحة وتلامة .. فعلى الجمهور أن يحذر أمثاله.. ومن نسج على منواله.. أما دليل معرفتهم .. فمن كتابتهم.. فهي هجوم بلا تعليل.. أو ثناء بلا تدليل.. والحمد لله .. إنهم قلة.. وإن كانوا شلة!
In the text that the judge orders be printed in the newspapers, it seems as though the very last lines here—in which he thanks God and calls the bad critics a gang— are not meant for publication but rather are his own interjection. While this is all technically all uttered by the voice of the judge, there is nonetheless a voicing contrast between what is meant to print and what is not, one which is understood both by the change in perspective represented by the exclamation, as well as by its shift in emotional intensity (exemplified by the strongly familiar Egyptian word for gang (“شلة )). One identifies voices based on the ways the text contextualizes them rather than via some grammatically idiosyncratic aspect that sets them apart. A difference of perspective, or the interplay between two perspectives, can be implied without either having to represent a specific person. They can indeed be two voices contained within the utterance of a single biographical person. This is the dynamic of polyphony at play in so many of Al-Aswānī’s episodes about the literary world. In other episodes about plagiarism, impersonation, state patronage, and simple writer’s block, he uses subtle metrical contrasts between perspectives to create the sense of an incestuous literary milieu, where various personalities and perspectives are imitating, contradicting, and speaking over one another. Through his work, Al-Aswānī shows how the case that polyphony is a special development, brought forth by the stages modernism and postmodernism, falls apart under scrutiny.
The Personal Status Law as Nazla and Bahiya Would Like to See It
Al-Aswānī also makes space in his maqāmāt for dissonant cultures and voices, interacting with the world of gender politics and class prejudices in the course of his own daily life. interacting with a variety of. But in doing so, he never simply relies on ʿāmmiyyah as an emblem of subaltern speech. He instead appeals to and frustrates a number of specific stereotypes about different discursive and semiotic genres. In the fourth maqāmah, “The Personal Status Law as Nazla and Bahiya Would Like to See It” (قانون الأحوال الشخصية كما تريده نظلة وبهية), al-Aswānī is invited one evening to the feminist “Women’s Association”. Outside the building there is pandemonium. A member named Fawqah is speaking to the crowd, declaring some of the demands of the Association, saying:
لا حرية للرجال..كلهم دجال..كبلوهم بالسلاسل والقيود.. والمواد والبنود.. لاطلاق.. على الإطلاق..
Debates in Egypt over personal status laws had been a major touchpoint for decades, and in the mid-1960s the Nasser regime seriously considered annulling certain laws like that of “bayt al-ṭāʾah” (“the house of obedience”, whereby husbands claim the right to demand obedience from their wives,) in the name of women’s advancement. Women’s magazines and national newspapers were full of articles and editorials likening the institution of bayt al-ṭāʾah to feudal relations of slavery. In response, defenders of traditional Islamic values publicized stories about the broken homes and neglected children that result from the breakdown of the moral order.
