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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226392196 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2010 |
| Series: | Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Stambeli
MUSIC, TRANCE, AND ALTERITY IN TUNISIABy Richard C. Jankowsky
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2010 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-39219-6
Chapter One
Encountering the Other People ALTERITY, POSSESSION, ETHNOGRAPHY
Khemisi Hdid died the sixth day of Ramadan, in the year 2000. A black Algerian, Khemisi had arrived at Dar Barnu (the "Bornu House") in Tunis thirty-eight years earlier, and it remained his home until his death. Dar Barnu was part of a network of houses established during the time of slavery, on the periphery of the Tunis medina, that served to help freed slaves and other displaced sub-Saharans find others from their places of origin to help them adjust to life in Tunisia. Dar Barnu, as its name suggests, originally served as a shelter for those from the Bornu region of central Africa, near Lake Chad. After the last of his family in Algeria had died, Khemisi came to Tunis to find an uncle on his mother's side of the family. The uncle, however, refused him. Soon thereafter, he met Baba Majid (whose surname is Barnawi, meaning "of Bornu"), who brought him to Dar Barnu. Although Khemisi was not of Barnawi descent, he, like many other marginalized or disenfranchised individuals in Tunis, was nonetheless welcomed into the Dar Barnu household.
We are in the open-air courtyard of Dar Barnu. Emna is wearing a green kashabiyya (hooded cloak) and holding a green, wooden staff in her right hand. She is possessed by Sidi 'Abd el-Qadir, a Muslim saint known as "master of the spirits" (sultan is-salhin). She is on her knees, head down, directly in front of the gumbri being played by her father, Baba Majid. To either side of him sit two younger musicians, each of them playing two pairs of shqashiq, which saturate the air with their cyclic rhythms and metallic overtones. Emna's feet begin to move to the beat, and she rises gradually, stamping the rod on the ground until finally throwing it down. It falls and hits her father, who does not seem disturbed. She is now on her feet. When the music stops, she stands in place, swaying back and forth. Her mother removes the kashabiyya, leaving Emna in her "Los Angeles, California" T-shirt. The musicians begin to play the nuba of Sidi Frej, who, like Sidi 'Abd el-Qadir, is one of the "Shaikhs," the most powerful group of stambeli saints. Emna's body rocks back and forth to the music in increasingly intensifying movements until she passes out, falling flat on her back. Her mother and a friend calmly step over to her, stroke her head, and call for the white cloth. Baba Majid shakes his head, indicating no, it is not yet time, and continues to play....
The Barnawis loved Khemisi dearly and considered his death to be a great tragedy. They described him to me as pious, quiet, gentle, and caring. When they spoke of him, tears would oft en well up in their eyes. They would also inevitably mention his great singing voice, which has become legendary in the stambeli network of Tunis. A single homemade cassette recording of a stambeli ceremony in 1991 ensured his voice would not soon be forgotten and was oft en played for me so I could hear his voice. "That's Khemisi's style. There's nothing like that here any more, nothing," Baba Majid would say with a distant look in his eyes. "He never wanted anything from life," I was also told, "he never even wanted to marry. All he wanted to do was to pray and to sing." Khemisi's death also left the ageing Baba Majid as the sole bearer of the Dar Barnu stambeli tradition. Without Khemisi at his side, he would now have to rely on younger musicians, whose ritual knowledge he viewed as, at best, minimal, and whose interests, he worried, were privileging making money over the tradition of healing.
... Emna begins to writhe on the ground, trembling convulsively, inching forward until her head nearly hits the gumbri. As the music subsides, Baba Majid finally calls for the white cloth. Three women take the cloth and use it to cover her body, which is now sprawled on the ground. The music begins again. Each of the women takes a corner of the cloth and pulls it up and down in time with the music. After some time, the music ends and they clothe her in a black kashabiyya. Emna rises slowly as she becomes possessed by a spirit named Kuri and dances on her knees, stomping her leg as she throws her arms into the air, one after the other, over and over. Then she passes out again, indicating that Kuri has left her body. When she awakes, it appears that Sidi 'Abd el-Qadir has taken advantage of her vulnerable state and possessed her yet again. This time, however, he does not dance but rather foretells the future, in secret, to the women who are now gathering around her. Tears well up in the eyes of some of the women as they consult, in hushed voices, with Sidi 'Abd el-Qadir, who speaks to them about, among other things, the well-being of Khemisi in the afterlife....
Upon hearing the news that Khemisi had died, Emna had run from her room at Dar Barnu to his to be by his side. She cried over his body and kissed his forehead. The following day, her legs became paralyzed. She remained immobile, in her room, for nearly three months. The Dar Barnu healers determined that Kuri, a powerful sub-Saharan spirit who had afflicted Emna in the past, had once again struck her. Spirits are oft en present at times of death, and coming into physical contact with the dead makes one especially vulnerable to a spirit attack.
