Read Online A Reed Shaken by the Wind by Gavin Maxwell - Free Book Online Page A

irresistible. The rhythm was staccato yet somehow fluid, each movement whether of limb or torso somehow resembling a pause and a pounce. The dance was a narrative, as are many of them, and song and mime was a part of it, all held within the framework of a tight unvarying iambic rhythm. Ti-tumti-túm, ti-tumti-túm; the audience took up the rhythm, each stamping out the tune with the heel of an extended right foot, each with his arms outstretched before him and his hands locked with extended fingers to produce a finger-click as loud, literally, as a man may make by clapping his palms together. Even the small children can do this; a shrimp of six years can with his soft baby fingers make a crack like the report of a small pistol.
    I could not follow the words that the slave sang as he danced, but the mime made the theme plain, a labourer cheated of his hire. His voice was light and plaintive andwhimsically protesting; its pathos seemed the aggregate of generations of unquestioning slave tradition. As the dance neared its end he squatted on his heels and in exaggerated time with the rhythm he bounced round the little open space, searching for the labourer’s hire of which he had been cheated, lifting the corners of the reed matting, peering into the coffee pots and among the embers of the fire, chanting pitifully, “I want my pay, I want my pay.”
    The next dance was, like most that I saw during the journey, erotic. These dances have been described in the journals of learned societies as “erotic but not obscene”; the distinction is a nice one, but the words would require close definition before the point could be maintained. Most of the movements in these dances are specifically and frankly sexual; sometimes the dance is composed almost exclusively of such movements, and becomes a stylised pantomime of the sexual act, ending with a formula to represent climax; sometimes the sexual movements are used arbitrarily among others, as though a dancer were using his whole repertoire and adding these for piquancy. Each dancer is in any case his own choreographer; he learns gradually when he is very small how to perform and perfect simple steps and body movements, and these he develops, elaborates, and intermingles into dances that are thus essentially his own though using the dance-language of his culture.
    It seems likely that many hundreds of generations of dancing in the tiny confined space about the hearth of reed huts, with the necessity for the maximum movement in the minimum space, have been responsible for the great development of body-movement as opposed to footwork for which there would be inadequate room. Thus, any dancer worthy of the claim, often if he is still quite a small child, is able to call into play groups of muscles of whose very existence in himself the average European is unaware; and an important part of every dancer’s vocabulary, as it were, is a violent and prolonged shivering of one or both shoulders. Precise andalmost acrobatic use of the pelvic muscles lends a sexual flavour to nearly all dancing, the movements ranging from direct crissation to sinuous rolling motions or plain high-speed bottom waggling; this last nearly always draws enthusiastic laughter from the audience.
    The slave’s second dance that night at Ramla was on a theme that is very familiar to the marshmen, an exploitation of the risqué possibilities inherent in the Muslim attitude of prayer with the forehead pressed to the ground and the rump high in the air. He was a superb artist, and there was certainly nothing slipshod or haphazard in the execution of the performance, but whether it would have been labelled erotic rather than obscene in England seems a very academic point; it was a beautifully danced dirty joke.
    Besides the talented and enthusiastic amateurs, of whom there are a number in every village, there are also professional dancers, or rather entertainers, for they are expected also to sing, to drum, and to perform