This debate is on display in the maqāmah as the rhymed slogans and speeches of the feminists are exaggerated to satirical lengths. In al-Aswānī’s version, the usual objections to the ruinous effects of patriarchy on the country’s women are spoofed as the untamed and liberated women lord over men with their oppressive beliefs. It is not mere liberation, but the subjugation of men that the Association’s women members are calling for. Sister Lamaʿiyyah, the group’s leader, famous for her many victories against lowly men, is called to speak. She herself is the wife to four men and author of such books as:
”هادى الأبصار، القلوب.. في شيل الفكه من الجيوب“
"كيف تحولين الانسجام والدندنة..إلى هم وعكننة”
"كيف تستعملين السم.. ليصبح زوجك بلا أم"
All of the slogans and fictional book titles index the speech repertoires of feminist discourse and the sort of “how-to” self-help rhetoric of women’s magazines. This is not the language of a wholly separate dialect, the autonomous colloquial subaltern voice of women, but a relatively small string of conspicuous forms within speech which can be identified as “feminist discourse.” Sister Lamaʿiyyah’s book titles are metapragmatic stereotypes about activist feminist language, taken to the absurd extremes of the unruly shrew who wants to unsettle marital harmony and thus poisons her mother-in-law. We have, in fact, two types of stereotypes working in tandem: the typical misogynist stereotypes about anarchy-loving feminists aiming to enslave men on one hand, and metapragmatic stereotypes concerning the phraseology of women’s liberation on the other. Al-Aswānī’s comedic effect relies on sneaking in the former dressed in the latter. This is possible for two reasons. The first is that because registers are the effect achieved by the social perception of a specific semiotic repertoire rather than comprehensive structures in of themselves, it is possible to condense and combine them, or play them tropically off each other. Secondly, registers often invoke discursive genres rather than always necessarily having to be rooted in a specific biographical identity or social class. Sister Lamaʿiyyah’s book titles are not merely enregistering her own voice, but the different social domains in which she has register competence.
The members of the Women’s Association agree that some further amendments need to be made to the eleven amendments to the 1929 personal status law that are being proposed by the government. Sister Lamaʿiyyah then lists 9 amendments in rhymed prose, meant to echo the language of constitutional legalese، but nevertheless quite silly. For example:
٥- إذا أقام الزوج مع أمه.. أباح القانون دمه.. ولا يجوز زيارة الأمهات.. إلا في مناسبات. بشرط أن يكون الزوج في رفقة زوجته.. حتى لا تطول غيبته
The rules are meant to establish a new regime of bayt al-ṭāʾah, but in reverse, regulating male behavior and guarding against their disobedience leading to a breakdown of the moral order.
٦ - السهر في المقاهى.. من أخطر الدواهى.. وللزوجة اقتحام للمكان.. والاستعانة بأى إنسان. لإخراج الزوج في الحال.. دون معارضة ولا سؤال
The amendments are a clever mix of tone, being simultaneously a type of impersonal admonishment and a well-known brand of female nagging. In fact, the actual proposed amendments to the 1929 Personal Status Law contained a similar element of moral reprimand. They were written in the authoritative voice of Nasserist style state feminism, a voice which was seen by conservatives and religious factions as reflecting a type of elitist idealism, issued from on high by institutions like the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Social Affairs. These western-oriented elites were well-connected and had never themselves dealt with the financial difficulties of divorce. The pro-reform movement of the 1960s was actually led by professional women holding prominent jobs in the public sector as well as positions of cultural influence. These women often wrote opinion columns in newspapers and magazines which made strong moral claims about personal freedom, national duty, religious protections, and the relationship between female subjectivity and the regulation of male behavior. The claim of a moral fact (late nights at the cafe are the most dangerous type of calamity) followed by a statement of rights (a woman may plunge into any place to extract her husband) is a structure shared by declarations of rights, the editorial pages of Hawwa magazine, and the combative spouse at home. That the language al-Aswānī incorporates into his maqāmah is indexical of all of these repertoires is a testament to his competence invoking linguistic registers to play on social stereotypes, not to some inherent quality of language to act as a repository for them.
After Lamaʿiyyah has finished reciting the 9 proposed amendments, the crowd breaks out into applause, at which point al-Aswānī tries to offer a rebuttal. But the feminists won’t have anything to do with it.
