Conceptualizaciones de la variable conciencia fonológica

In the early 1990s, when one entered Tarim, one of the largest towns in the southern Yemeni region of Hadramawt, one had a choice of perhaps two restaurants for lunch, if that. At the edge of town, right by the ceme-tery and bounded by remnants of the ancient town wall encircling the settlement—the wall had been torn down by socialists dismantling feu-dal ramparts—stood the Kenya Restaurant. While the restaurant was un-likely to have a full hot meal ready to serve, it was un-likely to be open and to serve tea and snacks such as French fries and sugar-glazed doughnut holes called kalimati. If one bothered to ask, the African youth serving the food would draw on linguistic resources that were equal parts En-glish and Arabic to explain, with an apologetic grin, that kalimati is a Swahili word, and the treats are an African specialty: Aren’t they sweet and tasty? The other dining option was the Tanzania Restaurant, on the main road toward the center of town, run by dark men of African de-scent. There, the hungry traveler could sit down and be served without a word: invariably, the restaurant oªered a choice of fried fish with red-tinted rice vaguely reminiscent of Indian biryani, cooked in ghee (Indian clarified butter) and spiced tomato sauce, or more of the same. At either place, nevertheless, one could count on a ready pick-me-up: a stiª cup of Hadrami tea, an unmistakable, astringent brew of Ceylon leaves distilled by prolonged double boiling in a small teapot perched over a large ket-tle of hot water, samovar style. “Hadrami whiskey,” the mischievous would say in jest, and the color was about right.

When I first visited Tarim in 1991, and on many subsequent occasions 63

between 1993 and 1995 while resident there, I spent time at the Kenya and Tanzania restaurants, too lazy to cook but busy with fieldwork. The restau-rants were natural places for “hanging out,” as the town had few other eating spots or open public spaces. Only later did I realize, after minor admonishment, that these places were expressly not frequented by per-sons from good families, or by self-respecting locals, for that matter. People who wanted their fish and rice but couldn’t cook, such as work crews, ordered takeout from the Tanzania. That explained the big pots and few customers. From hearing accounts of restaurants in Hong Kong and Beijing, I had assumed that the poor state of the local ones here—so symptomatic of the “postsocialist transition” to a market economy—was the legacy of a quarter century of Marxist government, geared to pro-duction rather than services: feeding the people rather than serving for-eign tourists. The only Marxist state in the Arab world, South Yemen had a ruling politburo that was communist enough to pursue bloody strug-gles between “Chinese” and “Soviet” factions through the 1970s and 1980s.

As it turned out, however, the restaurant service problem predated the Marxist one.

The very notion of a place where one could eat and drink in public figure 12. Graves of Tarim and their cupolas, ensconced behind the wall.

The road is a major flood path. Kenya Restaurant at end of line of cars, to the left. Photo by the author.

was not just foreign but base in Hadramawt. The first modern, printed history of Hadramawt, al-Bakrô’s Political History of Hadramawt (al-Bakrô al-Yáfiªô 1936), mentions coªeehouses and bars in the same breath—as in-stitutions of ill repute on the coastal regions of the Red Sea, in areas pop-ulated by lowly Africans and their descendants. Foreign mercenaries could be hired at such establishments for attacks on legitimate local authority.

In 1806, Isâáq b. ªUmar b. Yaâyá gathered such a crew from Red Sea bars and coªeehouses and with them, attacked the Kasádô emir of al-Mukallá, a principal Hadrami port on the Indian Ocean coast (al-Bakrô al-Yáfiªô 1936: 118).

In Tarim, Kenya and Tanzania referred not just to the restaurants that posted these names on signboards above their doorways. They stood for the countries they named, the Africans found in them, the inferior qual-ity and cleanliness of their food, and the troubling moral qualqual-ity and ac-tivity of their denizens—the sum total of the normative distance between the desirable home and the undesirable foreign. The hierarchical nature of this distance took on further dimensions when some of the old men I met at the Tanzania Restaurant admitted that they had in the past, before the independence revolution, been slave soldiers of the local Kathôrô sul-tans and were descendants of East African slaves. The Africans in the Kenya and Tanzania restaurants of Tarim were as unwitting participants as I was in social associations that enjoyed su‹cient consensus and durability for people to enact and realize them in urban space and reiterate them across centuries and regimes. After the Yemeni civil war of 1994, in which north-ern forces subdued southnorth-ern secessionists, we were to be joined by other outsiders, poor northern Yemenis who sold qát and snacks by the old wall and cemetery next to Kenya Restaurant. They lived and slept where they traded and were apparently devoid of places in which to take baths. In the cool of the evenings, this area became a rather lively place for Africans, northerners, and even wayward sons of good families to gather, drink tea, watch TV, and endlessly chew qát. Having grown up on the array of de-licious foods littering the streets in Malaysia, and imbued with the an-thropologist’s penchant for public culture, I naturally gravitated to these points of low social standing. Moreover, I had not received many invita-tions to dine in.

