3—
The Arabic Epic Poet as Outcast, Trickster, and Con Man
Susan Slyomovics
The heroic deeds of the Bani Hilal tribe—a tribe of Bedouin Arabs who migrated from the Arabian peninsula into North Africa during the tenth and eleventh centuries—are preserved throughout the Arabic-speaking world in a diverse cycle of narratives (both prose and poetry), including the oral epic of Sirat Bani Hilal. The epic is perpetuated in Upper Egypt by a class of poets who perform in public and are simultaneously regarded by the community as social and ethnic outcasts, as well as respected verbal artists and transmitters of cuture. Susan Slyomovics maintains that Hilali oral epic poets excel in rhetorical devices during performance, most typically puns or wordplays. She suggests that puns, the trope par excellence of Egyptian epic, serve as a poetic challenge to audiences to negotiate the ambiguities inherent in the outcast-poet of performance, the outcast-poet-hero of the narrative, and the discourse of both.
Across the folklore of virtually all cultures, the figure of the trickster stands out as a convergence of deception, disguise, and verbal ambiguity.[1] The trickster acts and speaks in a paradoxical fashion, one that Roger Abrahams characterizes as "combin [ing] the attributes of many other types that we tend to distinguish clearly. At various times, he is clown, fool, jokester, initiate, culture hero, even ogre."[2] Claude Lévi-Strauss has described the trickster as the expression of both sides of any binary opposition—life against death, chaos versus order, the sacred and the profane.[3] Such clownlike personalities are often culturally sanctioned characters, allowed, either in narrative or in performance, to reverse the rules of both language and society.
This essay explores several levels of the use of the trickster figure in the Arab epic Sirat Bani Hilal, a cycle of heroic tales recited throughout the Arabic-speaking world in the specific version I collected in Upper Egypt in 1983. What are the interconnections between the role of the Upper Egyptian outcast-poet in his society and the Arab trickster-epic hero in the epic narrative, and how do these connections mediate the relationship between the storyteller and his story in an enacted performance? I claim that at the heart of this configuration is an outcast-poet, on the one hand, a trickster-culture hero, on the other, with a third equally ambiguous and polyvalent feature
of Upper Egyptian performance, namely, the proliferation of puns embedded and improvised in live performance. I begin with a brief description of the life of a contemporary performer and reciter, the Upper Egyptian epic poet 'Awadallah 'Abd al-Jalil 'Ali, in order to relate the ambiguous, outcast position of this epic poet to the rich, multivocal role of the trickster-epic hero, Abu Zayd the Hilali.
The Epic Poet, 'Awadallah 'Abd Al-Jalil 'Ali
'Awadallah 'Abd al-Jalil 'Ali is an epic poet from the province of Aswan in Upper Egypt. He sings in the surrounding southern Egyptian marketplaces, in cafés, during public ceremonies, and at people's homes to celebrate births, weddings, circumcisions, a return from the hajj to Mecca, and Ramadan breakfasts. I have described elsewhere the complex status of the epic poet in southern Egypt—his role as an outcast yet at the same time the artistic bearer of his group's cultural history. In Upper Egypt, epic poets own no land, are ethnically designated as gypsies (everywhere an outcast group), and do not possess 'asil, the Upper Egyptian term for honorable character aligned with good, "clean" lineage. All these characteristics disqualify them from respectable social standing. But both audiences and poet see the poet at the moment of performance as the bearer of tradition and not as an individual, let alone an individual creative artist.[4] In performance, 'Awadallah's epic story is respected, though 'Awadallah the epic poet is not.
The Epic Hero, Abu Zayd—Outcast, Trickster, and Epic Poet
Abu Zayd the Hilali is the hero of the Arab folk epic Sirat Bani Hilal, the epic sung by 'Awadallah and the many poets of Egypt and the Arabic-speaking world. The epic hero Abu Zayd is in part a trickster figure, a characterization that is closely linked to the black skin he owes to a single word that almost accidentally governed his origin. In "the birth of the hero" sequence that is the first part of the traditional tripartitite division of the epic, the hero's mother, Khadra Sharifa, has been barren for eleven years.[5] In hopes of conceiving a son, she goes down to a magic spring in the Arabian peninsula. There she wishes upon a black bird, fierce and combative. She says:
Give me a boy like this bird,
black like this bird.
