An example of minimal poetry: tibṛāʿ, or female poetry in ḥassāniyya
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17561/blo.v16.10232Keywords:
Ḥassāni women’s love poetry, Ḥassāni women’s sung poems, Ḥassāniyya dialect, Maghrebi folk poetryAbstract
Within popular poetry in the Maghreb, there is female love poetry that is transmitted orally and composed primarily to be sung. This special poetic genre appears under different names and in various forms in the different countries of the Maghreb. In Libya, it is called ġannāwat al-ʿalam and women use it to express various aspects of life, especially love. In southern Tunisia, Bedouin women compose short sung poems called əġnē (singular ġunnāya). In Algeria, there is al-ḥawfī which is female poetry present in the city of Tlemcen. In Morocco, this female literary genre is represented by what are known as salamāt “greetings”. In Mauritania, this feminine sung poetic genre is called tibṛāʿ and could be described as minimalist poetry because each poem consists of a single verse. This work consists of a study of the main characteristics of this type of poetry and a sample corpus of poems.
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