ArteEast Quarterly: “Our Eyes Travel to You Everyday” - The place of Jerusalem in the works of Fairouz and the Rahbani Brothers

October 1, 2007


“Our Eyes Travel to You Everyday” - The place of Jerusalem in the works of Fairouz and the Rahbani Brothers

by Christopher Stone

We Loved Each Other So Much
Clip duration: 4 minutes. 53 mgs
Directed by Jack Janssen, Produced by Pieter Van Huystee
First Run/Icarus Films  http://www.frif.com/new2004/much.html

Zahrat al-Madaain
Clip duration: 1 minute. 8 mgs


Jerusalem represents so much to so many.  For Arabs and Palestinians it has become, particularly since Israel occupied roughly half of it in 1948 and then all of it in 1967, a symbol for loss:  the loss of land and home, the loss of sovereignty, the loss of hope for a unified Arab world, the loss of honor.  It will surprise no one that many Arab poets, famous and unknown alike, have written both about this loss and expressed hope of recovery.  Many of these poems have taken the form of popular song.  It would be difficult to find an Arab singer who has not sung for Palestine.  It is arguable that no one’s songs for Palestine have been more listened to than those of the Lebanese diva Fairouz, undoubtedly the most famous living Arab singer.  She, her husband Asi Rahbani, her brother-in-law Mansour Rahbani and others produced hundreds of songs and a large number of musical plays in the second half of the last century.  Though Fairouz and the Rahbanis are most famous in the wider Arab world for their songs for Palestine, most of their work focused on Lebanon in general and the Northern Christian mountain village in particular.  If there is a unifying theme to their work, it is nostalgia.  Singing for Palestine, then, was a natural fit.  This essay examines several paradoxes in some of Fairouz’s most famous works for Palestine, paradoxes that speak both to the nature of nostalgia and of imagined spaces.

A recent documentary on the impact of Fairouz on her listeners—Jack Janssen’s 2003 We Loved Each Other So Much—takes the viewer to the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in the south of Beirut.  As we hear an interviewee describing some of the difficulties of life in Lebanon for Palestinians, we are shown a variety of shots meant to convey the tough conditions of the camp.  In the background we hear, faintly at first, Fairouz singing her 1967 “The Flower of the Cities,” perhaps the most famous of all of her ten or so songs written explicitly for Palestine.  The city referred to is, of course, Jerusalem.  The song acts as a bridge between this scene and the next, which takes us to a rooftop in the camp where younger refugees sit around listening to this song while chatting and smoking the water pipe.  The youth speak about the importance of Fairouz to them generally, and specifically about the significance of this song.  By way of example, they describe a trip to the South of Lebanon before the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 to demonstrate against the occupation.  The demonstrators were shot at by Israeli troops and one of them was killed.  Back on the bus, the mood already heavy, someone played “The Flower of the Cities,” and everyone burst into tears.

In these scenes lies a paradox that will be the focus of this essay.  Fairouz is best known throughout the Arab World for her songs for Palestine.  The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has said that Fairouz and her artistic partners the Rahbani brothers did more for Palestine artistically than anyone.  How can Fairouz be considered a champion of and unifying force for the Palestinian cause and a siren for Jerusalem, even by Palestinians inside of Lebanon, when her early work helped to forge an elite Lebanese Christian nationalism that pitted itself against the Palestinians and other “Others” inside of Lebanon during the series of Lebanese civil wars that ran from 1975 to 1990?  I will attempt to explain the paradox by discussing a few of Fairouz’s songs for Palestine.  As the key to this paradox lies in the nostalgic description of place, I will focus on her songs for Jerusalem, arguably the epicenter of the Palestinian resistance song and poem in general and the only specific space that makes multiple appearances in Fairouz’s Palestinian works.