وهنا علا التصفيق والهتاف واهتز المكان وإرتج.. فقمت لكى أعارض واحتج.. ولكن الست لمعية رئيسة الجمعية.. قاطعتني في حمية.. وقالت الآن.. الجلسة سرية. فأرجو من الرجال.. الانصراف في الحال.. فهناك مواد.. في حاجة إلى إعداد.. وستكتب بها النساء، وثيقة بالدماء.. فخرجت وأنا ناقم على لمعية.. هذه المرأة الجهنمية
At the close of the chapter, the female leader of the organization assumes the voice of traditional male authority, dismissing the men so that the women can get down to real work. At the conclusion of the episode, Lamaʿiyyah’s decisively dismissive tone and authoritative commands has her fully inhabiting the voice of paternalism for the sake of feminism. Lamaʿiyyah having achieved dominance, al-Aswānī is left passively spiteful and resigned to her authority. In his final poem which concludes the chapter, he can only complain about the evil women who would subject men to the authority of Nazla and Bahiya. He makes his own plea for equality, saying: “أن العدالة تقتضى منح التساوى لا الأذية” (“justice requires granting equality rather than doling out punishment”). In this moment he too is switching roles, voicing the interactional trope of the moralizing feminist, complaining about society’s ills and gender tyranny, but for the sake of men.
لا حرية للرجال..كلهم دجال..كبلوهم بالسلاسل والقيود.. والمواد والبنود.. لاطلاق.. على الإطلاق..
Debates in Egypt over personal status laws had been a major touchpoint for decades, and in the mid-1960s the Nasser regime seriously considered annulling certain laws like that of “bayt al-ṭāʾah” (“the house of obedience”, whereby husbands claim the right to demand obedience from their wives,) in the name of women’s advancement. Women’s magazines and national newspapers were full of articles and editorials likening the institution of bayt al-ṭāʾah to feudal relations of slavery. In response, defenders of traditional Islamic values publicized stories about the broken homes and neglected children that result from the breakdown of the moral order.
This debate is on display in the maqāmah as the rhymed slogans and speeches of the feminists are exaggerated to satirical lengths. In al-Aswānī’s version, the usual objections to the ruinous effects of patriarchy on the country’s women are spoofed as the untamed and liberated women lord over men with their oppressive beliefs. It is not mere liberation, but the subjugation of men that the Association’s women members are calling for. Sister Lamaʿiyyah, the group’s leader, famous for her many victories against lowly men, is called to speak. She herself is the wife to four men and author of such books as:
”هادى الأبصار، القلوب.. في شيل الفكه من الجيوب“
"كيف تحولين الانسجام والدندنة..إلى هم وعكننة”
"كيف تستعملين السم.. ليصبح زوجك بلا أم"
All of the slogans and fictional book titles index the speech repertoires of feminist discourse and the sort of “how-to” self-help rhetoric of women’s magazines. This is not the language of a wholly separate dialect, the autonomous colloquial subaltern voice of women, but a relatively small string of conspicuous forms within speech which can be identified as “feminist discourse.” Sister Lamaʿiyyah’s book titles are metapragmatic stereotypes about activist feminist language, taken to the absurd extremes of the unruly shrew who wants to unsettle marital harmony and thus poisons her mother-in-law. We have, in fact, two types of stereotypes working in tandem: the typical misogynist stereotypes about anarchy-loving feminists aiming to enslave men on one hand, and metapragmatic stereotypes concerning the phraseology of women’s liberation on the other. Al-Aswānī’s comedic effect relies on sneaking in the former dressed in the latter. This is possible for two reasons. The first is that because registers are the effect achieved by the social perception of a specific semiotic repertoire rather than comprehensive structures in of themselves, it is possible to condense and combine them, or play them tropically off each other. Secondly, registers often invoke discursive genres rather than always necessarily having to be rooted in a specific biographical identity or social class. Sister Lamaʿiyyah’s book titles are not merely enregistering her own voice, but the different social domains in which she has register competence.
The members of the Women’s Association agree that some further amendments need to be made to the eleven amendments to the 1929 personal status law that are being proposed by the government. Sister Lamaʿiyyah then lists 9 amendments in rhymed prose, meant to echo the language of constitutional legalese، but nevertheless quite silly. For example:
٥- إذا أقام الزوج مع أمه.. أباح القانون دمه.. ولا يجوز زيارة الأمهات.. إلا في مناسبات. بشرط أن يكون الزوج في رفقة زوجته.. حتى لا تطول غيبته
The rules are meant to establish a new regime of bayt al-ṭāʾah, but in reverse, regulating male behavior and guarding against their disobedience leading to a breakdown of the moral order.
