Jun 3, 2008 - cultâzdrâhas been glossed, according to folk etymology, as the Ara ... an emotional catharsis effected by the trance experience (Fakhouri 55).
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
ISSN: 0740-770X (Print) 1748-5819 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwap20
Ritual Grievance: The language of woman? Susan Slyomovics To cite this article: Susan Slyomovics (1990) Ritual Grievance: The language of woman?, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 5:1, 53-60, DOI: 10.1080/07407709008571140 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07407709008571140
Published online: 03 Jun 2008.
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Date: 20 August 2016, At: 05:22
53
Ritual Grievance: The Language of Woman? By Susan Slyomovics
W
omen are usually the central speaking subject of the zdr, a spirit possession and exorcism ceremony common in the Middle East and Africa. The word for this spirit possession cult—zdr—has been glossed, according to folk etymology, as the Arabic word meaning "to visit" or "a visitation." The main feature of the zdr cult is the possession of the body and mind of an individual woman—for this is predominantly a woman's activity—by a specific and appropriate spirit. According to the scholarly literature on Egypt, the spirit inhabiting a female host is frequently male and is called the master. This male demonic spirit has caused physical and mental illness. When all other curing methods, such as charms and divination, have failed, it is determined that a spirit who is now and forever bound up in the woman's life and body must be satisfied and placated. In the zdr ceremony the spirit or demon {^afreet, shay tan iblis, zdr) is exorcised by an adept or shaman who can be either male or female (the male is called a shaykh, the female shaykha). With the help of music and incense the possessed woman, supported by women in the audience, dances, wails, shouts for joy, speaks, falls into a trance, and eventually faints. The zdr exorcism is a striking and bizarre performance long noted and commented upon by anthropologists, scholars, and travellers to the Middle East. For example Jacques Berque, a French sociologist of the Arab world, discusses the zdr within the framework of the political oppression and economic exploitation of the Egyptian peasant class, whether male or female, a peasantry whose salient behavior alternates between apathy and inertia and individual acts of violence arising from brief emotional crises. For Berque, not just women's zdrs, but also men's hashish-taking sessions and the seances of fraternal mystic orders, express this same bipolar reaction (Berque, 71-72). In other words, men and women suffer the same thing in the same way. Hani Fakhouri, an anthropologist, sees the zdr as a therapeutic cure, an emotional catharsis effected by the trance experience (Fakhouri 55). An Egyptian anthropologist, Soheir Morsi, notes the use of the zdr as a means of female empowerment and as a community-based protocol for negotiating improved social or domestic changes by exploiting the power of female hysteria. Morsi concludes that this aberrant behavior
54 / Slyomovics is "associated with deviation from culturally stipulated role behavior and is directly related to [woman's] subservient status" (Morsi 614). Still other scholars, such as Cynthia Nelson and John A. Kennedy, look for a common ritual which lends itself to a coherent patterning for all female experiences, especially those experiences and events that follow the female life cycle in the Middle East. In this essay, I am following Kennedy and Nelson's preliminary indications and I compare some inversions and parallels between the zdr exorcism ceremony and Middle Eastern wedding customs governing women's behavior and decorum. At a zdr, the afflicted woman is dressed as a bride and is called al-arusa, the bride, while the zdr ceremony itself is termed "wedding with the masters" (fardh mcfdh al-asydd). The "masters" is often the name for the male spirits. Like a bride, the possessed woman is adorned with wedding henna, make-up, and perfume. As at weddings there is music and dancing. The musicians sing songs appropriate to the woman and to her mate; however, in the case of the zdr, they sing not to the groom who marries the bride but rather to the spirit who possesses the afflicted woman. For example, the following song is addressed to a spirit who is called the Red Sultan by the musicians and the adept. The afflicted woman is specifically called a bride and the possessing spirit and master, the Red Sultan, is her groom: Red king of kings, you are the king of the genies recall your spirits so that all of them will be present O you little bride holding a lighted candle in your hand you are the bride of the Sultan and your groom is like a lighted candle The possessed woman wears a white gown and sometimes a white veil. (Significantly, in Nubia where Kennedy witnessed male possession, he noted that the man was adorned and costumed as a female bride.) The zdr ceremony ritually opposes and inverts traditional Egyptian weddings. Marriages are usually arranged, and most importantly, the woman is absent during the signing of her marriage contract. Her father, father-in-law, and the groom conduct the event. On the other hand, the zdr trance and dance is initiated by the possessed woman. She chooses her zdr leader or shaykh, she negotiates the time, the place, and the economic exchanges for the ceremony. She also seems to choose her sickness and its corresponding demon. For example, Michel Leiris, a French writer who witnessed the zdr in 1930's Ethiopia, went so far as to question the sincerity of the participant. There were