One of the lenses through which we can view the career of Fairouz and the Rahbani brothers is that of Lebanese nationalism and identity formation.  I argue that in their songs, films and musical theatrical productions they participated in an elite national project that spoke primarily to the Christian minority of Lebanon, the same minority that would pit itself against Lebanon’s largely Muslim Palestinian refugee population, among others, at the start of the civil war.  The Rahbanis achieved their greatest success in Lebanon when they began contributing folkloric musical theatrical works on an almost annual basis to the International Baalbeck Festival starting in 1957.  Through decreasingly folkloric and increasingly spectacular plays such as The Moon’s Bridge (1962), The Days of Fakhr al-Din (1966) and Mountains of Granite (1969) at Baalbeck and other venues in Lebanon and the region, in addition to their musical concerts, television shows, motion pictures and albums up through and even beyond the start of the Civil War in 1975, the Rahbanis helped propagate the myth of Lebanon as a primarily Christian country.  They invoked an idealized Christian village where conflict is always caused by an outsider and is inevitably solved by a combination of love and miracle, almost always administered by the character played by Fairouz.  These musical theatrical works evince nostalgia for the Lebanon of self rule on Christian Mount Lebanon, the period between the violence of the 1860s and the re-imposition of Ottoman rule on the mountain during World War One.  They portray a fantasy Lebanon devoid of sectarian tensions, a Lebanon of one accent, of one folkloric dance style, of many miracles.  The miracles dried up, of course, if not in the Rahbani theater, in Lebanon itself in the early 1970s.

It is important to state that although Christian (Greek Orthodox), Fairouz and the Rahbani brothers never consciously or publicly associated with Lebanon’s right-wing Christian nationalists.  In fact, they saw themselves as forces of unity and inclusion in a country where the majority Muslim population has been ruled by the minority Christian population since the formation of Lebanon as a modern state after WWI.  This fact, however, does not preclude their artistic output from aiding that cause.  How, then, can Fairouz and the Rahbani brothers’ works for Lebanon have become synonymous with a narrow Christian nationalism, and their songs for Palestine a symbol for that resistance movement at the opposite end of the political and sectarian spectrum?

It would be difficult to overstate the impact the events of the 1967 Six Day War had on the people of the Arab World, for they had been led to believe, even as the Arab armies were being crushed, that victory was imminent.  1967, along with 1948, has to be seen not only as one of the most important political but also cultural dates in the modern Arab world.  The effect of this event can be seen in popular and high culture throughout the region.  One of the quickest responses to this devastating loss came from popular song, of which Fairouz and the Rahbani brothers’ “The Flower of the Cities” forms a prominent example.

Late in the summer of 1967, just two months after the events of the Six Day war, a music festival was arranged at the famous cedar forest in the north of Lebanon.  It is here that Fairouz first sang “The Flower of the Cities.”  This song would eventually be released on Fairouz’s second album of songs for Palestine, the 1972 Jerusalem in my Heart.  It first gained widespread exposure, however, through the two most powerful media of the day:  cinema and radio.

A few months after the 1967 war Fairouz and the Rahbani brothers released a musical film called Safar Barlak (Exile).  As with the other two musical films in which she starred, this one was shown widely in Lebanon, even at high end theaters in the West Beirut neighborhood of Hamra that normally only showed western films.  It was also shown extensively in other Arab countries, a relatively rare occurrence for an Arabic-language film not made in the Egyptian dialect.  The Rahbanis prefaced the film, which is about the Ottoman re-occupation of Mount Lebanon during World War One, with a clip of Fairouz singing “The Flower of the Cities” at the Cedars.  Additionally, many radio stations throughout the Arab world played the song incessantly.  It is easy to forget the impact of radio, but at that time, when television was still young and relatively local, radio was the satellite television of its day.  It was this song, in fact, that marked the moment when many young non-Christian or leftist literati in Lebanon (such as Ilyas Khouri and Hassan Daoud) and other places in the Arab World (such as Yusuf al-Qaid in Egypt) began listening seriously to Fairouz.  It was also for this song that a committee of exiled Jerusalemites presented Fairouz and the Rahbanis the key to the city of Jerusalem in a 1968 Beirut ceremony.