... After the short break, the musicians resume playing. Emna's kashabiyya is removed, and she soon becomes possessed by May Nasra, a young, male spirit belonging to a family known as the Beyet, or Royalty spirits. The women cover Emna in a pink and white sunjuq (large cloth banner), place a red tarboosh on her head, and slide a tray of toys and a luha (young student's personal chalkboard) in front of her. May Nasra complains that he does not like the tarboosh and wants a new one. A Tunisian medical doctor and friend of mine in attendance asks me whether Emna had gone through a traumatic experience related to school. I respond in the affirmative. After the request for a new tarboosh is fulfilled, May Nasra indicates that he is finally placated by throwing candy from the tray to everyone present. Emna passes out once more. The musicians lead the congregation in the fatiha, and Emna's mother and friends help her up and slowly usher her into the house. The stambeli is over. Positive relations with the spirits have been reestablished. Emna is "all better (for) now."
* * *
I begin by interweaving this ethnographic description of Emna's possession with an account of Khemisi's death not only because they are intimately connected, but also because both vignettes mark moments of profound transition in the Dar Barnu stambeli tradition. The loss of Khemisi highlighted a moment of historical rupture. Historically, Dar Barnu's main function had been to address the experience of suffering for displaced sub-Saharans, which took many forms, including the violence of slavery, displacement, and loss, as well as the experience of prejudice and social marginalization. His death brought to a tragic end an era in which Dar Barnu served as a refuge for enslaved and free black Africans.
The second transition, namely, Emna's transformation from afflicted to healed, highlighted a moment of historical continuity. Through music and trance, Emna's ceremony evoked Dar Barnu's historical and spiritual legacies, while also underscoring stambeli's continued relevance in its role of alleviating the suffering of spirit affliction. For Emna, a bright, shy young woman who was her high school's valedictorian but stopped her university studies due to harassment by what her father calls khumaynistes (radical Muslim students; the term combines the name Khomeini-referring to the Iranian ayatollah-with an ascriptive French suffix commonly used in Tunisian Arabic), the possession ritual was both taxing and cathartic. By allowing a succession of sub-Saharan spirits and North African and Middle Eastern Muslim saints to use her as a vessel for their enjoyment of music and dance, she reestablished positive relations with members of the stambeli pantheon who, in their ritual appearance, not only heal but also collectively evoke the trans-Saharan movements and encounters of stambeli itself.
The Other People: Sub-Saharans in Tunisian Society
"The other people" (in-nas il-ukhrin) refers collectively to the spirits in the stambeli pantheon. This appellation confers on the spirits a humanlike quality and calls attention to the potential for social relationships both among spirits and between human and spirit. Their otherness is manifested not only in their invisibility and elusive metaphysical presence, but also in their historical and geocultural identities connecting them to distant places and times.
"The other people," however, may also be used to describe how stambeli practitioners and other blacks in Tunisia have been perceived by mainstream Tunisian society. They have been othered in different ways throughout different periods of history, beginning with the earliest days of the trans-Saharan slave trade, at which time they were brought from sub-Saharan Africa into North Africa and sold as slaves. Their non-Muslim status-later conflated with their race-situated them within the category of kuffar, or unbelievers, making them candidates for slavery within the purview of Islam. Converting to Islam, or even being born Muslim, however, did not protect Tunisia's black population from the experience of prejudice. Noted historian L. Carl Brown observes that Husaynid Tunisia (ruled by an Ottoman dynasty from 1705 to 1881, and still present under French "indirect" rule from 1881 to 1957) was "far from color blind," and the "only Muslim element in the population subject to discrimination tending to keep them at the lower social and economic rungs of society were the Negroes" (Brown 1974: 185-186).
Tunisia's black population must be understood in its historical and geocultural heterogeneity. A general distinction is maintained between the wargliyya, who are the blacks from the southern Tunisian oases and who are considered more or less indigenous, and the rest of the black population, which is understood as descendants of displaced sub-Saharans, the vast majority of whom were slaves (Zawadowski 1942). Within this latter group we must distinguish broadly between the overlapping populations of slaves that arrived in Tunis before the advent of the Husaynid Dynasty in 1705 and those that arrived in much larger numbers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bringing with them specific cultural practices and identities that led to a distinctive sub-Saharan slave culture within which stambeli crystallized (Montana 2004b).
Blacks in Tunisian society, whether or not they are associated with stambeli, continue to experience racism. Conversations with members of the stambeli community and close Arab Tunisian friends confirmed the existence of widespread prejudice limiting the social, marital, and employment options of dark-skinned Tunisians. This is reinforced in a variety of ways. The government still uses a stamp of a "Negro head" to denote the lowest grade of silver in its grading system of precious metals. The servitude of slavery remains linguistically inscribed on the black body in Tunisia, where the most common socially acceptable term for black people is wasfan (servants), and where it is not uncommon to hear a speaker specify someone's race by designating that person mahruq (lit. "burnt," i.e., black) or hurr (lit. "free," i.e., Arab).
