Women's Songs from West Africa

6 - Saharan Music: About a Feminine Modernity

6 j Saharan music About a Feminine Modernity Aline Tauzin One of the major issues in gender relations in the Arab world today is the status of women. In Mauritania, a society governed by traditions that go back many centuries, women today are reversing some longstanding ways, especially in the areas of poetry and music. The purpose of this chapter is to document the nature and extent of those changes. Before turning to the specifics of these changes, it is essential to provide some background on a society that is not well known outside of Africa. Mauritania is composed of two different populations: the light-skinned Moors and the dark-skinned Africans, whose roots are largely sub-Saharan. The Moors are the dominant population in Mauritania and can be defined very briefly as a nomadic group, at least until recently, living in the western part of the Sahara. They speak an Arabic dialect called Hassâniyya. They are Muslims and played an important role in the Islamization of West Africa. Their social organization in the past has been highly stratified, with the hassân (in French, guerriers, or warriors) and zawâya (marabouts or religious people) at the top, and slaves at the bottom.1 Traditionally, among the Moors, playing music and singing were, and still are, the specialty of professional men and women, keepers of the oral tradition found in the Sahel region of West Africa. In Hassâniyya the plural term for both males and females is îggâwen,2 with iggîw for man. Tiggîwâten designates women, with tiggîwît for woman. In long poems, the îggâwen praised the leaders of the hassân tribes with a strong, shouting voice, especially before a battle or when they wanted to honor them or obtain some presents. They satirized the enemy and in so doing contributed to Saharan Music 113 the competition for honor and power that marked relations between different tribes. And, of course, they provided some pleasure and entertainment for their listeners, essentially during evening sessions. For the zawâya, the situation was quite different. They did not have îggâwen and did not even tolerate music in their milieu except that performed by women in private. As they used to say, they preferred to praise God rather than be praised by others. More deeply, the pleasure provided by music was considered by them to be a manifestation of the devil. That point refers to a long tradition among the Moors and, more widely, in Islamic dogma. The adoration of God requires from the believer the use of his mind and intellect, while music, like wine and women, leads him to a point where there is no more comprehension, a place beyond words. This incompatibility between religion and music is easy to perceive in the words naming the act of chanting the Qur#ān: all insist on the necessity of producing an intelligible discourse which makes God’s words understandable to everyone. Religious peoples in Mauritania enjoy listening to stories that are told, and never sung, by their own blacksmiths. So, song and music are incompatible with religion and they are also incompatible with masculinity. They belong to and lead to femininity in both Moor and Islamic traditions.3 This place “beyond words,” mentioned before, is a feminine one, as it can be seen in some tales, especially those talking about “women’s trickery” and “female devils.” Song is feminine because of gender definition: putting words together in order to make a poem is a man’s work, while singing them belongs to musicians, or to women in the private space of the encampment. Moreover, listening to or practicing too much music may lead a young boy to be transsexual, according to Moor theory. I will be more explicit about this belief later. But, if women can sing, they have to do it only in the circle of their relatives. They are not allowed to show themselves to foreigners because it would bring dishonor on their group. And finally, until recently, women did not create poetry; at least, they did not let it be known (Tauzin 1989). The reason for this is that in the very peculiar gender system which exists among the Moors, women are inaccessible objects of desire. Everything is done to obtain their passivity and their impassiveness. Men do not want to confront women’s feelings, hopes, or expectations, so they “force” them to be silent. And male poetry becomes...