I swear to make him possess Tunis and Wadi Hama!
I swear to make him possess Tunis by the blade of the sword![6]
Her wish is granted, but divine interpretation of it is absolutely literal: her son is born with a black skin. When the Hilali Bedouin Arabs discover her
son's skin color, mother and son are banished to the desert. Abu Zayd is therefore of noble birth, but also black-skinned, in Arab epic a sure sign of servile status; he is a warrior by definition, but also by definition an outsider or outcast. The childhood and youth of this exiled hero are marked by the most approved occurrences and exploits.[7] He combats authority figures: he begins by killing his Koranic teacher, then he annihilates the Arabs responsible for humiliating his mother, and almost slays his own father. Eventually he manages to win reinstatement with the tribe, marry, father children, and acquire a great reputation as a warrior.
It is Abu Zayd's destiny to unite the warring Bedouin tribes for the battle for Tunis and the conquest of the Maghrib, the centerpiece of the epic narrative.[8] However, before embarking on the grand westward migration, as if to rehearse for the exploits ahead, the hero Abu Zayd must defend his tribe and his religion in the Arabian peninsula against two local enemies: first, a Jewish leader named Khatfa, and second, the evil Arab and Muslim king Handal, who has raided the holy city of Mecca, captured the Hilali women, and wounded the hero's father. It is the latter tale that will be examined more closely in this essay.[9]
The Pun as Outcast, The Outcast as Pun
According to Jonathan Culler, who called his introductory essay on puns "The Call of the Phoneme," puns are a reality of the language "where boundaries—between sounds, between sound and letter, between meanings—count for less than one might imagine and where supposedly discrete meanings threaten to sink into fluid subterranean signifieds too undefinable to call concepts."[10] Puns show how language, literature, and even social relations work by forging unexpected connections. Beyond serving as obvious linguistic wordplay and artistic ornamentation, the pun can expand into the narrative to generate plot, episodes, and even protagonists. Because of the ready availability of homophones in Arabic in particular and the ambiguous nature of language in general, frequent punning is a hallmark of much Upper Egyptian performance of epic poetry,[11] and the tale of king Handal versus the Hilali Bedouins, as it is told before Egyptian audiences, is a narrative in which deceit, trickery, and disguise propel the plot, and puns seem not only to govern the way it is articulated by the poet but also to generate the events and the substance of the plot itself.
We begin with the fact of a black hero whose black skin causes him to float between acceptability and rejection, much like the pun. He is accused of bastard origins, but puns are too. As will be seen, the black hero plays with identity the way puns play with language. This essay describes what unites ( ) the black epic hero, (2) the outcast Upper Egyptian epic poet who sings about the black outcast-epic hero, and (3) the language of the Arab epic song. I
claim that because the black outcast-epic hero disguises himself in the narrative as an epic poet, who in Egyptian society is coded as a social outcast, he therefore uses the language of the outcast, the double-talk and double meaning of puns, all of which points to the potential deceptiveness of language itself.
The Two-Faced Hero, The Double-Tongued Poet
The Arab epic hero Abu Zayd is two-faced, the Egyptian epic poet 'Awadallah is double-tongued. This points to a countertradition, an antirhetoric in the literary history of rhetoric. Indeed, Roland Barthes speaks of deliberate transgression, calling the use of puns "'a black rhetoric [ une rhetorique noire ] of games, parodies, erotic or obscene allusions . . . , where two taboos are circumvented, language and sex."[12] In other words, wordplay suits texts and characters that are not straightforward. Certainly, the Arab epic Sirat Bani Hilal frequently pronounces, in oral formulaic fashion, lines that speak to the hero's triumphs over the world. Some examples to describe the hero and his actions are taken from texts cited below: "Abu Zayd worked his trickery, / he mixed lies, he brought falsity"; "The hero Abu Zayd, who but him deceives the defenseless?" (ilbatal abu zed min giru yikid il'uzal ) and "I know him, Abu Zayd, the man of lies" (bta 'ilahyal ) —frequent epithets for the hero scattered throughout the epic.
