(no subject)

It smells like fall outside :-)

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I am right now in the middle of watching the Egyptian movie Fatma, starring Um Koulthum, and one of her songs/monologues just gave me a complete breakthrough with regard to understanding why Arabic love songs are by and large tragic.  She sang something like her love and her self is hers to give, but her honor is not hers, it is her family's, so she cannot give in to what she wants unless the man she has fallen for (mrzero and atalanta, a man really named Pasha Bey!) makes a formal offer of marriage to her.  It struck me then that falling in love for an Egyptian woman is a tragedy, because you will be torn by the conflict between desire to give everything to your loved one and the knowledge that you must be true to your family--but there is more to it than that.  It seemed to me from her song and words that she was saying you will lose something of yourself even if you do things the right way when you fall in love, that you will sacrifice some part of who you are by loving another.  And suddenly all the songs made perfect sense, the songs about losing your soul and his eyes stealing your heart and how love makes you suffer.  Not that long ago I read the book Khul-Khaal:  Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories, and there too it seemed that even those women in a happy marriage knew that they had given up something to be in love, whether it was their independence or their economic status or their previous safe and happy homes.   You want to be in love, you want to indulge your heart and your body, but at the same time you don't want to lose your independence and your pride and honor.  This is why love songs are sad.  You cannot give yourself away without really and truly giving something away.

Back to the movie now--I have a feeling things are going to go badly for poor Fatma, but at least now she is enjoying what she thinks is her honeymoon in Iskanderia...

(p.s.:  you can take the anthropologist out of the discipline, but you can't take the discipline out of the anthopologist)