Before looking more closely at the song itself, it is important to mention that Fairouz and the Rahbanis did not, of course, have a monopoly on the Jerusalem poem or song.  In modern times, some examples from poetry are Khalil Mutran’s “Salute to Exalted Jerusalem,” ‘Ali Mahmud Taha’s “Anthem of Jihad for Palestine Day” (part of which was sung by Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab), Ibrahim Tuqan’s “Jerusalem,” Nizar Qabbani’s “Jerusalem,” and of course Mahmoud Darwish’s collection of poems entitled Under the Old Windows, some of which were put to music and sung by Marcel Khalife.  Songs for Palestine were also performed by Abdel Halim Hafez, Umm Kulthum, Warda and, more recently, by singers like Amr Diab, Hani Shakir and Kazim al Saher.

The eight-minute “The Flowers of the Cities” opens with the violins that by the mid sixties had become a key ingredient of the Rahbani sound.  The melodious strings are joined by martial sounding brass, the combination of the two comprising a trademark of the Rahbanis’ works for Palestine dating back to their 1955 Rajiun (We are Returning).  Before even hearing the song’s lyrics, the listener gets a hint of its treatment of space from the title, which uses the relatively rare plural for city, mada’in instead of mudun.  On the one hand, it is clear that this was a choice made out of poetic expediency.  I would argue, however, that the word, for its rareness of use, also lends abstractness to the description from the very beginning, an impression compounded by the martial and anthem-like ninety-second musical prelude to the song.  And though from the start the narrator addresses the city in the second person, there is never much of a Jerusalem to hold on to:

For you, city of prayer, I pray
For you beautiful city, flower of cities
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, city of prayer, I pray
Our eyes travel to you every day
Moving about the hallways of the temples
Embracing the old churches
Wiping sadness from the mosques
Night of the isra, path of he who ascended heavenward
Our eyes travel to you every day, and I pray
The child and his mother Mary in the cave, two crying faces.

This beginning offers its own explanation for the vagueness, as it quickly becomes clear that Jerusalem is being described from afar, being remembered. The reason for the distance, in case anyone listening to the song would need reminding, comes in the middle of the song:

For those made homeless
For the children without houses
For those who defended at the gates and were martyred
Peace itself was martyred in the nation of peace
      and Justice fell at the gates
When the city of Jerusalem toppled
Love retreated and in the hearts of the world, war settled
The child and his mother Mary in the cave, two crying faces.

The last part of the song is dedicated to inspiring the listener to efface the distance so evident in the rest of the work.  There is no question that this is a powerful resistance song aimed at inspiring steadfastness, as can be seen in the song’s last lines:

The blinding anger is coming and I am full of faith
The blinding anger is coming and I will bypass the sadness
From every road it is coming, with the awesome steeds it is coming
As the omnipresent face of God it is coming, coming, coming
The gate to our city will not close, for I am going to pray
I will knock on the gates, I will open the gates
And you Jordan River will wash my face with sacred water
And you Jordan River will erase the traces of the barbaric feet
The blinding anger is coming, awesome steeds it is coming
It will defeat the face of oppression
The house is ours, Jerusalem is ours
And with our hands we are going to return the city to its splendor
With our hands peace is coming to Jerusalem.

Just before this conclusion to the song, there is a melodious sadness, as Fairouz and the female chorus members sing about the crying of Jesus and Mary.  Then we get a blast of horns, after which the male chorus members sing twice that the “blinding anger is coming.”  Fairouz picks it up from there, occasionally echoed by the chorus, singing with a resolve matched by the increased tempo and volume:  a rousing end to a song that also conveys the sadness of the Palestinian predicament, but where is Jerusalem in all of this? 

