For the 13th consecutive year, the Monot Theater, Beirut, organized the International Festival of Stories and Monodrame. The tradition is revived mainly during Ramadan, in some cafés in Sidon, South Lebanon, and during a special festival of storytelling. Today, the hakawati is long gone, replaced by various forms of modern entertainment. Kings, too, depended on storytellers to spread their message,” says Ahmad Yusuf, a hakawati from the UAE. “It was said that after the ruler of the country, it was the storyteller who occupied the second most important position, as telling a story involved communicating with the masses. Telling a riveting story to pass time and learn a few morality lessons along the way was a powerful means to make people step out of their everyday concerns and willingly loose themselves in another world. It is also said that al Saidawi cut the story short because the Ottoman governor begged him to finish it. According to legend, in the eighteenth century, Ahmad al Saidawi, one of the best hakawati of his time, told the story of King Baybars for three hundred and seventy-two evenings in a café in Aleppo, Syria. Experimenting with pitch, tone and accent, the storyteller impersonates the many characters he is talking about.Ī hakawati could go on spinning the same tale daily over several months, always ending on a cliffhanger to keep his audience wanting more, the equivalent of today’s soap opera. He tells traditional tales from 1001 Nights, chronicles of legendary Arab heroes such as Antar, or stories from the holy Quran.
He always tells them from memory and his style is one filled with metaphors, rhymes and lots of exaggeration. In the old days, villages had their own hakawatis, but the great ones left their homes and traveled around the country to earn their living.Ī hakawati never reads his stories. A hakawati is a teller of tales, myths and fables, a storyteller, an entertainer, someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarn.
The word hakawati is derived from the Lebanese word hekaya and literary means the one who tells stories. The most common form of entertainment in the Middle East used to be that of the hakawati. Once upon a time, in bygone days, people entertained themselves.īut, not by watching TV, going to the movies, reading a book or surfing the Internet.
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