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Research in African Literatures 33.3 (2002) 140-166



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Placing the Shameless:
Approaching Poetry and the Politics of Pemban-ness in Zanzibar, 1995-2001

Nathalie Arnold


But any utterance [. . .] reveals to us many half-concealed, or completely concealed words of others [. . .]. The utterance appears to be furrowed with distant and barely audible echoes of changes of speech subjects and dialogic overtones [. . .].

—Mikhail Bakhtin, "Speech Genres and Other Late Essays" 86-87

Wawajuwa wasohaya weye? Wasohaya nani?
(Do you know the shameless, you? Who are the shameless?)

—asked of me in a bus on the way to a Pemban wedding, 1997

The field of Swahili studies has in recent years benefited from the work of literary scholars who have sought to understand the role of Swahili poetry in the forging of national and regional identities in East Africa (see Shariff; Amidu; Sengo and Mulokozi; Mazrui and Shariff; Biersteker). Others, social historians, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists, have placed special emphasis on taarab, or sung poetry, and the sociopolitical implications of its practice (Topp, "A History of Taarab Music"; Topp Fargion, "Nyota Alfajiri" and "Hot Kabisa!"; Fair ; Askew; Lange; Ntarangwi ). These works together have done much both to highlight the political importance of poetry and to bring the identity-making aspects of creative practice more fully into social-scientific purview. 1 But literary approaches to Swahili poetry, and to sung poetry, or taarab, in general lack an attention to social context apart from the moment of composition, and the nature of accurate interpretation; anthropological approaches to poetic practice and song performance, even as they focus on the politics of practice and take the state's role into account, may not yet have given sufficient attention to the role of poetry in the making of explicitly unequal political identities outside of performative and creative arenas. Neither approach has fully confronted the relationship between academic forms of representation and the politics of representation on the ground, where states to a great extent control, police, exploit, and silence various poetries and populations. The gap between literary and ethnographic approaches to Swahili poetry can mask, and in some ways replicate, the very politics of representation that structure silence and expression, both in academic texts, and in Swahili societies where such politics have a significant and sometimes deadly impact on participants themselves.

All recent publications on Swahili poetry stress the imbrication of social life and poetic practice. Alamin Mazrui and Ibrahim Shariff write that, up to the nineteenth century, "the fit between poetry and the rest of [End Page 140] [coastal] society was [. . .] so tight that poetic language was often an expressive mode of regular, social communication" (100-01). T. S. Y. Sengo and M. M. Mulokozi note that poetry "reflects the contradictions and struggles within Kiswahili society," (54), and Shariff argues that if an event or situation is "meaningful," a poem, often sung, will not fail to be composed about it (117; emphasis added). Further, he cites "politics and electoral campaigns" as crucial discourses and spaces in which sung poetry plays an especially meaningful role. On the link to politics, Sengo and Mulokozi argue that, as "poets were not divorced from their societies but were participants, mouthpieces, and commentators," serious study of their poetry will "elicit their understanding and interpretation of the political process" (59).

Ann Biersteker, in an important book that addresses the use of Swahili expressive forms in the building of national communities, has focused on poetry in Socialist Tanzania as a mode of political discourse that serves not only to describe, but to create an ideologically self-conscious society. Using an intertextual approach to Swahili poetry to document how poets "have situated their texts in allegiance with others to sustain and broaden the discourse of ujamaa" (97), she traces both specific poetic dialogues and outlines the formal features of Swahili poetry, which, as promoted by Julius Nyerere (Tanzania's first president), fostered dialogic composition about explicitly "political" topics. She observes the use of poetry by pre-independence leaders, and later by
the state, to establish, at least as...

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