Veiled Sentiments

Abu-Lughod explains how the society’s sanctioned poetic discourse “violates the ideology of honor and modesty” that dominates Bedouin everyday thought (233). The social context in which poems emerge provides a critical clue to sorting this confusion.

Men and women alike share poems, but usually with people to whom they do not taḥashsham. The formality of ḥasham suggests “social distance,” and those around whom the distance is not necessary are close and trustworthy. “Poetry is the discourse of intimacy” (234), the marker of a lack of ḥasham. As such, “it usually does not cross the boundaries created by differential power and status” (234), especially the gender boundary, unless used in romance to “deliberately breach” that gap (235). Poetry can be, in this sense, a means by which one indicates one’s relationship to another.

Socially, poetry also binds those who share it: the vulnerability that it surfaces, and the secretiveness of the interaction, pulls those who share and those who listen to a greater level of intimacy. But Abu-Lughod warns against seeing the social (public) existence of the Awlad ‘Ali as a “structured [mask] worn for social approval” and the intimate, poetic existence “as simple [reflection] of personal experience” (237).