٦ - السهر في المقاهى.. من أخطر الدواهى.. وللزوجة اقتحام للمكان.. والاستعانة بأى إنسان. لإخراج الزوج في الحال.. دون معارضة ولا سؤال
The amendments are a clever mix of tone, being simultaneously a type of impersonal admonishment and a well-known brand of female nagging. In fact, the actual proposed amendments to the 1929 Personal Status Law contained a similar element of moral reprimand. They were written in the authoritative voice of Nasserist style state feminism, a voice which was seen by conservatives and religious factions as reflecting a type of elitist idealism, issued from on high by institutions like the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Social Affairs. These western-oriented elites were well-connected and had never themselves dealt with the financial difficulties of divorce. The pro-reform movement of the 1960s was actually led by professional women holding prominent jobs in the public sector as well as positions of cultural influence. These women often wrote opinion columns in newspapers and magazines which made strong moral claims about personal freedom, national duty, religious protections, and the relationship between female subjectivity and the regulation of male behavior. The claim of a moral fact (late nights at the cafe are the most dangerous type of calamity) followed by a statement of rights (a woman may plunge into any place to extract her husband) is a structure shared by declarations of rights, the editorial pages of Hawwa magazine, and the combative spouse at home. That the language al-Aswānī incorporates into his maqāmah is indexical of all of these repertoires is a testament to his competence invoking linguistic registers to play on social stereotypes, not to some inherent quality of language to act as a repository for them.
After Lamaʿiyyah has finished reciting the 9 proposed amendments, the crowd breaks out into applause, at which point al-Aswānī tries to offer a rebuttal. But the feminists won’t have anything to do with it.
وهنا علا التصفيق والهتاف واهتز المكان وإرتج.. فقمت لكى أعارض واحتج.. ولكن الست لمعية رئيسة الجمعية.. قاطعتني في حمية.. وقالت الآن.. الجلسة سرية. فأرجو من الرجال.. الانصراف في الحال.. فهناك مواد.. في حاجة إلى إعداد.. وستكتب بها النساء، وثيقة بالدماء.. فخرجت وأنا ناقم على لمعية.. هذه المرأة الجهنمية
At the close of the chapter, the female leader of the organization assumes the voice of traditional male authority, dismissing the men so that the women can get down to real work. At the conclusion of the episode, Lamaʿiyyah’s decisively dismissive tone and authoritative commands has her fully inhabiting the voice of paternalism for the sake of feminism. Lamaʿiyyah having achieved dominance, al-Aswānī is left passively spiteful and resigned to her authority. In his final poem which concludes the chapter, he can only complain about the evil women who would subject men to the authority of Nazla and Bahiya. He makes his own plea for equality, saying: “أن العدالة تقتضى منح التساوى لا الأذية” (“justice requires granting equality rather than doling out punishment”). In this moment he too is switching roles, voicing the interactional trope of the moralizing feminist, complaining about society’s ills and gender tyranny, but for the sake of men.
How the Exorcism Started in the Home of the Herbalist
In another episode entitled (كيف بدأ الزار في بيت العطار), the voices of even more marginalized groups literally come to possess one of al-Aswānī’s companions. In al-Aswānī’s 16th maqāmah, the usual cast of friends is sitting around talking when they come to the topic of Zār, a ritual exorcism cult. The group mainly agrees that the practice is ignorant, backwards, and an embarrassment. But one of the companions, Zakarīya, admonishes them, saying that it is the friends who are ignorant for not knowing the history of Zār not for respecting an important part of folk heritage.
