The Hafla and the Zajjal: Sociability, Masculinity, and Modernity among Arabic-Speaking Immigrants in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina

The poet in the Arab World is a social critic who commands respect from his/her peers and the society in which he/she lives.  Indeed, the power of the word has the potential to create sociopolitical controversy, inform debates pertaining to social mores, and incite rebuttals both for and against the poet’s argument.  The zajjal is the extemporaneous oral poetic art form most commonly found in the Levant and Egypt, which was performed at weddings and haflas, or social gatherings.  It is the expressive medium immigrants from Greater Syria (present day Syria, Lebanon, and historical Palestine) brought with them to Argentina during the fifty year period of intense migration before the global Great Depression.  For male immigrants, the hafla provided a masculine space of sociability to deliberate a series of issues affecting them in their new milieu.  Furthermore, the zajjal provided a medium to articulate discourses of modernity and construct an honorable self.  This poetic construction of self was an ongoing and interactive social process involving language with fellow immigrants based upon shared experiences and cultural frameworks.            Examining reprinted poems from published poetry volumes and the Arabic-language press in Argentina, this paper considers the hafla as a space in which Arabic-speaking immigrants formulated collective and individual identities through discourses of masculinity and modernity via the poetic art of the zajjal.  This space was a critical forum in the sociability of these men and the debating of various issues associated with life in Argentina and what it meant to be modern.