Veiled Sentiments

Abu-Lughod recognizes that poetry for the Bedouins is not the only means of expressing emotions; rather, it is a way to express “sentiments radically different from those they express about the same situations using nonpoetic language” (186). Both modes, common discourse and poetic discourse, address personal life in diverse ways. Abu-Lughod summarizes the Foucauldian definition of “discourse” to explain these sets of language that she teases apart.

Using a previous example, Abu-Lughod explains that poems can reveal sentiments (like sadness) that differ from those that societal conventions might demand (like anger) in charged circumstances. She uses stories of two separate women who are older than those at the centers of the stories, like first wives or older aunts. These stories illustrate how women might use or share poems that express their true sentiments, even though their outward actions and speech appear “to ignore […] or not to care” about the circumstances that cause them stress (197). In either case, the woman will lose face if she expresses disappointment for the lack of respect or position afforded her; sharing the poems is a way to “[confess] how wounded” she feels (197).

When they mourn a loved one, Awlad ‘Ali use poetry to “express their sentiments through a ritualized funeral lament called ‘crying’ (bkā) that is structurally equivalent and technically similar to poetry” (197). Abu-Lughod uses three examples to demonstrate how poetry and bkā allow individuals who must express “anger and blame” outwardly to “communicate sorrow and the devastating effects of the loss on their personal well-being” (197).

Bkā is “much more than weeping; it is a chanted lament” that helps women and those with them to “express their grief” (198). The performance of the poem/songs includes some weeping; there is a resemblance between crying and singing. While Bedouin society expects that family members will seek a culprit for their loved one’s death and express their anger verbally, women’s poems reveal an entirely different emotional element of the experience. Men do not cry, and while they encourage one another to toughen up, they are present for and sanction these expressions of despair.

Abu-Lughod formally gives the name “discourse of honor” to those public sentiments that differ so clearly from private sentiments expressed in poetry (205). Because honor, or being a “real man,” is so intimately tied to “freedom from control by others” (205), a man’s (and, in many cases, a woman’s) emotions must also be free from such control. This shared value, which some realize differently and to different degrees from others, motivates the outward expressions of righteous, vengeful anger (as opposed to illogical sadness) that Abu-Lughod describes as common.

Because “the prime sentiment of resistance is anger” or “denial of concern” (205), both responses can be seen as honorable while still calling attention to the tension that bothers the one who feels in a given situation. Feeling “wounded or deeply affected” by a loss is an “[attribute] of the weak, of the young, the poor, and the female” (205). “Blaming others is an aggressive act that focuses anger” (206), both of which are compatible with the redemptive honor system in Bedouin society.

“The same people who so energetically present themselves as invulnerable and assertive” can also “portray themselves differently through their poems” (206-07). While expressions of helplessness are “the mark of impotence” and vulnerability the mark of “dependency and weakness” (207), “the discourse of poetry” brings both helplessness and vulnerability to the fore (205). Abu-Lughod raises questions about why this state of affairs exists and then explains that she will take up these questions in the coming chapters.