Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments

Within different cultures across the world, poetry, song, stories and films that people use to express themselves can always help us understand the social and cultural context. In Lila Abu-Lughod’s book Veiled Sentiments, the author studies the poetry of the tribes of Bedouin in northern Egypt known as the Awlad Ali from October 1978 to May 1980. The author recognizes two contradictory discourses: “an ideology of honor in ordinary conversation and everyday behavior” on the one hand and “oral lyric poetry of love and vulnerability” on the other. (p. 10) In the first part, the author discusses the ideology of Bedouin social life of Awlad Ali. In the second part, she shifts the center to the reactions of individuals to the ideology of honor as …show more content…
One of the most important discoveries made by Abu-Lughod was the fact that there was a “radical difference between the sentiments expressed in the ghinnawas and those expressed about the same situations in ordinary social interactions and conversations.”(p. 31) These poems, known as ghinnawas, are recited mostly by women and young men, usually in the midst of ordinary conversations between intimates. In part one of Veiled Sentiments, the author demonstrates the idea that in Bedouin society, women are only capable of achieving respectability by adhering to codes of chastity or sexual modesty. So ghinnawas always convey vulnerability and deep attachment to others. Many of the veiled sentiments concern relationships with members of the opposite sex toward whom they respond, outside of poetry, with anger or denial of concern. For instance, a woman rejected by her husband would claim cool unconcern about her loss, which is the correct behavior in a society that downplays sexuality, yet she would sing of sadness and longing. So poems are considered both revealing and confidential, and women are especially concerned that men not hear