One feature that distinguishes “The Flower of the Cities” from most of Fairouz and the Rahbanis'  songs about Lebanon and also perhaps adds to its lack of specificity is that it is in Classical Arabic, as are most of their songs about non-Lebanese places:  Damascus, Mecca, Kuwait, etc.  These non-Lebanese songs, most of them written by Sa‘id ‘Aql, the Lebanese poet, ultra nationalist, and mentor of Fairouz’s husband and brother in law, are equally vague in their description of space.  The formal language of “Flower” gives it an epic quality, epic in the sense of timeless, and this impression is augmented by the mention of Jesus, and by the reference to the “awesome steeds” which could be meant to make us think of Salah al-Din’s recapture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187.  Although the song is one of the few resistance songs for Palestine that mentions the places of worship of all three main monotheistic faiths, this is about as specific as the descriptions get.

Let us see if this lack of specificity holds for Fairouz’s other song written for Jerusalem:  “Old Jerusalem.”  The Lebanese writer Ilyas Khouri cites “Old Jerusalem” as an example of how Fairouz’s works about the Palestinian cause are more detailed than her songs about Lebanon.  The comparison to Fairouz and the Rahbanis’ Lebanon songs is apt at least in so far as like those songs, “Old Jerusalem” is also in a dialect of spoken Lebanese Arabic.

Like “Flower,” this song can also be found on the 1972 album Jerusalem in my Heart.  It turns out, however, that “Old Jerusalem” is not, as many fans think, a post 67 song , but rather was first performed in 1966.  Just as its being sung in spoken Arabic gives it an earthier quality than the ethereal “Flower,” so does its detail, or perhaps more precisely the proximity of the narrator to the scene being described.  We can see this in the opening lines:

I walked the streets...the streets of old Jerusalem
In front of the stores...from what is left of Palestine
We talked about the news together and they gave me a vase
They said to me that this is a gift from the people who are waiting
And I walked the streets...the streets of old Jerusalem
I stopped at one of the doors and made friends

 

If this song seems to have more detail than “The Flower of the Cities,” it may be because parts of it are based on Fairouz’s only visit to Jerusalem, made in 1964.  It is said that she and the Rahbanis went there for inspiration.  The story goes that she was so moved by her visit to the old part of the city, then under Jordanian control, that she began to weep and that an old woman gave her the vase mentioned in the song to make her feel better.  The fact of the visit and its pre-67 timing helps to explain some of the differences between this and the “Flower.”  Instead of our eyes moving about the city every day, here the narrator of the song herself is able to be present, walking through the streets of the city.

The most fruitful place to look for the significance of similarities and differences between these two songs, however, is not in the effect that events of 1967 had on songs for Palestine in general, but rather in a shift in the Rahbanis works for Lebanon that cannot wholly be explained by the ruptures caused by those events.  Pre 1967 is the period in which Fairouz and the Rahbani brothers were rising to fame in Lebanon, primarily on the strength of folkloric musical theatrical plays and sketches very clearly set in the Lebanese mountain village like The Moon’s Bridge and The Ring Seller.  While this may have been an idealized village, it was a specifically described place:  the town square, the village spring, the red roofed houses, the unkempt boulder-filled meadows on the outskirts of town.

The song just described, “Old Jerusalem,” is not a village song, but in a sense there is nothing particularly urban about it:  its streets, windows, doors and shops are ubiquitous in the early village songs and plays of the Rahbanis.  Muhammad Abi Samra has commented that even when the Rahbanis are talking about the city, they are really writing about the village.  This is true of most of their works for Palestine, including their first, the somewhat overlooked Returning.

In 1955, just as Fairouz and the Rahbanis were becoming well known in Lebanon and Syria, they were invited to Egypt by Cairo Radio and asked to write some songs for Palestine.  What they came up with was Rajiun (Returning), a semi dramatic work in which Fairouz’s voice is in dialogue with a chorus of male and female voices.  It is said that the chorus represents the Palestinians and Fairouz’s voice their collective conscience.

If you look at the album as a whole, which is how it is meant to be heard, it quickly becomes apparent that the vocabulary of these songs for Palestine is precisely the vocabulary of the subsequent early songs and plays about the Lebanese mountain village.  The title track, “Returning,” for example, has the breezes, nights, flowers, fields, hills, suns, soils, dreams, dawns, springs, squares, winds, rains, and insomniacs of the early Lebanese plays.