I had my first taste of a “real” Hadrami meal when an acquaintance had some visitors from out of town to his home for a spread, laying out dishes of meats and vegetables on plates, the staple of steamed white rice, and saucers of condiments on mats on the carpets. Each guest had his own plate of rice and added bits of meat, vegetables, and condiments from

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the shared dishes throughout the meal to flavor the rice. The spread was essentially the type of meal that the Dutch in Indonesia came to call rijsttafel,or “rice table.” The condiments were sambal, achar, and a sweet, thick soy sauce poured over the chicken, called kichap.¹

“So,” my host asked, “is it like what you have in your country?” I replied in the a‹rmative, quite amazed at the similarities, even though some dishes were not exactly the same and not exactly my favorites.

He explained to me, with a triumphant flourish, that in the good houses, I would find pure steamed white rice, unlike the greasy stuª that Africans eat, like the rice I had in the Kenya and Tanzania restaurants, and not like the animal-fat rice preferred by the bedouin in the countryside.

Further, most of the large houses in town were built by grandfathers who had migrated to Jáwá (Java, a synecdoche standing for “island Southeast Asia” in Hadrami parlance), and the cuisine I was having was passed down from Jáwá grandmothers within those houses. In fact, a number of those repatriated women were Chinese women who had been adopted by or married to the Hadrami grandfathers in Jáwá. This intermarriage was one reason why the scions of the good houses were often of a fairer aspect. I digested this between fistfuls of my white rice and red-chili sambal. On another such occasion, an Indian visitor commented to the Hadrami host on the light complexion of his little son, who burst in during the meal;

he noted that the fair boy was quite handsome (“he doesn’t look Arab”).

This statement was taken as a great compliment.

While color informs hierarchical valuations of persons and places, the semantic domain of Jáwá encompasses other potent associations. Jáwá comes from the time of ancestors and is about descent, wealth, and in-heritance, as well as about cuisine and phenotype, the constituents of tangible human substances. “The food was better when granny was around.” For the good families in the great houses, the era preceding that

1. Sambal is pounded chili flavored with shrimp paste. It is common in Southeast Asia;

the word derives from the Hindi word sambar. Achar is an acid and salt fruit relish, usually pickled lime in Hadramawt. It is widely known by the same term in most of the Indian ver-naculars, Siam, Burma, and the Malay world. Limes in this form were used by Muslim Mal-abaris (descendants of Arabs, called Choolias by the English) to protect against scurvy when they sailed from Malabar to Southeast Asia in the eighteenth century. The term was com-mon in Anglo-Indian usage, applied to pickled products of the English firm Crosse & Black-well; it may have originated from the Latin acetaria and come to India via the Portuguese (Yule and Burnell 1994 [1903]: 3). Kichap, from Malay, stems from the Hokkien Chinese koe chiap,a compound of paste and sauce (with a consistency between the two). The word was also adopted into English usage, as catsup and finally ketchup, the American tabletop icon.

of the Marxists, who took power soon after independence from Britain in 1967, was one of nostalgia for a century in which good things came from the Jáwá regions, in goodly numbers. The Javanese Days, the ayyám Jáwá,were a lost golden age to the generation that grew up under Marx-ist rule. The connections were broken when the MarxMarx-ists came to power, and the golden age slipped into the past. Families that identified with tribal groups (qabáºil, adjective qabôlô), or with descent from the prophet Muâammad, were categorized as bourgeois²and subdivided into big, medium, and small bourgeoisie. Families with wealth and remittances from Jáwá were called “big bourgeoisie” and were dispossessed of houses and lands.