Zār ceremonies are an almost ideal topic for showcasing subaltern speech and beliefs. Originally thought to have been brought to Egypt by slaves taken from Ethiopia, they were an important heterodox religious ritual carried out by a specific exorcist cult, derided by members of the mainstream Sunni culture in Egypt, and especially by those of higher socioeconomic classes. Zār exorcism has been interpreted by anthropologists as a means through which subordinate individuals can bring attention to their needs and express the otherwise inexpressible in public. In this way, Zār ceremonies literally permit the subaltern to speak. The cultural debates over Zār are reflected in the humorous exchanges between al-Aswānī’s friend al-Saʿadanī, who is extremely incredulous about the entire enterprise, and Zakariya, who claims to possess knowledge about the practice’s elusive origins as well as detailed information about active groups. After the two bicker for some time, Zakariya says he knows of a woman named Zakiya who does weekly Zār exorcisms, and invites the friends to go see a ceremony firsthand.
Upstairs in the building where they arrive, they are greeted by Zakiya’s husband ʿAṭiyyah who ushers them into a room where Zakiyyah stands before them, shaking violently in a silk shirt. Surrounding her are a darwish and three women holding tambourines and incense. The darwish recites the long list of demands that the demon has for releasing his host.
فوقي ياوليه.. اسمعي طلبات العفريت.. انه يطلب توبين شيث.. وفرخة محمرة بالزبدة.. وجلباب صوف ولبده
ʿAṭiyyah is exasperated that new demands seems to keep coming every week. Al-Saʿadanī is incredulous once again, laughing and telling ʿAṭiyyah not to allow himself be taken in by this occultist extortion.
ما هذا يا عطية. احفظ فلوسك يا هفيه..وقم أدب في الحال زكية لا تصدق أن زوجتك ركبها عفريت..كما يريد أن يوهمك هذا الخرتيت فاهتاج زكريا واغتاظ.. وتفوه بغريب الألفاظ
For al-Saʿadanī, Zār is nothing more than the bewitching power of mumbo jumbo. But just as he’s feeling confident, the darwish suddenly reveals that it is in fact al-Saʿadanī who is possessed.
كيف لا تعرف أنك مركوب.. وحالك مقلوب.. وأنك بالعفريت ملبوس.. من يوم ما عرفت الفلوس.. والتفت الرجل نحو النساء وكن ينضحن وجه زكية بالماء.. وصاح كقائد يعطى أمر الهجوم فقال وهو يزوم.. "دقوا السعدني..دقة عثماني. تحضر عفريته الجواني
The darwish here uses a specific term for possession, that of being “donned” by a demon (talbasuhu, the possessed being referred to by the passive participle “malbūs”), an example of the specific jargon used among Zār circles. At this, al-Saʿadanī is unable to move, and begins to go through the physical motions of exorcism: his mouth foaming, his body shaking uncontrollably, and falling to the ground. When he finally comes to, he has been cured of his incredulity. With tears in his eyes he proclaims:
لقد نجوت من الموت.. وعدت من بطن الحوت.. آمنت بوجود العفاريت.. وأنها تضرب باليد والشلاليت
These are al-Saʿadanī’s own words, but he is also now speaking on behalf of his demon, as well as double voicing the discourse of the cult.
This episode reveals much about the relationship between register competence, social status, and vernacular epistemologies. It is obvious from the beginning that the group regards the Zār cult with a great deal of social stigma; as a set of backwards discursive practices. By reenacting the ceremony as a plot device in his maqāmah, al-Aswānī creates a connection between the ritual and the maqāmat’s famous themes of linguistic hucksterism, hysteria, and superstition.
