The Palestinian Hikaye
الحكاية الشعبية الفلسطينية
The winter-evening tale told by women to women and children — a folk narrative form inscribed by UNESCO in 2008, and a critique of society delivered from inside the household.
The hikaye is a Palestinian narrative form with its own conventions of language, rhythm, and voice, distinct from other genres of folk narrative. It is told at home on winter evenings, at unplanned and companionable gatherings of small groups of women and children; men rarely attend, and it is considered improper for them to. The teller works almost entirely through the voice — emphasis, speech rhythm, vocal inflection — and the tales themselves are narrated in Palestinian dialect, either the rural fallahi or the urban madani.
The tales are fiction, developed over centuries, and their subjects are family and society. UNESCO’s account is blunt about what they do: the hikaye offers a critique of society from women’s point of view, and draws a portrait of the social structure as it bears directly on women’s lives. Many of the tales turn on a woman caught between duty and desire. Told in a domestic setting, by women, to an audience of women and children, they are the one place in the traditional order where that argument could be made aloud.
The most substantial collection is Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, compiled by Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana and published in English in 1989, with French and Arabic editions following in 1997 and 2001. Its forty-five tales were selected from a larger body of some two hundred, gathered from women in the Galilee, the West Bank, and Gaza. The book is taught in university courses in Palestine and abroad; in 2007 Hamas-led authorities in Gaza briefly banned it, and reversed the decision after public objection.
UNESCO inscribed the Palestinian Hikaye in 2008 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, having originally proclaimed it in 2005. The inscription notes that almost every Palestinian woman over the age of seventy is a hikaye teller, and that the form is in decline — pressed by mass media, which teaches people to regard their own customs as backward, and by the continued disruption of social life under the political conditions in Palestine.