By Fazeena Saleem
DOHA: Qatar Heritage and Identity Centre has taken an ambitious step to preserve Qatar’s folklore heritage with plans to publish first of its kind bilingual collection of Qatari folktales.
The book to be published in Arabic and English will preserve the tribal dialect, a critical part of Qatar’s heritage and a context of the story and background to the storyteller, under ‘My Identity, My Story’ a new education project to save Qatar’s endangered folktale tradition.
In Qatar, folktales (hazawi) are passed down within families, and often reflect their ancestral past. The country has a rich folklore heritage, but in recent years the tradition has begun to decline, and stories that have been retold for generations now risk being forgotten.
“Very few collections of Qatari folktales exist, and of these, the orality of the storyteller isn’t always preserved,” Autumn Watts (pictured), Project Manager, Qatar Heritage and Identity Centre told The Peninsula.
“Ours will be the first English and Arabic book of folktales exclusively from Qatar, and I believe the first to preserve the dialect and family history of each story, which is why we’re so excited about it,” she further said.
To raise awareness and increase appreciation for Qatar’s oral folktales and to collect, preserve, and share them for future generations of storytellers Qatar Heritage and Identity Centre is also hosting a slew of activities.
QHIC aims to protect heritage by offering free training workshops to university students to increase their appreciation for Qatar’s oral inheritance, improve their oral storytelling skills, and ethically collect, preserve, and share Qatari folktales for future generations.
To train the students, QHIC brings an interdisciplinary panel of experts from Qatar University, the Translating and Interpreting Institute, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, and expert storytellers from the community. They include Sheikha Nora bint Nasser bin Jassim Al Thani, Director, and QHIC and folklore researcher, Dr Kaltham Al Ghanem, Professor, Sociology at Qatar University and Khalifa Al Sayed a columnist and folk story teller. The stories will be published as a book.
‘The Art of story telling, a Qatari Folktale workshop’ runs from September 30 to November 18, and consists of sequenced training sessions on folktales of Qatar, the art of storytelling, interview methods, research ethics, transcription and translation, followed by workshops for which the students will conduct their own fieldwork and work closely with research and translation mentors.
A continuation of this project planned for 2013 will partner the students with animation mentors to guide them through the process of interpreting their own family folktales into short animated films.
The Peninsula