In the episode of the evil Arab king Handal against the Hilali Bedouin, the range of punning and deceit has much to say about the role of epic poets in society and epic heroes in narrative. One device within the tale, for example, not only comments on the social status of the epic poet at the king's court but also exemplifies multiply embedded frameworks of disguise. The Handal tale turns on the witty syncopation of the hero Abu Zayd's disguising himself first as an epic poet and then as an old man who is also black. He assumes the poet's disguise in order to wander freely in the enemy court to entertain, to seek information, and to free his kidnapped womenfolk by slaying the enemy ruler Handal. (An important advantage of this disguise is that epic poets in Upper Egypt are permitted to associate freely with women strangers, another instance of the characteristics of the trickster converging to invert and subvert social beliefs.)[13] Thus 'Awadallah, the Upper Egyptian epic poet sings about a hero disguising himself as an epic poet (who presumably sings about an epic poet who sings about an epic poet and so on). The second disguise is that of a black slave who is the jailer of the black epic poet.
It is also noteworthy that the Handal story itself is introduced by an episode in which a mother and son meet in disguise and attempt to deceive each other. The hero Abu Zayd, while traveling through mountain and desert disguised as an epic poet with his musical instrument, the rababa,
slung over his shoulder, encounters his mother Khadra Sharifa. As if to prove that ambiguity and disguise are hereditarily acquired through the maternal line, Abu Zayd's mother has also put on a disguise; she too is dressed in the clothes of a despised black slave, the easier to flee Mecca with her wounded husband, the hero's father. Mother and son greet each other disguised as blacks and as slaves, assuming the precise trangressive characteristics that caused their original traumatic expulsion from the Bedouin Arab confederation. Abu Zayd, who is truly black-skinned, is able to pierce his mother's fake blackface, whereas the mother cannot recognize her own son disguised as an epic poet, even though one of the son's many formulaic descriptions declares that the hero is yoked, paratactically and genetically, both to his trickster status and to his mother: "(Abu Zayd), son of Sharifa, the trickster" (ibn sharifa bta' ilahyal ) where the description "trickster" can apply, by zeugma, to either or both of them. The mother has merely changed superficial attire, the first and basic level of disguise and trickery; but the son can both alter and divine appearances. He is even trickier than the mother: he deceives her for no apparent reason by announcing his own death to her in language full of ambiguities, as though to underline that the pun is the realm of the oblique, the sly, and the teasing. Then he laughs as she weeps and laments (56-65):
56: min ahd abu zed mitwaffa
57: tammit-lu sab'a -ttiyam
58: sufi -ddunya -lkaddaba
59: la damit li-basa wala sultan
60: bakit xadra bi madma' il'en
61: ana fann il'arayib HOZIN(A)
62: bakit xadra bi madma' il'en
63: ya ma fan il'arayib HOZI'ANA
64: ow'ani -zzaman w -ilben
65: 'ala kabdi 'annawah HAZINA[14]
56: "From the day Abu Zayd died,
57: seven days have passed.
58: See the world of deceit;
59: it does not last for a pasha or sultan."
60: Khadra cried tears from her eyes.
61: I, the art of Arabs, my possession / sorrowfully.
62: Khadra cried tears from her eyes.
63: Oh, how the art of Arabs is my possession / sorrowfully.
64: Fate and separation torment me.
65: Over my beloved [literally "my liver"] I mourn sorrowfully / my possession.
The word for "sorrowfully" (hazana ) can split into two words (hozi ana; "my possession" is hozana ) that are puns, cross-coupling the notion of art as full of sorrow even as the mother's beloved son is her possession and his death
is to be mourned in sadness. The multiple puns in this line also render the speaker indeterminate, allowing for ambiguity in line 61 about the art of the Arabs: do these sentiments belong to the epic poet 'Awadallah or to the epic hero Abu Zayd disguised as an epic poet, or are they the words of the mother? This pun recognizes that any of the three may be the speaker, thereby illustrating the instability not only of sounds to which different meanings can be assigned but also of meanings to which different nuances can attach in the mouths of different speakers.