Ritual Grievance I 55 obvious cases of deceit, of what he termed "acted theater" in which even the Ethiopian women noted the complaisance of the subject who can be possessed on demand. The crucial moment of many peasant weddings is defloration of the bride. In a public ritual, witnessed by his community, the groom emerges from the bride's quarters bearing a blood-stained handkerchief. This signals loss of bridal virginity both by the presence of virginal blood and by the absence of the woman herself. In the zar ceremony blood is also employed, but in a very different manner. In order to placate the spirits once they have revealed themselves, a rooster or chicken will be sacrificed and its blood rubbed over the white bridal dress of the woman, or slowly sprinkled about the dancing, demon-ridden women. In the verses quoted earlier, where the spirit called the Red Sultan and his female host are compared to a bride and groom, the use of blood is especially significant because this particular spirit causes his female victims to experience hemorrhages. Though blood sprinkling and animal sacrifice are usually present, in the case of the Red Sultan, the presence of blood during the ceremony and about the woman's person is especially copious. Thus a ritual inversion suggests itself. In a wedding a woman's blood is separated from her body and paraded in the absence of her physical body. Her blood belongs to her husband: he has possessed her sexually and he possesses her materially. On the other hand, during the zar, blood is reunited with the woman's body, a body that now publicly displays the macabre fact that it contains both male and female, bride and groom, possessing male spirit and possessed female flesh, united and created by female illness and misery. During the wedding contract the woman's body is not present, the bride does not speak. Therefore, it could be posited that the Egyptian peasant wedding ceremony exemplifies a particular feminist model of language that characterizes women's language by silence, alienation, and oppression. Feminist theoreticians, such as Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich, bemoan the lack of an authentic non-male language that could make up for woman's sense of alienation and experience of being silenced. Both the Middle Eastern wedding ceremony and this model of language presuppose a linguistic determinism: men decide what words mean and therefore, both the language of the wedding ceremony and female speech preserve and perpetuate patriarchal misogyny. In this instance, language determines reality. The questions that this model poses are how do men effect control of languages, how does it work in practice, and finally in the particular case of the zar, is the zar ceremony an instance of limits to men's power over women? Language plays a crucial role in the zar ceremony. In the beginning
56 / Slyomovics the exorciser and the possessed interrogate together the possessing spirit to determine its identity and nationality. This is ascertained either by music (the possessed sways to the beat associated with the spirit) or by language. The exorciser and the possessed question the spirit, often in a zar language known only to initiates. The possessed woman sometimes speaks in an unfamiliar tone of voice which may be her voice or the response of the spirit to her invocations. She calls to the spirit inhabiting her body, speaks of her imprisonment, and the walls that surround her. In the following example she says only the wind, which is freedom and freshness, reaches her in her domestic prison through the tiny aperture, the tdga, of the Egyptian peasant home: They imprisoned me took away the keys And the wind comes from the tiny aperture Who takes care of me Who takes care of me I am the one who calls, I call, I am calling I am the one who calls, I call, I am calling It is time, it has been a long time, Welcome I am the sick one. In this particular zar ceremony, a woman believes that her words and the slander of others have caused her intense physical suffering. She insists that such disruptive social behavior does not originate from herself but comes from the male spirit that possesses her. Typically, her speaking voice during the zar ceremony merges both female subject and male possessing spirit. You are sick and I am sick and of your world you are suffering Keep with the world and do not talk about people's honor I am not to be blamed I repent and suffer the blame of the Beloved I am sick, suffering I heard the Beloved blaming me, talking Listen to the words of the Prophet There are people talking Mind your own affairs and do not speak Talking in assemblies causes pain in the body I was like you O slanderer But God saved me from it It is my duty to advise you
