Tarik always knows.... Tarik Sultan 2 hrs · Jersey City, NJ · The African Origins of Belly Dance: Go make yourselves a cup of tea, this is study time yall. THE USE OF BOLD LETTERS HERE ARE IN REPLACEMENT OF BOLD TEXT AND DO NOT IMPLY SHOUTING. So.... Why do Egyptians move the way they do? What is this thing we call Belly Dance and where did it originate? When you look at a large picture from only a few inches distance, you see only what is infront of you and you miss the larger whole, nor are you able to see what that spot relates to and how and where it fits in the picture. This thing we call Belly Dance for far too long has been a source of confusion. Most have labled it Arabic Dance, because of the fact that Egypt is an Arabic speaking country. However, there are those who would claim that it was created solely by Arabs and has no origins in Egypt at all. Only being brought there in the Middle Ages by the conquests of the Islamic Arab Empires, but is this the whole truth? The issue of identity is a complex one. Who any people claim as their identity is dependent on many factors, historical, geographical, genealogical, political, linguistic, cultural and to some extent also religious. Any one of these elements in and of themselves can and do influence not only the ways people see and identify themselves, but the way they are identified and perceived as well. So what of Egypt and the dance that we so identify with it, whether we call it Belly Dance, or as it is known in Arabic, Raks Sharki, or Baladi? From where did it come and who can lay claim to its origins? Two posts motivated me to write this. The first was one claiming its origins in the Arab courts of Raroun Al Rachid in Baghdad and the other a post on women of color, particularly dark skinned women of color in the Belly Dance community. It is my position that far too often when the discussion of origins is raised, we tend to stand too close to the canvas and so, we only see what is in front of our eyes and miss the larger picture. We need to take several steps back to see not only that spot, but how it relates to everything else in order to get a clear understanding. My position is this, the dance we recognize today as Raks Sharki, is a blend of mostly African elements with Asiatic overtones. To remove it from Egypt and place it solely in the Arab World is a distortion and to remove Egypt from the African world and only place it in the Arabic world a greater distortion still. The reason why Egyptians move the way they do is because they are Africans, plain and simple. TAKE A STEP BACK: Although the official langauge of Egypt today, is Arabic and the official religion is Islam, Egypt had a population and a language before their arrival. The true language of Egypt is COPTIC, which is still spoken in the christian church of Egypt today. Coptic was the final stage in the Egyptian language. Just as the English language we speak today evolved over time from the language of Chaucer, (spelling?), so too did the Egyptian language evlove over time. What am I saying? Im saying that the language spoken by Egyptians at the time of the construction of the pyramids evolved over time and the final version of that language is Coptic. That was the language spoken at the time of the Islamic conquest in 638. As recently as the 1700s there were still villages in Upper Egypt where Coptic was spoken and even today there are communities where Arabic is a second language, (Nubian dialects and Berber dialect in Siwa). The Coptic language is part of the Afro Asiatic language family. The only language group of this family spoken outside of Africa is the Semitic group,the same group that Arabic belongs to. TAKE ANOTHER STEP BACK: Therefore, since the language spoken by the Egyptians was one native to the continent, not one from outside of it, the Egyptian people themselves were native to the continent and not Semitic or Asiatic migrants. TAKE ANOTHER STEP BACK. We have all sorts of convoluted ideas about what an Africn is, looks like etc, etc, the vast majority of these created by the colonial Western powers that have no basis in scientific or historical facts. We assume that the Sahara acted as a barrier between the northern and southern regions of the continent when in fact this never was the case. We know all humanity evolved in African and from Africa modern humans migrated to the rest of the planet. Homosapian is an African animal. When the World was in the gripps of the Ice Ages, the Sahara was in fact a green oasis. Intact, the archological record shows that at this time there were more human settlements in the Sahara than there were in the Nile Valley. It was only whne the Sahara began to dry up some 5 or 6 thousand years ago that we saw an increase in settlement in the Nile Valley which resulted in the development of the Pharaonic Civiization. Much of the culture of that civilization shares much in common with cultures that still survive in the Sahara and in East Africa. One only needs to look at practices such as female circumcisions, the use of head rest, and the hair styles of such people as the Afar, (Google search it people), to see what I mean. Further more, genetics has shown that the oldest haplotypes found in Northern Africa originated in East Africa. That East African mans descendants spread out across the continent, the M35 made an arc from Ethiopia across to Morocco for instance. Some branches of his family went south and some west, (research it people and TAKE ANOTHER STEP BACK). Therefore, the civilization that developed in Egypt was home grown having ties to other people still on the continent which shows up in cultural traits still surviving today, one of them being movement. I would just like us all to consider the sheer size of the African continent, (google search real size of Africa people). The Entire United States, China, South America, all of Western Europe can all be fit into Africa with room left over. Now consider the size of the Middle East in relation to that and TAKE ANOTHER STEP BACK. Our dance is characterized by the articualtion of the hips is twists, circles, shaking and vibrations, as well as twirling. The use of undulations in the torso and accented movements of the abdominal muscles, shaking of the shoulders and chest while the hands and arms act mostly as a frame, (more on this later). If we look acroos the Asian continent, we find that the dances there do not fall into this description. However, if we look at the African continent, we will see dozens upon dozens of dances that do, all the way from North Africa to Southern Africa. Each region has their own way of using these elements that gives them their distinct flavors and identities, but we can recognize that they all belong to a larger family that is collectively African. They are not neccessarily identical, but we can see a clear and definate relationship. Once again, I want you to consider the sheer size of the land mass we are talking about and the fact that these elements are found all across it from North to South to East and west and the Center, yet one cannot say the same about either Asia or Europe. Therefore, it only stands to reason that this way of moving the body is inherantly African and that the dances found in North African are in fact part of this larger family group. The Eastern Mediterranean, being connected by land also shares dances in this group, but just as the Semitic langages spoken in Western Asia are part of a larger African language family, we must also realize that those Western Asiatic dances are part of a larger African movenet family, to which I call your attention to the sample of videos below. Dont get comfortable, there will be more in Part 2. Put on your god slippers and be prepared to take A FEW MORE STEPS BACK. Kenya: https://youtube/watch… Morocco: https://youtube/watch?v=iEMmDczC31k Uganda: https://youtube/watch… Egypt: https://youtube/watch… Uganda: https://youtube/watch… Congo: https://youtube/watch… Morocco: https://youtube/watch… Egypt: https://youtube/watch… Ghana: https://youtube/watch… Egypt: https://youtube/watch… Congo: https://youtube/watch…
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 20:43:38 +0000
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