Puns are about the deliberate cultivation of overlap, mess, and struggle; they emerge from language like the hero's laughter in response to his mother's laments. Laughter, a nonverbal physical reaction to one's own or another's puns and disguises, causes Abu Zayd to bare his front teeth to reveal his one unconcealable descriptor, the famous gap-teeth that forever mark the identity of the hero Abu Zayd in folk memory. His true identity is thereby revealed to his mother. While a dominant motif of this black Arab hero-trickster is his superiority of verbal wit and intellectual cunning, it is also the case that laughter, like disguise, resides in the body in an ephemeral way. Laughter acoustically emerges from the gap-toothed grin. Abu Zayd responds to this mother's laments at his supposed demise not with duplicitous punning words that exit from the hero (perhaps the poet's mouth); instead there is laughter, a nonverbal physical reaction to puns and disguises. Laughter resolves its owner's identity. Indeed, in this epic all products of the mouth are viable: the hero's laughter is revelatory and happily reunites the family. The hero's spittle, the magical liquid of his mouth, cures his father's wound. Finally, the hero's words, a vow to his father to return after twenty nights with the ninety captured Hilali maidens, set the action of the tale in motion.
The Plot of King Handal
The tale of Abu Zayd against the Arab king Handal properly begins when Abu Zayd arrives in Handal's orchards. There, he finds the Hilali maidens dressed in sackcloth and bearing the heavy waterskins (girba ) usually carried by men. The Hilali maidens are forced to attend the diwans, the public assemblies or gatherings of Arab men where females on public display are fair game for insults by passing Arabs. Abu Zayd, in his disguise as an epic poet, addresses in turn each of his beautiful maidens. In this way we, the audience, are introduced to the famous heroines of the epic, Jaz the woman warrior and herself a trickster; Rayya, Abu Zayd's daughter; Diyya, his niece; Na'sa, his wife, and so on. To each he insultingly addresses the epithet Jammasiyya. The Jammasa are an outcast tribe of Upper Egypt; to be associated with them is an insult. Yet they are in fact the modern lineal descendants of the same Bani Hilal who are the heroes of the Arab epic. In
the rest of the Arabic-speaking world, descent from the Hilali tribes is a marker of noble Arabian Bedouin heritage,[15] but in Upper Egyptian society, these subjects of heroic song are as ostracized and outcast as the poets who sing about them. In southern Egypt not just epic poets and epic heroes, but even membership in the Hilali tribe, there known as the outcast Jammasiyya tribe, reinforce the conflation and attribution of outcast status to tale, teller, and even topic.
Rayya, Abu Zayd's daughter, objects strongly to this abusive language by her father, though, in fact, he has named her what she is, a Hilali, but he has used Upper Egyptian pejorative terms. Rayya's reply yokes the identity of poet and warrior, a link altogether absent in Upper Egyptian ascriptions of social status to their epic poets. In lines 240-243 Rayya says to the epic poet who, unknown to her, is her father, the hero Abu Zayd:
My father is a poet like you—
he conceals himself, he pretends he's an artist,
he comes concealed, he pretends he's a poet,
—a bold valiant man, a horseman.
She urges Abu Zayd in his role as epic poet to make poems and give news about their predicament wherever he travels. Rayya's views of her father Abu Zayd resembles a dual-purpose metaphor of mobility: he is both epic poet and its social opposite, a horseman and a warrior whose contrasting epithets provide simultaneous, though competing, references in the same unit.
Abu Zayd then presents himself at Handal's court, where he is rudely ignored. Handal, who has heard of Abu Zayd, his black skin and his penchant for disguises, becomes the recipient or audience to Abu Zayd's multilayered characterizations. Handal instinctively recognizes the equation black outcast equals epic poet equals brazen liar as in lines 269-274:
He [Handal] feared he was the hero Abu Zayd,
lest he pretend to be an artist,
lest he with his rababa
open the doors of destruction
and take the Zoghba daughters:
"I know him, the man of lies [bta' bahtan]."