One has to understand the celebration of Jáwá in Hadramawt in the context of the dissolution of the Marxist state in South Yemen, after the fall of the Berlin wall and the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990. The return of valuable land and houses confiscated by the Marx-ists, the lifting of surveillance on communications and restrictions on in-ternational travel, and the return of religious scholars and rich uncles from exile abroad all created excitement at the prospect of recuperating the past glory signified by “Jáwá” today. Indeed, students from Jáwá are begin-ning to come again to Tarim, the spiritual home of Islamic scholars and the Prophet’s descendants in the Indian Ocean, signaling its reinstatement as the fount of religious education and value for Jáwá and the Sawáâil (Swahili East Africa). A new university, founded in 1995, has been built with funds from migrants in the Persian Gulf. The architect for the build-ings is a Malaysian of Hadrami descent.

Jáwá was not always so celebrated. In the late nineteenth century, when wealth began to pour into Hadramawt from the tens of thousands of Hadrami migrants there, Jáwá was bemoaned as a foreign source of corruption. “Forget Jáwá, stay home and water the fields”³was the best-known line from a celebrated poem condemning Jáwá and its sowing of discord and corruption of morals in the homeland. The poem’s author, the judge Muâsin b. ªAlawô al-Saqqáf, fielded numerous commercial dis-putes between migrant Hadramis coming out of Jáwá.⁴But the biggest disputes of the era were not commercial. They accompanied the rise in

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2. At times, other stigmatized terms were used in place of bourgeois, including iqìáªô (“feu-dalist”) and kahnñtô (“priestly”).

3. al-sináwa wa-lá Jáwá

4. One of these cases is described by his descendant, the notary public Jaªfar al-Saqqáf (1993).

Southeast Asia of a new movement against the erstwhile social prece-dence of the descendants of the Prophet, the preeminent citizens of Tarim.⁵

The morals of Hadrami oªspring born of foreign mothers, the creoles called muwallad, were a great concern.⁶ Books were written for their edification, schools were started in the homeland for their education, and wills were written granting them inheritance on condition they spent their formative years in the homeland.⁷Stereotypes of the Jáwá muwallads from the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries are similar to those of the African youths who loiter about the Kenya Restaurant today. Those Africans are also muwallads, Hadrami creoles from Kenya and Tanzania.

But in their social and spatial marginalization, they fill positions vacated by the Jáwá muwallads, who have since gained ancestor status.

In Hadramawt, the identification of people, places, and things as for-eign or local is relativized by history and framed in hierarchy. Designa-tions of “foreign” and “local” are parts of an apparently stable, public, consensual structure of valuation. Despite the processual parade of per-sons, places, and things through time, such as the foreign Jáwá muwal-lads who have become localized, a relatively stable structure of percep-tion seems to persist, which valorizes the local and diminishes or even demonizes the foreign. In the face of a scientific—that is, a historical—

analysis that can map the trajectory of a cultural item from despised-foreign to valued-local status, we can call the insistence on valorizing the local a resolute localism. It is resolute because it is not always unaware of the trajectories of localization; it is resolute despite that knowledge. The apotheosis of the Jáwá muwallads is one example. Naturalization is never complete because local folklore within circles of family and community, and sometimes even individual memory within one lifetime, tells of such incorporations.

Material culture, such as items of food, provides other examples. The books of Hadrami history and biography are replete with firsts: the first person to introduce tea to Hadramawt was the sayyid Hámid b. ªAbd Alláh Junayd, for example, according to Muâammad b. Aâmad al-Sháìirô in his Epochs of Hadrami History (al-al-Sháìirô 1973: 71). Religious law

5. This topic is discussed in chapter 6 and subsequent chapters.

6. Chapter 8 elaborates on this theme.

7. The largest of these wills was that of Shaykh b. ªAbd al-Raâmán b. Aâmad al-Káf, which was drawn up in Singapore in the first decade of the twentieth century; payouts lasted until the last decade of the century. See IORL, R/20/A/3874, “Probate No. 176 of 1910 (Will of Shaykh al-Kaª).”

and practical morality of past centuries register debates about the ad-missibility of coªee, tea, and tobacco for human ingestion by Muslims.⁸ When tobacco first appeared in Hadramawt in the sixteenth century, it was initially taken up by soldiers, bedouin, and cameleers. Muslim ju-rists campaigned against its use, and in the seventeenth century, al-Husayn, the son of the great Hadrami saint Shaykh Bñ Bakr bin Sálim of ªAynát, issued a fatwá (jurisprudential opinion) pronouncing it ille-gal. He commanded the governors of the country to stop its entry at the ports and personally bought up all supplies in the country to pre-vent its spread (al-Sháìirô 1973: 72). His home base of ªAynát was a ma-jor caravan center in the Hadrami interior for goods from the coast, and from there, the message that tobacco was contraband went out to other markets in the country. Nonetheless, these items of material culture are now thoroughly integrated into local Hadrami religious practices and everyday pursuits of sociability.

