Picture a world in which every task is done with the aid of the rhythmic sound of poetry. Those who live in this poetic universe have an ear for its harmonious sounds, which they listen to with enjoyment and entertain themselves with when tired from day-to-day responsibilities. Whether they’re loading a camel, drawing water from a well or singing for a baby, they have a genre specific to the task at hand, each with its own unique metre. They may be driven by a single poem that can make them go to war, while another reverses the situation and forces them to make peace. They record their history through the tongues of their bards, the only way of preserving it, and, listening to voices from the distant past, it is easy to see how their attitudes have changed over time.
This is how we used to be a century ago. Nonetheless, traditional nomadic life still keeps a firm hold on our literary style. The aesthetic gene of our forefathers has been transferred to subsequent generations, and there is always an appreciative audience wherever a Somali community happens to live.
What engages each generation of poets is mainly related to the challenges of normal human life. For instance, the issue of mass migration was something not addressed in our predecessors’ poems simply because it was totally absent and unknown to them. However, to my generation, mass irregular migration is a tragedy that has touched our lives deeply. We have lost friends, classmates and relatives through this, with thousands dying at sea. As a result, it has been given much attention by our contemporary poets.
Our previous generation, lived in a state under a cruel and oppressive regime, and an expressed opinion might sometimes land them in jail, as happened to Cabdi Qays and Hadraawi. Others were assassinated for their outspoken criticism of the regime. In response to that tyrannical political system, a new kind of political poetry emerged that was written in an allegorical form and thus could be understood in different ways. Contemporary Somali poets, on the other hand, wherever they live, rarely write this kind of poem due to the fact that most are now in a position to express themselves freely, as I am in Somaliland. As a result, unequivocally expressed opinion is commonly found in our works, particularly in our political poetry.
Other areas of difference between the generations involve knowledge of Somali culture and language. If you look through the work from the past, what immediately strikes you is how rich they were in the area of language. Previous generations had an impressive command of their native tongue simply because they had firsthand experience of our nomadic way of life, which is one of the characteristic pillars of our poetry. They also acquired libraries of unwritten wisdom from their older generations, whereas many of us today have been raised in cultural deserts such as refugee camps or conflict zones, where the social fabric completely disintegrated. Consequently, the transfer of culture as a whole, including oral literature, from one generation to the next has been disrupted.
Despite these differences, what the generations have in common is more important. Firstly, as poets of the same people and with the same collective memory, they have always been an inalienable part of our growth. They were our heroes, whom we tried to imitate when we were toddlers growing in the world of poetry. We were not only influenced by their artistic works, but their conception of being a poet also had a great impact on us. Having been mentored by one of the literary giants, the late Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’, I have long been nourished by the philosophical dimension of Somali poetry. Under Gaarriye’s xer (school of thought), to be a poet is not only to write a well-structured poem but includes being a committed voice for the voiceless and under-privileged. These normative guiding principles are the core element that unify us with our predecessors.
As with the generation prior to mine, poetry is not only an entertaining business, but a powerful tool for advocacy. The poet is a selfless advocate for the people and sometimes wages a war for their well-being at the expense of own his life. He lights candles of hope for them when they are in the depths of despair, and the rebellious voices in our poems are the unheard cry of our people as they protest and seek to change the socio-political landscape. In this sense, poetry is something which cannot be divorced from the people.
There are two themes that we share in particular with the previous generation: politics and love. In political poetry, we explore the same areas, though in different settings. As they were fighting against corruption, nepotism, abuse of power, injustice, tribalism, inequality, so, forty years later, we are still addressing all these themes. Moreover, our political poetry is not confined to the Somali territories, rather, regardless of race, religion or region, it crosses all boundaries within humanity.
With respect to love, we see eye to eye with our previous generation. That beautiful emotion, which combines the tears of happiness and sorrow, is something widely discussed in our works. Some of us joke ‘show me a poet who does not fall madly in love a million times.’
The structure of our verse is the strongest bond that binds the generations. Somali poets have always been and continue to be proud slaves to metre and alliteration. These two decisive elements are what differentiate poetry from prose. Somali verse is alliterative with the exception of jacbur, a form in which alliteration is omitted deliberately, though it is still metrical. Somali poetry has a quantitative metrical system in which lines are based on patterns of long and short vowels and syllable-final consonants. Thus the number of vowels and their position within the line determine the taste and the sort of musical melody that the ear receives. Unlike alliteration, omission of metre is too awful to contemplate, because metre is what poetry is all about.