Abu Zayd begins by rebuking Handal for his ignoble treatment of visiting epic poets, and Handal apologizes. He asks Abu Zayd to play music while the Hilali maidens dance for his men. Abu Zayd fears such public display would insult his women. To delay, he insists that Handal arrange for the women to be bathed, perfumed, and beautifully attired before being presented to the Arab men. The Egyptian epic poet 'Awadallah describes in detail their enticing dress, which renders men delirious. Rayya, the hero's daughter, leads the other women. She describes their predicament in a pun: it is "bitter," the ex-
tended meaning of handal (derived from its literal meaning, "bitter colocynth"), and bitter due to a human cause, a king called Handal. This appears to be the simplest way to pun: an identity of sound that proposes complementary denotations according to a bifurcated but related context of a name and its meaning. Handal means "bitter," and the tyrant who bears this name exemplifies bitterness, thanks to a justifiable etymological basis. The relationship of a person to his or her proper name is taken up in order to draw out the important pun on the meaning or import of a personal name that also specifies the content, as in the following sequence where the words in parentheses propose the secondary meaning (11: 12-22):[16]
The young maidens, the daughters of Hilal,
women of kohl-darkened eyes,
they went out of the baths,
they have roses on their cheeks, glowing.
Rayya says: "O women,
my heart from sorrow is BITTER [HANDAL];
when he comes he brings hypocrisy,
he says to the maidens, that HANDAL [BITTER],
he says: 'Dance, O maidens.'
Beware of agreeing to any word:
the sword before the dance."
xaragu -ssabaya banat hilal
'ummat al'uyun ilkahayil
xaraju min ilhammam
lihum ward 'alxadd I sal
rayya-tgul ya niswan
galbi min ilhamm HANDAL
lamma yaji yijib dihan
yigul -ssibaya da HANDAL
yigul argisu ya sabaya
i'wa -tmasu-lu kilma
issef awla min irragasan
Rayya tells Handal his very name will not only forever stand for "bitterness" but will also be the linguistic sign for ignominy among the Arabs when word circulates via the epic poet that Handal dishonors Arab women by forcing them to dance and display themselves publicly. Handal strikes Rayya, and she falls to the ground. Her father, Abu Zayd, still disguised as the epic poet, is forced to witness violence against his beloved daughter; only then does he reveal himself to her in the secret language, the Najdi Arabic dialect they share. Until now, the Arab maidens' refusal to expose themselves and their bodies to strange men has been matched by Abu Zayd's insistence on concealment even from his closest family members. Only when the inviolate female seclusion is threatened by dishonoring public display does
Abu Zayd seek refuge in the play of secret language, where he can safely reveal himself. The suggestion is of secret subculture, set apart linguistically, perhaps on a higher level, and based on those few initiates who decode meanings. The trickster not only shifts among various human identities, but he is also the master of linguistic register ( 11: 84-95):
Abu Zayd the bold one saw her,
And his sound reason was lost.
Abu Zayd said: "This is folly.
I put difficulties behind, and I find them ahead."
His reason says unsheathe your sword.
His reason says patience is the model.
He spoke gibberish to the Hilali women
in the Najdi tongue, a foreign tongue;
he said: "Dance, O Rayya,
You whose lot is darkness.
Come, dance a little.
I am myself the Hilali, your father."
He said: "Dance, O Rayya,
Woman of earrings and coquettish.
I am myself the chief of war,
My father Rizg, my grandfather Nayil."
He said: "Dance, O Rayya.
I am myself your father, Salama."
