Folk Tales and the Culture of Violence

Dr. Wijdan al-Sayegh - Iraq

The researcher views the folk tale as a cultural universe woven by the collective imagination to record current and future events. This applies to the ‘Bamniya jarjouf’ song whose special pattern has moved it from its local community to the international community.
As such, it has become a sort of narrative text which is not concerned with a repeated love story but a story in which the event is tied up with the rhythmic patterns of the story as a political sign that recalls the entire human history to shed light on the phenomenon of cultural and physical violence. The story culminates in annihilating the other through exposure of ideological despotism whose consequences have no bounds. As such, the act of interpreting of the jarjouf tale should be armed with ideology and culture in order to understand the mechanism that dominate the human mind which is the creation of the environment. Jarjouf should not be visualized as a male body which raped a female body, hence extracting its affiliation being the unripe and luscious fruit or a fruit has not fallen onto him from the ‘tree’!! Rather, it should be viewed as the despotic authority which practiced a cultural rip-off on the victim, the female protagonist.
In sum, the jarjouf tale interacts with the present circumstances as it reveals the main cause of the cracking of the empire of fear over the human history. It also shows how killing and confiscating the culture of the other are the two main causes of the downfall of empires and states. Isn’t jarjouf an aspect of this?