Zār ceremonies were highly gendered, a practice meant specifically to reflect social conditions “in terms of sex segregation, gender inequality, low female status, the restriction of women from religious participation, relative isolation, and marital insecurity.” But in al-Aswānī’s account, one of its biggest proponents turns out to be one of al-Aswānī’s male friends Zakariya, someone who successfully paints the group as themselves ignorant and backwards for being snobby about popular culture. He aligns himself as a member of the Zār cult not by the nature of his objective identity, but through “patterns of discursive and other semiotic behaviors.” The Zār cult’s biggest critic, Mahmoud al-Saʿadanī, also becomes suddenly versed in the discourse when he is possessed by a demon, emerging from his trance to speak in its same ecstatic register to give his endorsement. His possession is a farcically literal example of role alignment, whereby an individual aligns their self-image with the characterological figures of a given register. By ventriloquizing the discourse of the malbūs upon his emergence from the demonic trance, al-Saʿadanī magically obtains Zār register competency, which makes him radically alter his stance towards the cult. To say that the language associated with the Zār cult was colloquial, beyond being reductive, would be to miss out on the specific and elective ways that register acquisition “a form of semiotic capital that advances certain rights and privileges.”
There in an interesting parallel between al-Saʿadanī’s bewitchment in this fictional maqāmah and his own deep commitment to Nasserism in both words and deeds in real life. Despite al-Aswānī’s hatred of the Nasser regime and al-Saʿadanī's being a prominent figure in the Vanguard organization, the secret organization of the Nasserite regime, the two maintained a warm friendship. But a year after the maqāmat was published al-Saʿadanī’s was arrested during Sadat’s corrective revolution, al-Aswānī would refuse to do more than contribute legal memos on Al-Saʿadanī's behalf. Embittered by his friend’s unwillingness to help, Al-Saʿadanī wrote a critique of al-Aswānī’s reactionary politics after his death in an article entitled “the al-Aswānī Tragedy” (1983). In light of this context, a dialogic reading of the episode is possible whereby al-Saʿadanī's bewitchment pertains to more than one cult.
Zār ceremonies are an almost ideal topic for showcasing subaltern speech and beliefs. Originally thought to have been brought to Egypt by slaves taken from Ethiopia, they were an important heterodox religious ritual carried out by a specific exorcist cult, derided by members of the mainstream Sunni culture in Egypt, and especially by those of higher socioeconomic classes. Zār exorcism has been interpreted by anthropologists as a means through which subordinate individuals can bring attention to their needs and express the otherwise inexpressible in public. In this way, Zār ceremonies literally permit the subaltern to speak. The cultural debates over Zār are reflected in the humorous exchanges between al-Aswānī’s friend al-Saʿadanī, who is extremely incredulous about the entire enterprise, and Zakariya, who claims to possess knowledge about the practice’s elusive origins as well as detailed information about active groups. After the two bicker for some time, Zakariya says he knows of a woman named Zakiya who does weekly Zār exorcisms, and invites the friends to go see a ceremony firsthand.
Upstairs in the building where they arrive, they are greeted by Zakiya’s husband ʿAṭiyyah who ushers them into a room where Zakiyyah stands before them, shaking violently in a silk shirt. Surrounding her are a darwish and three women holding tambourines and incense. The darwish recites the long list of demands that the demon has for releasing his host.
فوقي ياوليه.. اسمعي طلبات العفريت.. انه يطلب توبين شيث.. وفرخة محمرة بالزبدة.. وجلباب صوف ولبده
ʿAṭiyyah is exasperated that new demands seems to keep coming every week. Al-Saʿadanī is incredulous once again, laughing and telling ʿAṭiyyah not to allow himself be taken in by this occultist extortion.
ما هذا يا عطية. احفظ فلوسك يا هفيه..وقم أدب في الحال زكية لا تصدق أن زوجتك ركبها عفريت..كما يريد أن يوهمك هذا الخرتيت فاهتاج زكريا واغتاظ.. وتفوه بغريب الألفاظ
For al-Saʿadanī, Zār is nothing more than the bewitching power of mumbo jumbo. But just as he’s feeling confident, the darwish suddenly reveals that it is in fact al-Saʿadanī who is possessed.