Over time, the Rahbanis’ plays for Lebanon became less folkloric and more epic in scale and scope.  In works like The Days of Fakhr al-Din, Petra and Mountains of Granite, the specificity of place began to be replaced by vague, grand and ethereal descriptions.  It is in this sense that the mistiness of place in 1967s “The Flower of the Cities” can be seen as the natural outgrowth of a trend that can be traced in their Lebanese works of this time.

Throughout the years the Rahbani/Fairouz song may have become less specific, but in important ways, whether for Lebanon or Palestine, it remained the same.  The Rahbani works about the Lebanese village were written in the context of mass migration both abroad and to Lebanon’s urban centers, particularly Beirut.  One of the reasons they struck such a chord with their local listeners is that they are infused with nostalgia, not only for the left behind village, but also for the simpler days that is the context for the memory of life in those villages.

This nostalgia is often accompanied by its counterpart, “ghurba” (alienation/homesickness/life outside of homeland).  The songs for Palestine, whether the words “nostalgia” or “ghurba”are always used, share these elements.  Upon receiving the key to Jerusalem in 1968, Fairouz’s brother-in-law Mansour said:  “We sing for those of you who resist inside and our wounds mesh with your wounds, and we sing for the children who where born outside of their homeland [fi’l-ghurba] -- so that they always remember that they are traveling,” that they are, in other words, just waiting to return home.

In “Old Jerusalem” of 1966, the narrator seems to move back and forth between pre- and post-48 Jerusalem.  After the relative detail and proximity as seen above, there is sadness, punctuated by a lugubrious violin phrase after the line

And their sad eyes, from the window of the city
take me with suffering’s alienation [ghurba].

After that, however, the violins almost disappear completely, replaced by an up tempo synthesizer phrase accompanied by happy pre-48 memories of a nation being built:

There was land and there were two hands building under the sun, under the
wind
And then there were houses and windows gleaming and children, with books
in their hands.

The mood changes quickly again with the return of the violins:

And in the dark of night hatred spread to the shadows of the houses
And the black hands tore off the doors and the houses became uninhabited
And between them and between their houses are thorns, fire and the black hands
I’m screaming in the streets, the streets of old Jerusalem.

These images, obviously a reference to the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, explain the living outside the homeland, the “ghurba,” mentioned mid-way through the song.  After the tone of terror and despair comes the same resoluteness heard in the post-67 “Flower,” despite an absence of martial horns:

Let the song become a raging storm
May my voice remain aloft, a hurricane in these consciences
Let them know what is happening, perhaps their consciences will awaken

The two songs are similar too in the use of nostalgia and ghurba, even if neither word is used specifically in “The Flower of the Cities.”  Instead, we get the mind’s eye roving the streets, implying distance and exile.  Also, the narrator of “Flower” prays for those made homeless in general and specifically for the children without houses.

All of this nostalgia and alienation—whether in works for Palestine or for the Lebanese village—are accompanied, of course, by the idea of return.  Most of the Rahbani plays and songs for Lebanon are staged in the village, so the idea of return is implied in the sense that the mostly urban audience is meant to imagine a return to the simpler time and place represented.  In the songs for Palestine, in the songs for those whose land is occupied, the idea of return becomes not only explicit but is also foregrounded in their very titles, such as the album and song title Returning from 1955.

There are other examples of the idea of return being made explicit in the songs for Palestine.  In the few years before the Six Day War of 1967 Fairouz sang songs like “”The Bells of Return” and “We Shall Return One Day”.  In the “The Bells of Return,” written in 1966 and considered a battle anthem for those fighting in 67, Fairouz sings:  “Today, today and not tomorrow, let the bells of return be struck.”  We know that the song “We Shall Return One Day” was written for Palestine, but there is actually nothing in it explicitly particular to Palestine.  In fact, after the start of the civil war in 1975, many who had to leave Lebanon understood the song as being sung for them.  And it is this song perhaps more than any other that Fairouz includes in her concerts outside of the Arab World, where her audience is largely made up of expatriate Lebanese.

