Monthly Archives: May 2023

Dabke

Nationality: American, Lebanese-American
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 3/26/23
Language: English, Arabic

[L]: For weddings, we always have like specific instruments for like the ceremony. We have tabals, which are a certain kind of drum that will be at every wedding, every Lebanese wedding reception. There’s also the darbuka which is another type of drum and then there’s also a little like flute…I don’t really know what it’s called but if you googled “lebanese flute” you could find it. [I did google it, and it’s called a zamour] And those three instruments are essential for Lebanese weddings.

[Me]: Do you happen to know why?

[L]: Well those are just the instruments that are used for all parties, aka hafle, but those instruments are just like at the center of almost all like party music and they’ve all been used in the region forever. You’ll find variations of those instruments in every other country in the Middle East..but yeah.

[Me]: Are there particular types of songs that they play? Or even a particular mood or tone or rhythm of them?

[L]: Usually very upbeat, um, and the mood or rhythm…there’s a very iconic Lebanese party music if you look up Faris Karam, he’s a very….iconic singer and his songs will always be at weddings. There’s also a dance that we do called dabke and we do that at all of our parties and weddings.

L is 20 years old and a student at USC. She grew up in Michigan, but spent most summers in Lebanon with family. Her dad grew up in Lebanon and immigrated to the United States in his early 20s, and her mom grew up in the United States in a Lebanese immigrant family. L has been to multiple Lebanese weddings—though only in the United States—so this information comes from her first-hand experiences as well as her general knowledge of Lebanese culture from her upbringing. 

I was fortunate enough to attend a USC Lebanese, Egyptian, Persian club crossover event with L very shortly after conducting this interview, and was able to experience and witness dabke first-hand. The dance didn’t make an appearance until about 2 hours had gone by of vibrant Arabic music blasting all around, but when it did surface, it was unstoppable. There was no distinction between those of Lebanese or Egyptian or Persian origin, this was a moment of people coming together to perform a dance that they knew as well as their own names. The most wonderful part of dabke, in my humble opinion, is that it works in a similar fashion to a conga line—participants can keep joining at the end of the chain—but instead of being linear, the front of the line begins to spiral inward to create a sort of pinwheel of people, all holding hands and united in dance. It makes perfect sense that this would be a dance performed at weddings and other celebrations alike—upon doing a little bit of research, I found that the dance has ties to community, family bonding, and resilience: “A simple message of locking arms together, stomping to the ground, and singing or chanting has left a deep mark in the culture…it unifies us against our oppressor” (Dabke Dance: A Shared Tradition of the Levant). Dabke is a folk dance known well in regions like Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, where people live and die by their connections to their family and community. Speaking to the specific wedding performance of dabke, a wedding is a liminal period in one’s life, and thus a dance promoting and encouraging resilience and unity would serve to reassure the newlyweds and make sure that they know they have the strength and love of the community behind them. All in all, dabke is a beautiful manifestation of the dearly held beliefs, ideals, and traditions of both Lebanese and other middle-eastern cultures.

Swedish Christmas Traditions

Nationality: American, Swedish
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Language: English, Swedish

[E]: During Christmas we have a bunch of Swedish traditions…we eat a lot of food…i’m not gonna say the food is great, it’s more traditional food. It’s fish, peas, potatoes, it’s very…you know…viking. But we do this celebration before we end up opening presents which is always on Christmas Eve and we all hold hands and the person in the front, who’s usually the oldest person in my family so it’s always my grandmother, we all hold hands in a line and sing this song and dance around the house and we go into every single room in the entire house singing this song. It’s basically just talking about how it’s a new year and we’re ridding the house of any negative spirits from the year before or any negative auras, like saying a room but everyone’s in there and we’re all singing together. So then we go back to the kitchen and we wrap around this island in the kitchen and we pass around this big…what’s it called…pitcher of beer and you pass it around to every person next to you and they do that in Sweden to make sure that nobody poisoned the beer because that would be the beer that they’d drink from for the whole night. You say these things, it’s a bunch of Swedish words that mean “can I drink this? Yes you can drink this! Cheers” and cheers is skol.