كيف لا تعرف أنك مركوب.. وحالك مقلوب.. وأنك بالعفريت ملبوس.. من يوم ما عرفت الفلوس.. والتفت الرجل نحو النساء وكن ينضحن وجه زكية بالماء.. وصاح كقائد يعطى أمر الهجوم فقال وهو يزوم.. "دقوا السعدني..دقة عثماني. تحضر عفريته الجواني
The darwish here uses a specific term for possession, that of being “donned” by a demon (talbasuhu, the possessed being referred to by the passive participle “malbūs”), an example of the specific jargon used among Zār circles. At this, al-Saʿadanī is unable to move, and begins to go through the physical motions of exorcism: his mouth foaming, his body shaking uncontrollably, and falling to the ground. When he finally comes to, he has been cured of his incredulity. With tears in his eyes he proclaims:
لقد نجوت من الموت.. وعدت من بطن الحوت.. آمنت بوجود العفاريت.. وأنها تضرب باليد والشلاليت
These are al-Saʿadanī’s own words, but he is also now speaking on behalf of his demon, as well as double voicing the discourse of the cult.
This episode reveals much about the relationship between register competence, social status, and vernacular epistemologies. It is obvious from the beginning that the group regards the Zār cult with a great deal of social stigma; as a set of backwards discursive practices. By reenacting the ceremony as a plot device in his maqāmah, al-Aswānī creates a connection between the ritual and the maqāmat’s famous themes of linguistic hucksterism, hysteria, and superstition.
Zār ceremonies were highly gendered, a practice meant specifically to reflect social conditions “in terms of sex segregation, gender inequality, low female status, the restriction of women from religious participation, relative isolation, and marital insecurity.” But in al-Aswānī’s account, one of its biggest proponents turns out to be one of al-Aswānī’s male friends Zakariya, someone who successfully paints the group as themselves ignorant and backwards for being snobby about popular culture. He aligns himself as a member of the Zār cult not by the nature of his objective identity, but through “patterns of discursive and other semiotic behaviors.” The Zār cult’s biggest critic, Mahmoud al-Saʿadanī, also becomes suddenly versed in the discourse when he is possessed by a demon, emerging from his trance to speak in its same ecstatic register to give his endorsement. His possession is a farcically literal example of role alignment, whereby an individual aligns their self-image with the characterological figures of a given register. By ventriloquizing the discourse of the malbūs upon his emergence from the demonic trance, al-Saʿadanī magically obtains Zār register competency, which makes him radically alter his stance towards the cult. To say that the language associated with the Zār cult was colloquial, beyond being reductive, would be to miss out on the specific and elective ways that register acquisition “a form of semiotic capital that advances certain rights and privileges.”
There in an interesting parallel between al-Saʿadanī’s bewitchment in this fictional maqāmah and his own deep commitment to Nasserism in both words and deeds in real life. Despite al-Aswānī’s hatred of the Nasser regime and al-Saʿadanī's being a prominent figure in the Vanguard organization, the secret organization of the Nasserite regime, the two maintained a warm friendship. But a year after the maqāmat was published al-Saʿadanī’s was arrested during Sadat’s corrective revolution, al-Aswānī would refuse to do more than contribute legal memos on Al-Saʿadanī's behalf. Embittered by his friend’s unwillingness to help, Al-Saʿadanī wrote a critique of al-Aswānī’s reactionary politics after his death in an article entitled “the al-Aswānī Tragedy” (1983). In light of this context, a dialogic reading of the episode is possible whereby al-Saʿadanī's bewitchment pertains to more than one cult.
Conclusion
This article has argued that a rich linguistic satire of society like the one that maqāmāt provide does not rely on a specific aesthetic repertoire, contingent on either the sway of some aesthetic pendulum nor the jocular temperament of the Egyptian dialect. Enregisterment and other semiotic processes of voicing are everywhere in literature, a narratological mechanism based on utterly common sociolinguistic processes. Al-Aswānī was indeed writing during a particular moment of social turmoil, but not in one which had privileged access to dialogism.