As novelties or stimulants, foreign items find ready assimilation into legalistic categories and subsequent evaluation. They easily fall under the religiously prohibited classes of “reprehensible innovations” (bidªa makrñha) and “intoxicants” (khamr). They are thus foreign not only to the particular geographical locale of Hadramawt but also to the global community of Muslims. To bear the label foreign is to carry the burden of a legal charge of illegitimacy.

Such charges can focus on personal spirituality as well. The famously pious Aâmad b. ªAlô al-Junayd of Tarim (1783–1858) had two brothers:

ªUmar, a migrant in Singapore, and ªAbd Alláh, a migrant in S¥anªáº, in North Yemen. Annually, ªUmar sent Aâmad a gift of five hundred “French riyals,” while ªAbd Alláh remitted a hundred.⁹Of these gifts, Aâmad would say, “I find more blessing (baraka) in the hundred of ªAbd Alláh than the five hundred of ªUmar.” ªUmar also regularly sent him fine garments from Singapore, heavy ones for winter and light ones for summer. Yet Aâmad simply stored them away in a box or cupboard and never wore them. His

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8. By 1532, coªee had gained acceptance in legal circles. In that year, the chronicler of the Hadrami diaspora ªAbd al-Qádir al-ªAydarñs, resident in Gujarat, recorded a discussion of the beneficial and deleterious eªects of coªee and whether its nature was hot, cold, dry, or moist (al-ªAydarñs 1985: 124). Yet even at the end of the nineteenth century, the Hadrami sayyid ªAlawô b. Aâmad al-Saqqáf, son of the mufti of the Sháfiªô school in Mecca, saw a need to author a volume on restraining desires associated with the consumption of coªee, tobacco, and qát (al-Mashhñr 1984: 243).

9. French riyals were the silver, Austrian Maria Theresa thalers used in Yemen until re-cent times.

sartorial choices were considered: he reasoned that using the foreign gar-ments would throw the local weavers of Tarim out of work and cause their finished stocks to go to ruin. Moreover, the Tarim weavers were Muslims who invoked God while they went about their spinning and weaving, and their products were charged with blessings, unlike foreign cloth made by unbelievers (A. Q. al-Junayd 1994: 122).

The lore of Aâmad al-Junayd is legion among his numerous descen-dants in Tarim and those of his brother ªUmar in Singapore today. To them, his ratiocinations on the relative merits of foreign and local must be tempered by a certain historical irony, for ªUmar in Singapore was the one who established the family fortunes and built the mosque that today stands as the oldest such structure in downtown Singapore. The ªUmar Mosque on ªUmar Road was built in 1820, a year after the founding of British Singapore. While al-Junayds in Singapore enjoy the prestige of residing in a modern city-state where streets, a subway station, and an in-dustrial park bear the family name, their cousins in Tarim live in great houses (some with indoor swimming pools, now dry) built by grandfa-thers who were repatriated from Singapore: the Jáwá muwallads.

These stories of Aâmad, ªUmar, and their descendants appear in a thick family history published in Singapore (A. Q. al-Junayd 1994) and dis-tributed gratis in Hadramawt and elsewhere. The book’s author, Sayyid ªAbd al-Qádir b. ªAbd al-Raâmán al-Junayd, is the Tarim-born leader (imám)of the Friday mosque of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The person-age of Aâmad al-Junayd, the most religiously celebrated member of this family since its ascent two centuries ago, carries gravitas that grounds the self-regard of the family. As Sayyid ªAbd al-Qádir recounted to me while the work was in progress, the idea for the family history evolved from

These stories of Aâmad, ªUmar, and their descendants appear in a thick family history published in Singapore (A. Q. al-Junayd 1994) and dis-tributed gratis in Hadramawt and elsewhere. The book’s author, Sayyid ªAbd al-Qádir b. ªAbd al-Raâmán al-Junayd, is the Tarim-born leader (imám)of the Friday mosque of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The person-age of Aâmad al-Junayd, the most religiously celebrated member of this family since its ascent two centuries ago, carries gravitas that grounds the self-regard of the family. As Sayyid ªAbd al-Qádir recounted to me while the work was in progress, the idea for the family history evolved from