Overarching sociocultural politics of identity in the Maghrib are generally framed in religious (e.g., Muslim vs. Jewish) and / or ethnolinguistic (e.g., Arab vs. Berber) terms. While these identities are by no means static (indeed, they are oft en situational and overlapping), the sub-Saharan presence in Tunisia complicates such divisions in particular ways. Whereas Berbers and Jews have been considered, for all practical purposes, indigenous others to politically dominant Arabic-speaking Muslims, sub-Saharans have been understood to be geocultural outsiders. However, it has not always been possible to categorize them as non-Muslim and non-Arabic speakers, as most slaves were converted to Islam before or after their arrival in North Africa and learned to speak Arabic once there. Like Arabic-speaking Jews and Muslim Berbers, sub-Saharans in Tunisia have continually negotiated nuances of sameness and difference vis-à-vis Arab Tunisian society. Shared or overlapping identities include common membership in the umma (community of Muslims), in an Arabic-speaking society, and in the Tunisian nation-state (constructing an image of national homogeneity has been a priority of both postindependence ruling regimes). Difference is manifested in their racially marked bodies, which evoke histories of servitude, prejudice, and ritual practices that are both contentious and in high demand by some Arab Tunisians.
Many Tunisians ascribe to black Africans a mysterious and powerful ability to manipulate the spirit world and to protect against misfortune. Writing in 1914, A. J. N. Tremearne noted that "in certain cases the presence of a young negress is a necessity even to the Arab magician" (1914: 187). Traditionally, black female servants known as dada would look after the children of the house, accompanying boys to their circumcision in order to give them courage, and even breastfeed Arab Tunisian boys so that they would grow up, in Baba Majid's words, "strong and brave." The presence of black women was desired in order to bring good fortune at weddings and at childbirth. When this was not possible, the mere image or likeness of a sub- Saharan would suffice. According to M. G. Zawadowski, in early twentieth- century Tunisia,
the dark pigmentation of the Blacks also seems to constitute an effective "scarecrow" against the jnun [spirits] in Maghribi popular magic. The presence of a Negro in a family meeting is regarded as bringing good luck, and, in the Tunisian Sahel, one invites a Negro to attend marriage ceremonies for the express purpose of "making the evil eye fly away" (iteyyer el-'în), according to the picturesque Arabic expression. Their power to protect them from the jnun is considered so strong that it is enough to make an image of a Negro out of cardboard, wood, bronze, or stone, and place it in a conspicuous place on a wall, for example, to obtain the same result. (1942: 151)
The perception of otherness is inseparable from a mysterious power to bring good luck or misfortune. As in many other sub-Saharan diasporic communities around the world, while this otherness limits social mobility, it also creates certain opportunities. Despite social and institutional prejudice toward black Africans in Tunisia (see Messaoud 1984), there also remains a common belief that sub-Saharans have particularly powerful efficacy in manipulating the world of spirits, a world that continues to hold sway (at least outside the public sphere) in Tunisian society. Stambeli practitioners are considered specialists in dealing with some of these spirits.
Situating Stambeli
Communities of displaced African slaves throughout the Islamic world developed ritual healing and devotional musics that refracted and transformed ritual traditions from their African places of origin and synthesized them with elements from their new societies. The trade in African slaves contributed to the spread of zar spirit possession practices throughout the Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia and into Egypt and the Persian Gulf (Natvig 1991). In Iran, African Baluchis are specialists in trance rituals such as guati-demali and lewa, as well as zar, each of which combines in some way local Sufi and African aesthetics and symbols (During 1997). Slaves and their descendants brought tumbura rituals from the Sudan to Saudi Arabia (Makris 2000), while ritual practices involving elements of bori and other sub-Saharan possession rituals were known throughout the Ottoman Empire, including cities in modern-day Turkey (Hunwick 2004).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stambeli by Richard C. Jankowsky Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Note on Spelling and Transliteration
Introduction
PART I Histories and Geographies of Encounter
1 Encountering the Other People
Alterity, Possession, Ethnography
2 Displacement and Emplacement
The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade and the Emergence of Stambēlī
3 Black Spirits White Saints
Geographies of Encounter in the Stambēlī Pantheon
PART II Musical Aesthetics and Ritual Dynamics
4 Voices of Ritual Authority
Musicians, Instruments, and Vocality
5 Sounding the Spirits
The Ritual Dynamics of Temporality, Modality, and Sonic Density
6 Trance, Healing, and the Bodily Experience
From Individual Affliction to Collective Appeasement
PART III Movements and Trajectories
7 Pilgrimage and Place
Local Performances, Transnational Imaginaries
8 Stambēlī on stage
(Re)presentations, Musical Cosmopolitanism, and the Public Sphere
9 Conclusion
Music, Trance, and Alterity
Epilogue (with Notes on Audio Examples)
Notes