Such a revision of does not mean that we should forego a linguistic preoccupation with historiography altogether. Language ideologies are a rich source for interpretation, as they “are profitably conceived as multiple because of the plurality of meaningful social divisions (class, gender, clan, elites, generations, and so on) within sociocultural groups that have the potential to produce divergent perspectives expressed as indices of group membership.” This is equally true of the literary text. As metalinguistic as it is, the language of the novel is too responsive to the subtleties of sociolinguistic life at specific historical moments as to be justifiably used as a type of coarse-grained fossil record of the great aesthetic currents or the political divides of the nation.
But at the same time as linguistic anthropology helps us to examine the immediate dynamics of register use in interaction, there is still an important role for literary studies in recognizing double-voiced discourse across longer expanses of time. As Bakhtin himself says, “there exists a group of artistic-speech phenomena… [which] exceed the limits of linguistics… stylization, parody, skaz, and dialogue.” There is style and parody detectable in al-Aswānī’s own voice as: the artist-speech of an author performing his register competence as the ultimate rāwī of his own maqāmāt. His lack of regard for adhering closely to every rule of the maqāmah genre belie a certain type of ironic distance, a sense of carefree insubordination against maqāmah as belle lettres, an attempt at remaking the form into mass media entertainment. Al-Aswānī is the inheritor of the legacy of al-Hariri and al-Shidyaq, but at first glance it doesn’t seem that he takes the responsibility seriously. But it is precisely in those awkward moments when his rhyme meter goes slack, when his isnād loses its thread, or when the plots seem absurdly contemporary that we can hear the double-voice of parody. Bakhtin says we should always watch out for this second context, that of parody, lest “stylization will be taken for style, parody simply for a poor work of art.” The seemingly clumsy execution of the genre conventions is in fact a knowing, competent bringing together social parody and a genre parody simultaneously. Like the non-congruence of Sartre speaking fuṣḥa, Al-Aswānī is performing the enregistered voice of the maqāmah author tropically.
In fact, al-Aswānī’s ironic stance is the most maqāmaesque like aspect of his whole project. According to Pierre Cachia, al-Aswānī is was fully aware of his remoteness from neoclassicism, mocking the artificiality of his predecessors and pointing “in a back-handed way to the long road travelled by Arab prose writers from formalism to functionalism and to experimentation and virtuosity.” But this is a common feature of the genre. Mohamed-Salah Omri makes an attempt at a classification system of different types of maqāmāt, from partial explicit reproduction of maqāmah (Hadith ʿIssa ibn Hisham) to parody of maqāmah ( Leg Over Leg) to colloquialization of maqāmah (maqāmāt al-Tūnisī) or even implied maqāmah (Sa’id the Pessoptimist). What they all share is a metageneric engagement. Renegotiations and outright rejections of the maqāmah form go right back to its origin. Even the first maqāmāt were written as a parody of yet other genres. Whether ḥadīth scholarship or majālis “sessions” or “lectures” or Amālī “dictations”, as Devin Stewart claims, the maqāmah has survived as a genre through this very chain of turning and mocking what has come before.
Al-Hamadhānī probably adopted the generic label maqāmāt, literally “standings,” as an intentionally ironic inversion of majālis, literally “sittings,” but technically “assemblies” or “lectures,” a synonym of majālis al-imlāʾ (dictation assemblies) or amālī “dictations.” To capture this allusion to the pre-existing genre, one might therefore venture to translate maqāmāt as “anti-lectures.”
As Omri and others point out, each new maqāmah stakes its claim in some way by reevaluating or turning on what has preceded it, on making a maqāmah for this age. Each one is an anti-anti-lecture. Al-Aswānī composes his out of the dialogic material of the various discursive and semiotic genres of his own time. That dialogic relationships are a twofold discourse between contemporary social registers as well as historical language styles makes it so that polyphony is a deeply historical phenomenon, if not a easily wieldable historiographic yardstick for comparing the intensity of periods of social and linguistic upheaval.
Comments