E is a 20 year old college student who grew up in Pasadena, CA and has grown up visiting her family in Sweden often. She is also very close to her grandmother, who was born and raised in Sweden and who has passed a lot of knowledge down to E.

Based on this interview, it’s easy to see that these Swedish Christmas traditions are deeply tied to Swedish history, ideals, and customs. E refers to the traditional Christmas food as “viking,” indicating that she sees a direct connection between Sweden’s long history and the present. The ritual of going through each room of the house while singing represents a belief in the importance of cleansing and renewal, and the idea of starting the new year with a clean slate. I’d be interested in further exploring what E meant when she talked about “negative spirits,” specifically whether or not she actually believes that there are metaphysical spirits or if that’s just the tradition that’s been passed down. Additionally, the act of passing the pitcher around to make sure that no one has poisoned the beer shows a level of trust and community spirit, as well as a wariness of potential dangers—likely established over a long period of time, when people used to be legitimately poisoned at such gatherings. All in all, these Christmas traditions show that modern Swedish customs and celebrations are very connected to the physical and cultural history of the nation and its people.

La Llorona

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 4, 2023
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

[A]: La Llorona is a classic Mexican myth, and the myth is that a woman that had two children she loses them…or they get killed…or she kills them…or something like that and for the rest of her life she’s a spirit that roams around the streets screaming, “Ay mis hijos,” and people would hear it and when people would hear her scream everyone would rush into their house so that she wouldn’t take their kids, that’s the idea that she could take your kids if you’re not looking after them…so yeah

[Me]: Is it just a well-known thing or did your parents throw that at you when you weren’t coming inside?

[A]: Oh actually I don’t know! It seems like something they definitely would have done but I can’t say for certain that I remember that happening…It was definitely a well-known thing though and on Dia de los Muertos they would tell her story at school 

When I asked A if he could think of any tales, legends, or myths from his childhood that he’d like to tell me about, the first thing he said was, “Well there’s La Llorona of course,” like it was the most common thing in the world. Had we not discussed this legend in class, I would’ve had no idea what he was talking about because it’s not folklore from a community that I belong to; however, La Llorona was so deeply woven into A’s background that I don’t think it would have occurred to him that I might not have known the story beforehand. This begs the bigger question in the discussion of how folklore influences the filter through which we see the world, like how almost all American folklore echoes the future-orientation of the vast majority of Americans. Although the published La Llorona legend that we looked at in class had implications for motherhood and gender roles, A interprets the legend as a warning to kids to listen to their parents so they don’t get kidnapped. It’s more than likely that certain pockets of Mexican communities have adapted the “traditional”—and I use that word in the loosest sense possible—La Llorona legend to fit their child-rearing needs.

Haunted house at the end of the street

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 4, 2023
Primary Language: English

[A]: I grew up in like an 8 house horizontal neighborhood, you know like 8 houses and they were gated off, and when I turned 5 or 6 the last house at the end, the people left and the house was just there sitting for like 3 years between the period that the family was living there and the next one. So me and my friends that lived in the other houses always used to say that that house was haunted and that’s why they had left. So when Halloween would come around we would walk over to the house, ‘cause there was also like…it was at the end and it was blocked off with big hedges so you couldn’t totally see it like the rest of the neighborhood. So we used to go in there and grab little stones from the pavement and toss them at the windows to see if a spirit would appear or something. So for that whole time we used to say that the house was haunted.

[Me]: Did you guys just decide one day that the house was haunted or was there something specifically that happened?

[A]: I think we always used to just say it…I don’t think there was anything specifically but we used to say a bunch of stuff about why it was haunted. It was the last house, number 8, and we used to say that 8 was a haunted number and that we had seen the number in the night and that the house would spin in circles and the lights would flicker on and off…allegedly…we were probably just little kids making up stuff

[Me]: Did you ever go on to the property?

