“This thought occurred to me when I was studying in the US. “Unfortunately, we find a lot of the new generation of Saudis who do not know, or barely remember, anything about our heritage,” she said. Baeshen says her mission is to help preserve what is being lost. What survives exists mainly within minds of scholars like Baeshen and the Jeddawis who remain in Al-Balad. Later, when Jeddah expanded beyond its walled perimeter that had been in place for centuries (only reconstructed remnants of the wall exist today), many of the people forgot their folkloric heritage. Like the cultural equivalent of the Galapagos Islands, folkloric traditions were isolated and allowed to evolve their own distinct characteristics. Baeshen says that Jeddah’s folklore has existed in a kind of incubator, literally walled in with the city’s long-standing citadel-like layout that not only protected residents from desert marauders seeking to loot the wealthy port city, but also kept denizens inside their tightly knit community. It was a dream come true.”Ĭonsidering the wealth of folkloric material, it almost goes without saying that Arabian literary heritage is rich. “By coincidence I was searching online for tales of Saudi Arabia, and I found my translated work listed on more than one site,” she said. “Part two is more fun because I’ve learned the techniques for finding these tales instead of figuring it out as I go along.”īaeshen says she gets a thrill when she happens upon her work in her search for more material. “I had fun while doing part one,” she said. She says that people are still calling her to meet their elderly family members who know stories or missing parts from the stories she presently has. The second part will be published in the next two months.
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The first part alone took about ten years to complete: 61 stories in all, 20 of them were later translated into English.
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She had collected so many traditional Hijazi folkloric tales - 111 of them to be exact - that she ended up breaking the book into two parts.
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She began her first project 14 years ago with a book titled “Al-Tabat wa Al-Nabat” (which translates roughly as the equivalent to “happily ever after”). “I will know that I have succeeded when people begin to cherish our heritage and begin to pass it on,” said Baeshen, who was a professor of English literature at the Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz University.īaeshen is one of the Kingdom’s few avid collectors of folklore and traditional music. She says preserving folkloric tales and songs - which to this day can still be heard in the zigzagging “Old Arabia” streets of Jeddah’s historic center, known as Al-Balad - is not just a passing fancy, but also a cultural responsibility. Lamia Baeshen is on a mission to preserve the culture of the Hijaz, the western region of Saudi Arabia that has Jeddah as its unofficial capital.