Youssef Rakha goes authentic A chance to delve into Sirat Bani Hilal, the last surviving rabab-sung epic of Upper Egypt, is an equivocal pleasure. On the one hand the catchy folk tunes and compelling storyline (the heroic exploits of the Bani Hilal tribes, led by the black-visaged Abu-Zeid Al-Hilali) have the potential to be absorbing. But any encounter with this all but extinct performance tradition will tend to raise disconcerting questions about the place it might occupy vis-à-vis the present- day city dweller and the kind of value it might carry outside its own, largely obsolete context. In a culture intent on self-annihilation, such visions of authenticity are at best uncomfortable. Like so many other aspects of the culture, the Sira has not developed beyond the designation of heritage and to encounter it raw (in the context of experimental theatre or Ramadan entertainment) is less a matter of regaining analytically impossible access to that heritage than one of peering at a commodified, insulated version of it -- in the present case with the aid of specialist commentary -- through the often stained glass of a modern museum display. Such were the feelings on attending one of the 10 nights of the Sira at Beit Al-Sehiemi in Gamaleya. Presided over by the vernacular Upper Egyptian poet Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi, the event utilised the last surviving sha'ir (poet, a performer who, unlike the lesser rawi-narrator, is capable of reciting the entire gargantuan affair if called upon to do so), Sayed El-Duwi of Qena. The performance was complicated further by the absence of El-Duwi's own band of musicians (the company of the rabab-player Hammam, one member of that band, makes a significant difference to the quality and tenor of any Sayed El- Duwi performance), by a sound system that failed to take account of the ups and downs of El-Duwi's own powerful voice (making the amplification, in parts, painfully loud) and by El-Abnoudi's own misgivings about how the Sira would be received by a predominantly Cairene audience, which compelled him to remain on stage throughout the duration of the performance, supplying commentary and interpretation, leading audience interaction, directing and redirecting the flow and occasionally satirising notions of Arab glory and heroism in the epic itself. There is no doubt that the rabab-sung Sira (as opposed to the classic, literary versions of the epic to be found in the Arabic canon) has always been marginalised. Its recent resurgence is due neither to popular interest nor to a state-directed national initiative, however, but simply to the efforts of a handful of lone champions like El-Abnoudi, agents of the arts whose own, independently acquired status has enabled them to extract the Sira's last accredited practitioners out of their isolation and poverty. Sayed El- Duwi first studied at the hands of his father, Hajj El- Duwi, on whose death he continued to learn with Gaber Abu Hussein of Sohag, then the only other practicing sha'ir, until the latter's death. El-Abnoudi, who produced a compendium of the first part of the Sira published in five volumes by Akhbar Al-Yom, spent two decades researching the epic with both Gaber Abu Hussein and the Duwis, tracking its resonances elsewhere in the Arab world, notably in Tunisia, and transcribing millions of muraba'at (sing. muraba'), the traditional quatrains in which Upper Egyptian versions of the Sira are sung. They serve as both a lyrical medium and an aid to improvisation -- since the sha'ir, rather than remembering the whole epic by heart, simply remembers the events and the content of the dialogues they incorporate, rendering them in the form of muraba'at that he improvises as he goes along, and in which he relies on a range of set phrases designed as "fillers" to think ahead. Outside the context of saint's anniversaries, weddings and circumcision ceremonies, then, the two, truncated episodes sung by El-Duwi -- the birth of Abu-Zeid, and his much later pre-conquest exploratory trip to Tunis -- were presented almost as academically mediated examples of the tradition. El-Abnoudi's commentary, without which they would have made little sense to anyone unfamiliar with the Sira, was thus essential. Yet following a long, secular-intellectual rendition of what was to be recited, the latter's presence on stage (while often enlightening) proved somewhat distracting. Taken together, however, what El-Duwi and El-Abnoudi had to offer amounted to a reasonably comprehensive beginner's introduction to the tradition as it was practised until recently in Upper Egypt, with the latter illuminating the plot, the methods and techniques of Sira masters like the former and, in the process, displaying his own, by now well-known, rhetorical powers. In this framework, sadly, what was once a simple means of working the public imagination becomes a subject of scholarly pursuit. And otherwise invaluable moments of artistic communion tend to be lost on city dwellers all too eager to understand, cognitively, rather than make emotional and spiritual contact with the images and the notions evoked by the epic. Perhaps such contact is rendered impossible through decontextualisation, perhaps one should be grateful for the specialist commentary provided. Yet El-Abnoudi's most interesting contribution must be the Upper Egyptian-conscious irony with which he presented glories desperately removed not only from the disinherited imagination that engendered them but, sadly, from the more privileged city lives which they enter only as museum displays.
