Muslim Women Sing: Hausa Popular Song (review)

Beverly Mack has written a book that is a welcome antidote to post-9/11 public discourse that tends to stereotype Muslim society globally as oppressive to women, intellectually insular, and lacking in healthy civic discourse. In this book, which follows three others on the literary lives of Muslim women, Mack seeks to show that "Muslim Hausa women's poetry and song demonstrate that women's status in Northern Nigeria is neither subservient, static, nor stoic" (3). She describes how women's lives in purdah (seclusion) behind compound walls in Kano are far from dour. Song and individual creative expression pervade family and community contexts, among both educated and illiterate, young and old. Mack brings out the vitality of Hausa women's performance through literary and sociological analysis of song, interspersed with five biographical profiles of female performers and followed by extensive transcriptions of song lyrics. An audio CD is included (although both the original and a replacement were defective in my copies).

Hausa waka (chanted poetry) is rich and includes many subgenres such as work songs, praise songs, royal praise songs, and songs related to jealousy among cowives, most of which are performed by women. Mack points out that in Northern Nigeria women have been free to negotiate artistic and scholarly activities within the Islamic framework by crossing gender lines and age-related social roles. Song is an important way that female audiences learn about current events and history, and it is an arena in which individual women artists display their creativity and opinions. In spite of constraints on their movement, Hausa women are informed about the outside world.

Written in an accessible style, the book clearly reflects Mack's sensitivity and respect for the intellectual energy of Hausa women. At points, however, the analysis of gender is weak. Mack makes her case that talented women in Hausaland have successfully built performance careers in an otherwise restrictive setting and that women-only domestic spheres are dynamic. Nevertheless, the author veers too far toward cultural relativism at times, seeming to apologize for patriarchal restrictions. For example: "Wife seclusion is often reported by scholars to be restrictive and oppressive, but anyone who has lived in Kano knows that it would be a privilege to be freed from doing the marketing, standing in line to pay taxes or electric bills, or negotiating the traffic in a car or on foot" (7); or, because wife seclusion lasts "only" during childbearing years and divorce is frequent, it is "not a lifelong defining experience" (6). Can a researcher credibly make such judgments on behalf of Hausa women? Nonetheless, Mack's effort to dispel misconceptions about the nature of Muslim women's lives—secluded or not—is of value.

The book's structure is a mixed success. The second half of the book consists of transcription of women's song without the benefit of commentary or context. Hausa language specialists may be disappointed that the Hausa is not provided. The interspersed biographic profiles of performers, while interesting in themselves, are not well-integrated into the analytic chapters or clearly connected to the song material in part 2 of the book. Overall the structure is choppy, and part 1 tapers off into a discussion of the role of repetition in song rather than bringing the careful literary analyses of the final chapters to bear on the initial challenge of the opening chapter: the subject of Muslim women's creativity in the modern world and in the context of seclusion. Nonetheless, Muslim Women Sing is a valuable contribution to the literature on African oral discourse, and its focus on the voices of women who are usually invisible to outsiders is particularly welcome.