Love, passion and patience for calamities.

We will deal with some wedding songs at Palestinian weddings, especially Hajjah songs, or as they are called in other regions, Samer songs. Al-Hajjah, an ancient Palestinian rural heritage, is performed at weddings to express joy, solidarity and solidarity, where men stand in two opposite rows, each row tucked at the shoulder, indicating the solidarity of the community. One of the classes begins by singing a verse of poetry in colloquial dialect, then the opposite row repeats the same verse and the first row repeats it again. Thus, the same house is repeated twice in each row, to move on to another house, and so on until the end of this paragraph of the evening.

The rhythmic movement of the body differs from region to region: in most of the Palestinian countryside, the verse is repeated, the body is upright, and the arms are clasped across the chest. With the end of the singing of the verse, the hands clap (excoriation), accompanied by the movement of the head to the left and right in a musical way, and the body leans back and forth, in conjunction with the movement of the legs in harmony with the movement of the body.
There is no logical correlation or specific sequence in the repetition of poetic verses, as it generally depends on what the memory is present in, and the meanings may differ from house to house, but it is mostly the more general theme of love and adoration, patience in the face of calamities and calamities, praise or admonition to the beloved. Reception of guests and visitors from outside the town.
When admonishing the beloved for his lack of questioning, the verse says: “Oh poplar, the door of the house is swinging / I am about to die when my friend of Sayyel comes” (Sayyel, that is, asked). In this, he reproached the beloved for not asking him for a long time, what applies to both sexes. As for the patience of suffering and the calamities endured, it goes like this: “The patience of the wood is patience under the mountains / What is your patience, oh wood other than the decrees?” (Predestination = predestination). This indicates the hard life of the people in the countryside, their endurance and patience with calamities, their suffering in their daily life, and the surrender of their affairs to destiny.
In the reproach of the heart when it beats for those who are not worthy, the desire to break from this situation (the love of those who are not), and the punishment of the soul for “I did it”, he says: “Oh heart, I am high so that I cut you and throw you / hang you in the air and make my salvation in you. ” As for the distinction between someone who loves you, comes to see you, and someone who makes excuses not to come, and there is an implicit admonition for the friend and the loved one, thus it is said: “He who loves you will take you on foot, he will walk / who loves you tells you what he taught us ”. And when showing love and taking the trouble to come to the houses of loved ones for that, or when describing the state of loyalty between friends: “If it had not been for love for a long time we would not have come / We did not travel your lands with our feet ”(From feet = feet).
When people’s emotional and living condition worsens, they feel nostalgic for the beautiful days gone by, especially those in which there was a “calm mind.” In nostalgia for the beautiful past, and the return of lost joy, especially when homes are empty of loved ones due to loss or travel, it is said: “Oh home Oh give, and if we returned as we were / To you, oh home, after the henna ceremony.

It generally still persists in many parts of the Palestinian countryside.

From this saying it is understood that the situation will not be as it was again, and expresses the desperation for the return of the absent.
With regard to turning and raising the beloved, to the extent that everyone who knows him or even hears the sound of his ring falling into the well will have paradise, and it is said: “The ring of my soulmate fell into the well and the bell / O who heard his bell, an emissary of the committee ”.
In some cases, the words are “softened” to fit the rhyme without a specific meaning, as in the following verse: “You will be good, come at this hour / your waist is thin and your hand is the seal of obedience.” In the first part of the house, a greeting to those who came as a visitor in the afternoon. As for the second part, it is nothing more than filling in words, to equalize weight and rhyme without a useful meaning. These are some of the songs and poems that are repeated at weddings, and still continue in many places in the Palestinian countryside, but they are steadily declining, after new customs, including orchestras, have entered either in open courtyards or in closed rooms, o Some of them use so-called DJs to broadcast radio songs and dance and music live, the latter being considered the heritage of the Bedouin and Saharan communities.

* Palestinian writer

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