Christopher Middleton
THE FATE OF HAFSA'S POEMS
Arab chronicles record the names of more than thirty women
poets in medieval Andalusia, but extant poems are attributed to only half as
many. Why this disparity? Did the male scholars and poets who compiled
anthologies tend to downplay women as poets, simply because they were
women? Traditions might have planted a blind spot in their cu ltural con–
sciousness: in their view, poems by women did nothing to nourish the root
mythology ofArabic poetry, originally a male mythology of desert warriors,
erogenous men and dangerous animals of the desert. A simpler reason might
be that, in al-Andalus between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, poems
were so much a part of everyday life that hundreds cou ld have vanished
without a trace, through carelessness with the familiar.
Among women of all classes there was an exceptionally high rate of
literacy, especiall y in Cordova when the Umayyad dynasty (711-929
A.D.)
was at its height. Even in later times, through all the sieges, massacres and
famines, women seem to have lived breezier lives in Andalusia than in other
regions of the medieval Muslim world. The orthodox factions
ifaqi)
were
largely misogynistic, true enough, and home was generally a woman's place.
Yet in those multi-ethnic communities, as long as differences in gender and
religion were not explosive issues, women could sing, improvise, and write
poems just as they pleased.
It
is hard to tell what values Arabo-Andalusians and Mozarabians as–
signed respectively to written (calligraphic) and to oral poetry. Possibly for
literate people in those times the relation between script and voice was quite
different from any that has come to be felt by us, who are captives of print.
Certainly exuberant oral traditions filled their streets with song and invaded
their palaces and gardens. Those traditions might have been the main stem
ofthe racial memory, with poems in script a mere offshoot. Certainly, too,
many poems written or recited, by men or women , for festive occasions,
must have perished with the moments that called for them.
When poems by women were preserved in writing, they were usually
fitted into a framework - anecdotal, biographical, or epistolary - many had
been letter-poems in the first place. Thus Rumaykiyya, the slave girl who
became the favorite and prolific wife of al-Mutamid, great poet-king of Seville
in the second half of the eleventh century, is celebrated for the improvised
couplet with which, in a garden, she first capitivated him. She is also known