Fairouz and company seem to pick when and where to sing her other Palestinian songs with equal care.  In looking at reviews of some of her concerts throughout the years, it becomes clear that Fairouz, or those responsible for song selection, always knows her audience quite well.  When she sings in Jordan or the Gulf, for example, where most of her audience is Palestinian, she breaks out the favorite Palestinian songs, and the reviews always mention the absolute hysteria these songs cause.  Likewise, when Fairouz sang in Las Vegas in May of 1999, she sang a number of songs for Palestine.  When she toured the US in 2003, however, it appears that she did not sing for Palestine—a fact that was noted on at least one Palestinian website that surmised critically that in the post September 11 atmosphere Fairouz was concerned about controversy.  Similarly, Fairouz’s February 2005 concert in Montreal only contained one song “for” Palestine:  “We Shall Return One Day,” and it wasn’t clear if the homesick audience was responding to it as a Palestinian song or one of general longing for the motherland.

This is part of the real genius of the whole Fairouz project, for who in this day and age does not feel a kind of alienation, a longing for return, if not home, then to a simpler time?  Fawwaz Traboulsi conjectures that many of Fairouz and the Rahbani’s works for Lebanon can be read as having been written for Palestine and vice versa.  But the assumption seems to be that the Rahbani’s songs for Palestine developed out of their Lebanon mountain village aesthetic.  It is important to remember, however, that before the Rahbanis and Fairouz became famous for their Lebanese song of longing and nostalgia for Mt. Lebanon they wrote Returning for Palestine in 1955. So, instead of looking for the seeds of their Palestinian songs in their works for Lebanon, I am suggesting that their whole Lebanon project, as divisive as it was, can just as easily be seen as having been informed by their heartfelt work for Palestine, not the other way around.

We started with what appeared to be a paradox:  how did Fairouz become an icon for the Palestinian cause when her artistic roots are in narrow Christian Lebanese nationalism?   Before trying to explain that paradox I offer another:  How is it that their divisive Lebanese nationalism grew out of their early work in support of the Palestinian cause, work which would continue in the years leading up to 1967 and beyond?  Perhaps the solution to both of these paradoxes lies in the descriptions of Jerusalem in “The Flower of the City” and “Old Jerusalem,” or, more precisely, the absence of Jerusalem.  In the fuzzy and foggy nostalgia of the Rahbanis, home becomes, simply, both wherever and whenever you are not.  I end with some lines from “We Shall Return One Day,” the song written for Palestine but often understood by the Lebanese to have been written for them:

We shall return one day to our neighborhood and drown in the warmth of its
hope,
We shall return, no matter how much time passes or how large the distances
between us.

This is not specifically a song about Lebanon or Mount Lebanon, but could be; it is not specifically a song about Jerusalem, but could be, for is this not exactly what Jerusalem is to many of the Jews, Christians and Muslims who consider it to be holy?  Is it not a kind of unreachable heaven on earth that both although unreachable and because it is unreachable appears destined to be a site of conflict for some time to come?  Let us hope that the same cannot be said of Lebanon, though one can argue that Fairouz and the Rahbani’s idealized descriptions of it from the fifties, sixties and seventies remain powerful conduits if not producers of nostalgia today.  Just like their Jerusalem, however, their idealized Lebanon not only does not exist now, but never did.

This is a version of an article that will appear in Jerusalem:  History, Religion and Geography, eds. Tamar Mayer and Suleiman Mourad (London:  Routledge, 2008).

 
 

Christopher Stone teaches Arabic language and literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York.  He received a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. His dissertation received the Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award for the Humanities from the Middle East Studies Association in 2003.  The book version -- entitled Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon:  The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation -- was just published by Routledge.  He is currently working on a project on the role of the actor Ahmad Zaki in contemporary Egyptian popular culture.  To that end he will travel to Egypt this spring as a Fulbright scholar.

 
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