Women's Songs from West Africa

9 - Women’s Tattooing Songs from Kajoor, Senegal

9 j Women’s Tattooing Songs from Kajoor, Senegal George Joseph One of the most common vocal genres across the diverse cultures of the Sahel is the tattooing song, sung while a woman undergoes the painful experience of having her face, lips, or gums inscribed in various ways with a thorn or a needle. Wolof woyu njam, or tattooing songs, are meant to accompany the process of tattooing the mouth with bundles of thorns and a black dye made of burnt peanuts and clay. The result is a blackening not only of the lips but also surrounding areas, notably the chin. The gums are also dyed black in a way that sets off more strikingly the whiteness of the teeth. One might assume that this form of body art, created in an intimate space, reflects exclusively feminine values. In fact, when asked, women do assert that the only purpose of tattooing is to heighten the beauty of an individual. But on closer examination, it appears that tattooing and the songs women sing to accompany the person undergoing the process are more deeply embedded in a wider range of social values that go far beyond the concern for beauty. What, then, are these values, how do the singers interpret them to listeners, and what is the wider significance of tattooing and the songs that mark what is becoming a tradition no longer practiced by many women? By analyzing here a corpus of songs that I have collected since 1973 in the area of what was once the Wolof kingdom of Kajoor, I will offer some preliminary answers to these questions. Kajoor covers the area that extends roughly along the Senegalese coast between Dakar and Saint-Louis, and constitutes the westernmost region of the vast Mande culture. Kajoor has a recognizably Mande-type social structure based on three classes: those people who were once of captive origin, ñeeño; ar- 152 George Joseph tisans such as goldsmiths, shoemakers, and gewal (“wordsmiths”); and finally geer, or aristocrats, a group that includes warrior nobility.1 Griots or gewal inherit their charge and are attached by birth to a noble family, whose traditions they keep.2 Although women played an important role in the traditional society of Kajoor , they were and remain, nevertheless, clearly subordinate. For example, the ruler of Kajoor, the damel, had to descend from a male line of Falls and one of seven female lines, the most important of which was Guedj, but the damel was always a man.3 Furthermore, there are women as well as men gewal and the lines between their repertories are blurred. Men gewal sometimes teach their wives and daughters what is normally intended for their sons.4 The lyrics analyzed in this study are, however, limited entirely to the world of women. No male gewal would ever sing a tattooing song. In spite of this separation, however , tattooing songs reveal that even this most intimately female experience is charged with metaphors drawn from a masculine value system. For this project, I recorded nine tattooing songs as well as interviews with the singers in spring 2002 with partial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities–funded Women’s Songs from West Africa project and the help of A. Badara Sissokho of the Senegalese Ministry of Culture as well as Mamadou Guèye, a technical assistant at Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire. We recorded, translated, and transcribed both the songs and the follow-up interviews in which the singers answered questions about the meaning of the songs as well as of tattooing itself. The women we worked with came from distinguished gewal families responsible for important historical traditions in three communities of political significance in Kajoor: Batal, Ndatt, and Xandaŋ. As a practice, this kind of tattooing seems largely though not entirely of the past. Some of the women we recorded knew songs but were not themselves tattooed . In one case a woman we spoke to was tattooed but could not sing songs. Only some of the women knew how to tattoo. All of the women we interviewed said that the main purpose of njam, or tattooing , is beauty, but as is often the case, beauty here turns out to be much more than skin deep and connotes moral character and the medical values of good health.5 For example, Marème Mbaye of Xandaŋ describes the significance of tattooing as a healthy kind of beauty. Her references to the beauty of tattooing glide inevitably toward moral...