[A]: I don’t think we ever broke into the house but we definitely went into the yard and on to the patio and the driveway and we used to again throw rocks at the windows then one of us would scream that we saw something then we would run away or whatever

A is 21 years old and grew up in a small town in Mexico. He told me this story after I had asked him if he remembered any scary or ghost stories from when he was younger, but as he recounted it like more of a happy memory than one that still scared him—as most scary stories from youth seem in adulthood. Afterwards I prompted him to tell me a bit more about the role the number 8 played in the story, but the details were unfortunately lost to time. Regardless, reflecting on our class discussion about the “luckiness” of numbers in certain cultures, it got me thinking about how the number 8 is perceived in popular American culture; typically it’s considered a lucky or at least auspicious number (i.e. magic 8 ball), so I’d be interested to dive deeper into whether this was just an instance of kids being kids or if there’s some deeper significance in Mexican culture.

A’s story contains many motifs common to the general concept of a haunted house: blocked off from the rest of the community, a mysterious backstory, etc. I found it interesting that both of the haunted house stories I collected for this portion weren’t necessarily well-known in the community but were instead primarily known and/or created by a group of young kids.

Haunted Manor

Nationality: Unknown
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: March 21, 2023
Primary Language: English

[S]: This is a ghost story…or at least what we considered a ghost story and have told many times. When I was younger, in the town that I live in there was this one old, abandoned manor. It was huge, built out of stone with moss vines up the side…like the definition of what you see when you picture old ruins, grown over colonial style housing. There was a huge, 8-foot by 4 foot wide stone wall that surrounded it so it was very blocked in and there were rumors surrounding the abandonment of this home. The story in the town was that it was last inherited by this woman who lived there alone for many years and was very reclusive and…I don’t really remember the specific details about this part but she was either a seamstress or somehow sewing or fashion or something related to that was very involved in the lore surrounding her. There was this story that she disappeared and barely anyone knew her so no one could trace her, no one could find her and or any trace of her and the property was foreclosed and left abandoned, but there was blood found in the bedroom that she disappeared from and so everyone had this rumor that she died and then of course the rumor became that she still haunted the place. Kids all the time would hop the fence or walk around it and kind of hang around the courtyard…oh and there were all of these really creepy statues in the yard space…kinda like I described before as Medusa’s garden in the Percy Jackson movie…me and my friends in middle school climbed the fence and were running around amongst the stones and when we were walking around the house…we tried to get in but all of the doors were super bolted and the windows were closed…from above us, cause it was a 3 or 4 story house, 2 of the window panes slammed shut and so we ran cause we were freaked out and as we went to go climb the fence one of my friend said “Look!” and so we looked back and I swear, to this day, again it might’ve been a real person…who’s to say…we saw a woman dressed in white like half watching us through one of the windows who disappeared behind the window very quickly. We freaked out and jumped the fence and ran away and the other weird thing that I remembered about it…this is the sewing thing…you know those plush tomatoes that people put sewing needles in? There were a bunch of them with needles stuck in them all over the yard, and it was really weird because they looked really new, not old and worn like everything else was so that was really weird and creepy…but we ran away so that was the story of when we saw a ghost.

S is a student at USC and told this story during our discussion section. We talked for a bit afterwards, and it seemed like this was one of those stories that kids come up with amongst themselves when they encounter something new or unknown.

The story contains several motifs that are common in ghost stories. These include the abandoned and decrepit building, the mysterious disappearance of a woman, and the blood found in the bedroom. These motifs contribute to the eerie and unsettling atmosphere of the story. Several supernatural elements make an appearance, such as the ghostly woman in white and the plush tomatoes with needles stuck in them. These elements add to the sense of mystery and terror surrounding the haunted house.