Ritual Grievance 157 Before you say words, your saying upon him You understand His meaning from me . . . I am the sick one, take care of me and I, and I, and I, and I, etc. (Mayers, appendix) These words are sung, chanted, and groaned by the afflicted woman. A three-way conversation takes place within the woman that includes the woman, her spirit and master, and also the phrases and admonitions of the shaman. Speaking through the woman's mouth, the male master and spirit explains the circumstances that led to his association with his female host. In this example, the Red Sultan points to malicious female speech that dishonors others. It should be noted that both the subject and the audience share the knowledge that the master never leaves his female host. The two together remain in conflict for the rest of this woman's life regarding the use and effects of her tongue within their joint social order. A second possession case, described by Cynthia Nelson, concerns a woman whose loss of speech is occasioned by her husband's taking a second co-wife. Without constant attendance at zar ceremonies, whether participating in the audience or as the central patient, the woman loses her ability to speak. In her own words: "One night I awoke unable to speak and I became very frightened. My friends told my husband that I must make a zar otherwise the spirit would do me more harm and if he did not give me the money to do it the spirit may harm him too. I made a zar and have been coming regularly ever since and if I don't the spirit takes my voice and becomes very angry" (Nelson, 204). In this case the woman's male master, as well as her husband in real life, are implicated in her ability or inability to speak. By way of conclusion I would like to point to some of the central questions for feminist ethnography that the structure, content, and context of the zar ceremony quite obviously foreground. What is the function and effect, for society in general and for the position of women in society in particular, of ritual reversals such as the zar that are organized around the figure of the disjunct woman? It seems very clear that for women the zar plays out the reverse side of marriage, in much the same way that, very generally, Levi-Strauss claims all celebrations and festivals play out the reverse side of social life. In the zar the possessed women materially manifest carnivalesque celebration in their bodies by means of their gymnastic contortions, their unbound hair, their unveiled faces, and their screaming voices. We might be tempted to say, therefore, that in the zar women manage to display their power
58 / Slyomovics by the way their bodies invert, disrupt, rewrite customary norms. They mock conventional dress codes that call for all-black attire, loosen their hair, and brazenly show their faces. Their central presence in the zdr reverses the normal absence of women at public spectacles. Such inversions of the norm surely allow for parodic inflections of strong cultural values, and sometimes this leads to remarkably sophisticated and pointedly ironic reflection. For example, in certain zdr ceremonies the possessing male spirit shapes the female host's behavior so that she not only masquerades as a man but uses this masquerade to parody distinctively male gestures. She smokes cigarettes, winds a man's turban about her head, plays with the male seducer's gestures and songs. The large question remains, however, as to whether such thematically subversive, but ceremonialized and socially approved inversions of social norms, function finally to subvert or instead to resecure such norms. A practical illustration of this question presents itself when we consider the specifically and stressedly gendered psychomachia (battle of/for the soul) enacted in the sexualized body of the woman in the zdr. It is usually said that the fantasy of bisexuality summons up the fantasy of a complete being, two within one. Thus in the zdr ceremony both sexes, male spirit and female host, are located within an apparently female body. But this is not a static unity in the ceremony of the zdr; quite the contrary, this unity contains within it a dramatic conflict and rupture. During the zdr ceremony, for example, the female speaker sometimes blames the male spirit. On the other hand, sometimes she is to blame and must ask forgiveness. In either case, however, whether she speaks for or against herself, it is understood that it is the male spirit, the acknowledged possessor of language, who speaks for her by speaking through her. The question arises, therefore, who is exorcising whom, whether this male spirit possession is not a form of dispossession, whether the woman only experiences her freedom to speak, to dance, to behave outrageously, by virtue of the fact she has literally incorporated into herself an alien male identity. In sum, is the zdr ceremony a symbol of, a clinical symptom of, a denial of, or a therapeutic reaction to an incompatible, incoherent synthesis of male and female? Like Freud's hysteric, the woman of the zdr can never be cured, only momentarily calmed. What is the significance of this temporary solution, the very achievement of which is evidence of its own irresolution? Helene Cixous has written on women in southern Italy who perform the spider dance to exorcise the spider's bite and venom. She wonders whether, in the end, it is the woman herself, rather than the spider, who