(11: 84-95)
wi'i -lha -lmigdim abu zed
aglu -ssalim indar
abu zed gal di balawi
afutha wara w-algaha giddaam
aglu yigul ashab sfak
aglu yigul issabr istimtal
ratan banat ilhilaliyya
bi -Isa najd garib ya lisan
yigul argusi ya rayya
ya -lli layali nabuki
ta'ala 'argusi swayye
bi zat ilhilali abuki
gal liha argusi ya rayya
ya -mm ilhalag wa -ddalayil
bizati rayis ilgomaya
abuya rizg wijadd I nayil
In the end, Abu Zayd is unmasked by Handal's daughter, 'Ajaja, who is a sand-diviner. She is able to penetrate his disguise as an epic poet and singer because her power resides not in the identity transformations of a trickster but in her ability to read the truth about the present and the future in the
sands. Abu Zayd tries to forestall 'Ajaja's exposure of this identity by claiming that according to Arab custom women have no right to be present, let alone speak in Arab male assemblies; to deflect attention from her accurate reading of his form, he reproaches her with unveiling her own. This leads the evil king Handal, 'Ajaja's father, to accuse his own daughter of loving the epic poet, a dishonorable passion that leads to her dishonorable presence among men. Nonetheless, she speaks, connecting all Abu Zayd's disparate disguises and social meanings. Her words send him to prison.
In prison, Abu Zayd continues to proclaim he is merely an innocent wandering epic singer. Handal proposes to Johar, his black jailer, that he, Johar, travel to the Hilali homeland in Najd to verify whether the real Abu Zayd is there: a man, unlike a pun, cannot be present in two places, distant Arabia and Handal's jail, at one time. Johar's reward is to be Jaz, one of the Hilali heroines. Marriage to her would ennoble a black slave's children: Johar enunciates a rule of class and color ('abid ma 'awwiz 'abid ) "a slave does not want a slave," 13: 248). After a journey of seven nights, Johar arrives in the Hilali territory, enters their diwan, and pretends to be the sultan of Sudan. Jews have attacked his city, he relates, and he seeks help from the hero Abu Zayd to defend his people.[17] In other words, the black slave pretends to be a prince in order to investigate the identity of the black prince in his custody, who is pretending to be an epic poet and will soon—as will be seen shortly—pretend to be a slave. The two are even described in identical oral formulas, for example (xalat izzur wi jab ilbuhtan, " Johar mingled lies and brought untruths/slander," 13: 268).
The Hilalis truthfully inform him that Abu Zayd is at Handal's court on another mission—namely, to rescue the Hilali maidens. Johar returns successfully from his mission to inform Handal that the black epic singer locked in his prison is in truth the hero Abu Zayd. Handal resolves to kill Abu Zayd and again promises his slave Johar marriage to a Hilali maiden of his choice once Abu Zayd is dead.
At this point in the complicated crossing of class and color, cross-dressing, duplicity, and false identities, there is one character in the tale who voices a critique of puns, obliqueness, and also presentation. The imprisoned Abu Zayd had called for help from al-Khidr, his magic protector since he was born.[18] A figure with magical powers, al-Khidr insists Abu Zayd renounce disguise—in other words put an end to puns, ontological confusions, and attendant catastrophes. It is as if he insists: let there be uncomplicated likenesses, everyone be who they are, names fit their owners, and human behavior based on action not wordplay. He delivers his plea clearly, repetitively, and without any punning. Moreover, he insists, Abu Zayd must replace himself in prison with the character in the narrative (the black slave Johar) whose disguise Abu Zayd has donned, so that all actors are in their appropriate place for the ensuing events ( 11: 332-341):
al-Khidr said to him: "I bid you, O Prince Abu Zayd,
Come reveal yourself to people,
O Abu Zayd, come to me, revealed,
And I will make you victorious in every place."
He said to him: "The slave who brings you a tray,
shackle him in chains.
If you shackle him in your place,
your life continues till now.
If you don't shackle him in your place,
go dwell in a grave of sands."
Nonetheless, al-Khidr performs his magic on Handal's daughter, 'Ajaja: she becomes inexplicably stricken with concern for Abu Zayd's welfare. She orders the same black slave, Johar, to bring Abu Zayd a tray of food. Johar demands nights of passion in her bed as his price, and she agrees. Then Johar delivers food to the imprisoned Abu Zayd. By playing upon a shared black identity, Abu Zayd asks Johar to release one hand so he can eat from the tray. With only a single arm, Abu Zayd pounds Johar to the ground, shackles him, and escapes.
