Women's Songs from West Africa

14 - Muslim Hausa Women’s Songs

14 j muslim Hausa Women’s Songs Beverly B. Mack The study of songs by Hausa women in northern Nigeria raises a major question for Western scholars. Since these performers both sing and compose poetry in writing, where is the line between the two genres, vocal and written? For Hausa listeners, there is no line between them as the two forms exist in a porous continuum of performance and communication. This study offers perspectives on the wide-ranging platform of Hausa performance communication through analysis of Hausa women’s song and poetry,1 both of which are marked by the Islamic influence that is integral to all aspects of Hausa culture. Part of the problem for the researcher is Hausa terminology for the two genres. Waƙa (pl. waƙoƙi,) is the Hausa term for a broad range of works from poetry to declamation, all of which is normally sung or chanted. The term is not readily translated, but comprises a range of meanings in English from song to written verse. To the Hausa, however, it is all “song.” Thus the plural term waƙoƙi is used here to refer collectively to both orally composed and written songs. The songs themselves are as varied in style and theme as the circumstances in which they are performed, and their content is gauged to the situation in which they are delivered. They are sung at naming ceremonies, at wedding celebrations, in praise of important people, as commentary on social behavior, as announcements of changes in social practices, as work songs, and as mnemonic teaching aids. That they occur in such a wide range of social situations is testimony to the genre’s pervasive role in Hausa culture. The works analyzed here are popular pieces by contemporary Hausa women who use waƙoƙi as entertainment that is alternately didactic, informative, ritualoriented , paced to domestic tasks, and celebratory. Muslim Hausa Women’s Songs 225 The fact that each of these singers is an observant Muslim woman shapes the ways in which they use language. Even orally composed songs like ritual music for the spirit possession cult (bori), naming and wedding celebrations, and praise songs demonstrate in their language or style a foundation in a Muslim cultural context. In the written works, their relationship to Islamic literary contexts is evident in poetic features that echo patterns found in the Qur#ān and other spiritually focused sources. For this reason, the examination of oral and written Hausa Muslim women’s songs in this study will rely not only on the messages of the lyrics, but also on literary techniques such as satire, irony, and metaphor as well as on non-verbal performances styles, patterning, and repetition . Islam provides essential keys to understanding the meanings of the songs. In the Hausa language many forms of musical and literary expression are described by the term waƙa. The two closely related types of waƙoƙi—waƙar baki (oral) and waƙar rubutu (written)—are quite similar. Sometimes they are indistinguishable, except by being categorized as waƙa I and waƙa II. Dalhatu Muhammad (1977, 9–14) notes the differences between these two classes of waƙoƙi by men, but for women’s waƙoƙi the differences do not apply in the same way.2 The term “orality” refers to aesthetic works that are communicated through the spoken word. Traditional studies of both Arabic and Hausa poetics differentiate between the presumably non-Islamic oral performance and the more conservative written works, but of course the two cannot be separated entirely in any context, since they exist symbiotically in the culture. All art forms in a culture necessarily relate to one another because they serve to define the same context. To some degree, all Hausa poetry is oral, because both written and oral works are chanted, or sung in public performance. The origins of written poetry are found in song and music. The root of the Arabic term for song, nashiid, means the raising of the voice, as well as referring to the work itself; the Arab adage “Song is the measure for poetry” (Adonis 1990, 15) indicates that song traditionally was the means of measuring rhyme and meter. “Meters are the foundations of melodies, and poems set the standard for stringed instruments.”3 Poetry’s synonymity with recitation and song is evident in fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun’s observation: In the early period singing was a part of the art...