Ritual Grievance 159 is ultimately expelled out of the woman because the ceremony addresses itself only to the therapeutic ejaculation of the demonic male. Finally the zar raises questions regarding the way ceremonial performative language informs, perhaps forms, gendered social relations. Remember that the zar ceremony subverts from within, problematizing a familiar feminine/masculine dichotomy, but only in the instance of extreme psychosis in the woman, a psychosis powerfully evidenced by her disordered speech. According to French semiotician Luce Irigaray, women's language, if it were not suppressed, is categorically different from men's language in two principal ways. In the first place women's language is not primarily syntactic, that is to say proceeding from subject to predicate to object. Second, she claims there is a plurality in feminine language, a heterogeneity, a heteroglossia deeply at odds with the univocal rigidities of male discursive order. In her article entitled "Women's Exile," she writes that "at each moment for women there are at least two meanings, without one being able to decide which meaning prevails, which is on top or underneath, which conscious or repressed." In the zar ceremony words surely have more than one meaning, and no meaning is more basic than the other by virtue of the fact that the speaker is indeterminate. But is it the male master, or the female body, or the suffering female consciousness that serves as agent of this double voice? The rallying cry of feminists of the Lacanian persuasion is "write your own body," to find a form of writing from which the specific rhythms of the female body and the female unconscious can emerge. Assuming that such articulation in speech of the woman's body occurs in the zar ceremony, assuming also the biologism and essentialism of Irigaray's account, does the zar amount in fact to the registration or the voicing of a male or a female speech? Who is speaking for whom, and to whom and who is listening? There are many problems with Irigaray's hypothesis, such as the relationship between the body and language, or whether anatomy can so readily manifest itself in speech language. For me these problems are quite significant. Nevertheless, I would like to record and to witness my memory of the authentically female speech sounded at the zdrs at which I have been present. Regardless of the type of illness or the specific demon invoked, every woman in every zar concluded its various sections with the repeated crying, singing phrase, in Arabic: "wa and, wa and" again and again. In linguistic terminology, wa and is the first person subject pronoun: "and I, and I, I, I, I, I." Whether this "I" is a complaint, a grievance, an exclamatory cry of pain or pleasure, or even an alienating apostrophe addressed to herself, this "I" calls up and out
60 / Slyomovics a female speaking subject whose palpable presence must be accounted for by any theorization of the zar. Author's note: I am grateful to Marilyn Mayers for her help and analysis of the zar. Susan Slyomovics teaches in the Department of Performance Studies, is a member of the "Women & Performance Advisory Board, and co-editor of this issue with Judy Burns. An anthropologist, she specializes in Middle Eastern theatre, film and performance, and is the author of Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Oral Epic Poet in Performance. BIBLIOGRAPHY Berque, Jacques. Histoire sociale d'un village egyptien au XXième siècle. Paris: Mouton, 1957. Cerulli, E. "Zär," Encyclopedia of Islam. London: Luzac, 1927. Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans, by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985 (Theory and History of Literature, volume 24). Leiris, Michel. L'Afrique fantome. Paris: Gallimard, 1934. . La Possession et ses aspects theatraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar. Paris: Plon, 1958. El-Shamy, Hassan. "Mental Health in Traditional Culture: A Study of Preventative and Therapeutic Folk Practices in Egypt," Catalyst, 6 (1972) pp. 13-28. Fakhouri, Hani. "The Zar Cult in an Egyptian Village," Anthropological Quarterly, 41 (1968) pp. 49-56. Kennedy, John G. "Nubian Zar Ceremonies as Psychotherapy," Human Organization, 26 (1967) pp. 49-56. Mayers, Marilyn. "Psychiatry in Egypt," Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984. Morsy, Soheir. "Sex Differences and Folk Illness in an Egyptian Village," Women in the Muslim World. Ed. by Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 599-616. Nelson, Cynthia. "Self, Spirit Possession and World View: An Illustration from Egypt," International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 17 (1971) pp. 194-209.