As this point in the performance, the Upper Egyptian epic poet 'Awadallah comments in an understated aside that again Abu Zayd "begins his trick anew" (jaddad ahyal, 12: 8), "mixing lies with untruths." Abu Zayd now disguises himself as Johar, Handal's black slave, and returns with the tray of food to Handal. Handal asks "Johar" (remember this is Abu Zayd in disguise) to bring Abu Zayd before him. In a rhetorical mode, it could be said that Abu Zayd is faced with the crisis of the pun forced to be put into explicit words, to disambiguate the uncontrollable in language.
Abu Zayd, alias Johar, calls for King Handal's ninety horsemen to enter the prison. Then, Abu Zayd, still as Johar, stations himself outside the prison entrance, sending the ninety horsemen into the dungeon in search of himself. When they emerge again, they encounter not Abu Zayd disguised as Johar but Abu Zayd the Hilali warrior, who proceeds to slaughter all ninety of them. Abu Zayd then returns to Handal, reverting to his disguise as Johar, to announce that Abu Zayd has escaped from prison. Handal goes to the prison and finds the real Johar, but at this point he no longer knows if the black man before him is Johar or Abu Zayd disguised as Johar. In the manner of tyrants, Handal kills the black man who is really Johar, reasoning thus: if the black man in his presence is indeed his slave Johar, then he, Johar, failed in his mission and deserves to die, and if it is Abu Zayd the enemy, he must be killed instantly.
There is a dead black body. The ninety fair Hilali maidens approach it, they see no identifying gap-tooth, and they rejoice in the knowledge that Abu Zayd still lives. In the meantime, Abu Zayd grabs a horse and takes refuge
in Handal's garden, where the Hilali maidens find him. Despite their urgings to escape, Abu Zayd stays to fight Handal. Abu Zayd sends two letters: one to Handal, announcing Abu Zayd's imminent arrival, and a second to the Hilali tribe encampment in Arabia. In his second letter to his Hilali kinsmen, Abu Zayd signs his missive with yet another identity, that of his enemy Handal. Again he repeats an earlier trick from other episodes in the epic: he writes to his fellow tribesmen in Handal's name that Abu Zayd has died, and they now owe tribute and wealth. His point is twofold: to test again his worth among his tribesmen and to ensure their presence in the final battle. Though his tribesmen weep and lament at Abu Zayd's death, the Hilali warriors quarrel over the need to rescue the maidens still imprisoned at Handal's court. They finally arrive thirty days later, engage the real Handal in battle, and are defeated. Only when the hero's own mother, Khadra Sharifa, prepares to join battle because she believes yet again that her son is dead, does Abu Zayd comes forward to stop her.
Finally, only in the last section of the Handal tale, do Abu Zayd and Handal, hero and villain, engage in the bloody, descriptively detailed, set battle piece on horseback so beloved of the epic genre. Handal is killed, and the tale concludes when 'Ajaja, Handal's daughter, a sand-diviner who saw through Abu Zayd's disguise, is, at her own request, brought under Hilali authority and protection.
Conclusion
Disguise, metamorphosis, multiple meanings, and the variety of effects achieved by the use of linguistic puns serve, I claim, to reestablish a serious hierarchy. Abu Zayd can play with becoming a black slave, but the corresponding reversal cannot be so readily effected; Johar, the genuine black slave, can never become a hero. So too puns have limits: they can uncover truths, and they can serve as cover-ups, but you cannot invent puns that are not already potential in the language. For this reason, Abu Zayd can disguise himself as an epic poet. He can add meaning, gain identities (even with a temporary loss of status in the narrative), and he can celebrate ambiguities. He can trick or mix with evil yet lose no honor. Punning can extend to a whole narrative and even misread an entire situation. Epic poets, whether they are Abu Zayd in the epic narrative or 'Awadallah in his southern Egyptian milieu, possess a high conception of poetic vocation. Though epic poets prefer multiple visions and meanings in the universe, nonetheless the everyday circumstances of social life in Upper Egypt ensure that, like Johar the black slave and unlike the black hero Abu Zayd, the epic poet 'Awadallah 'Abd al-Jalil 'Ali of Upper Egypt can never be seen as an epic hero—certainly never in his own society, but then not even in performance.
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