The gabay metre, which was once the most common, is not so frequent nowadays, but its prestigious literary position in Somali verse remains undisputed and those who use it are commended for sticking with it. However, both my contemporaries and the generation immediately before us mostly use jiifto metre. For instance, the well-known chain poems of ‘Deelley’ and ‘Siinley’ were, as far as I know, all based on jiifto metre (with the exception of one poem in the Siinley by the late Xaaji Aadan Af-qallooc, which was based on masafo).
Even though almost all different metres are something inherited from tradition, this tendency towards jiifto, which gained momentum in the 1970s, shows the fingerprints of our immediate predecessors’ influence. Not surprisingly, the recent ‘Miimley’ chain of poems was also based on this pattern. In February 2017, I wrote a poem called ‘Miimley’ (Plaintiff), accusing the government and parliament members of corruption and mismanagement of public property. Another poet, Abdillahi Xasan Ganey, wrote a poem called ‘Witness’ which supported my point. Following this, the poet Daaha Gaas wrote a poem called ‘Defendant’, in which he accused us of being traitors. Yet another poet, Sakriye Awaare, then wrote a poem called ‘The Court’ in which he reached a verdict supporting our point. After these four poems, more than thirty poets took part in this chain in which some of us accused the government, while other friends defended it.
All of these poems alliterated in ‘m’ and all of them were based on the jiifto metre. Unlike the Deeley, we were debating in a democratic environment where we didn’t fear for ourselves. Moreover, a greater number of female poets took part than did in the Deelley, which only featured one female poet, the late Saado Cali.’
Exploring the links between different types of metre is one of my favourite exercises, and I thank our nomadic ancestors for creating this world of music; we have inherited dozens of different metres from them. I have managed to list more than forty different indigenous metres, but don’t be surprised if I say I don’t know the exact number, because, as life goes on, I find one metre after another which is totally new to me. Trying to play with the jigsaw of our metrical system, investigating the relationships between the different patterns and solving its puzzling questions is an intellectual endeavour and I am personally obsessed with creating new metres out of the existing ones by adding certain vowels at the end of lines. This way of creating new metres is a trend gaining momentum nowadays.
Trained as a mathematician, I find terms like ‘mathematical beauty’ in every textbook. However, I rarely see that beauty if it is not the pleasure and satisfaction felt after proving a very difficult theorem. In contrast, as a poet, there is a preoccupation with poetic beauty. Whenever someone recites a poem, beauty arrives in our mind before the content, like a lightning flash that’s seen before the sound of the thunder is heard, though they take place at the same time and in the same place. We judge and are judged by it. Poetic beauty is what makes me praise my foe, and I will never shy away from reciting his work in front of the people, acclaiming it line by line because it is beautiful. In this sense beauty is independent of the person who wrote it and, also in this sense, poetry is nothing more than beauty. There are certain criteria for what makes a beautiful poem, such as playing with words or creating extremely vivid images and much of what is accepted as aesthetic expression is shared by the previous generations and contemporary poets. Great importance is attached to the emotional dimension of poetry, both the feeling of the poet and the emotional impact of his work on the audience. As the late Yuusuf Xaaji Aadan Qabille, poet and well-known educationalist, expressed in one of his poems:
"Haddaan gabayga uurkoo bukiyo arami kaa keenin,
Ama olol xanuun iyo jacayl kugu ijbaaraynin
Afkuun baad ka leedee tixuhu arar ma yeeshaan"
If a broken heart or wound doesn’t bring poetry from you
Or the sound of pain and love doesn’t force you to recite it
You only speak plain words and the lines begin no poem
The emotional strength determines the response. For instance, a love poem written by someone who is very much in love is more powerful, more emotional and has a greater heart-to-heart effect than one from someone imitating the experience if it is little known to them. If you don’t feel the words of your poem as you are writing them, it will have less impact on the audience. What comes from the heart can be received only by other hearts. In this sense, poetry is an eloquently expressed emotion which brings together a poet’s feeling with the experiences of his audience. The position of emotion in Somali poetry can be summarized by the Somali saying ‘it is a grudge or love that makes men write poetry’.
Contemporary poets and those from the previous generation are in some ways different, yet alike in others. Although the two generations differ with respect to the environment in which they live, the role of allegorical poetry and, in some ways, linguistic competence, they still share much. It will be interesting to see whether the differences dominate in the future or whether the bond of similarity holds together as tightly as it does today.
