In Swahili poetry, praising God through blessings and salutations finds aesthetic expression in a plethora of genres, particularly mashairi, utendi and takhmis. In this article, I will draw... Show moreIn Swahili poetry, praising God through blessings and salutations finds aesthetic expression in a plethora of genres, particularly mashairi, utendi and takhmis. In this article, I will draw attention to a lesser-known rhymed poetic genre known as gungu “songs,” in shairi verse form, dating to the turn of the nineteenth century. Different from other well-known, fully devotional Swahili compositions such as Sayyid Aidarus’s Hamziyya or al-Būṣīrī’s Qasida Burda, the texts that will be analysed are a selected group of short devotional quatrains belonging to a vast manuscript that otherwise chiefly comprises war poetry as well as dance and wedding songs. While, on the one hand, the presence of devotional lyrics in this extensive poetry collection attests to the legitimacy of religious subject matter in popular lyric poems, the verses also offer an opportunity to reflect on literary prayer (dua) and its architecture, lyrical tone and imagery, in comparison with longer classical Swahili religious compositions, where dua is also interpolated. Is there a set of shared Swahili or Arabic formulas for naming, praying to and praising God that can be found in all of these genres? Can the Qur’an be considered as the sub-text the poets drew on in making their texts speak of the divine? A stylistic analysis, looking at patterns, formulaic dua and devotional speech acts of these yet-unedited short devotional lyrics, will provide the criteria by which I will compare excerpts from other Swahili poetic genres, inquiring how Islamic prayer is woven in between their lines. Show less
In this paper, I seek to investigate the manifold relationships between traditional and contemporary, oral and written Swahili poetry—in the utendi and mashairi forms—and its recitation in terms of... Show moreIn this paper, I seek to investigate the manifold relationships between traditional and contemporary, oral and written Swahili poetry—in the utendi and mashairi forms—and its recitation in terms of the following considerations: how have advances in technology changed the production, transmission and reception of Swahili Islamic poetry? To what extent do writing and orality coexist in a recited text? What is the nature of performer identity formation within a “discourse network” of artists—the composer (mtungaji), reader (msomaji), and singer (mwimbaji)—who, in Goffman’s words, play “participation roles” and appropriate poetry belonging to other living poets or to their own (sometimes anonymous) ancestors? In an attempt to answer these questions, I provide examples of performers and their performative craft. Show less
This article presents a first study of the Islamic ideas and social committment expressed through the poetry of Mahmoud Mau, an imam poet and social philantrophist from Kenya. This contribution... Show moreThis article presents a first study of the Islamic ideas and social committment expressed through the poetry of Mahmoud Mau, an imam poet and social philantrophist from Kenya. This contribution aids in illuminating intellectual history and poetic productions from the Eastern African coast. Show less
Although a textual relationship between Arabic Muslim texts and their rendition through Swahili epic poems (tendi) is acknowledged in Swahili poetry studies, "translation" is not a straightforward... Show moreAlthough a textual relationship between Arabic Muslim texts and their rendition through Swahili epic poems (tendi) is acknowledged in Swahili poetry studies, "translation" is not a straightforward explanation of this relationship. Furthermore, Swahili narrative poems on the prophets (manabii), mostly created at the end of the 19th century, have seldom been considered in textual relation to the Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’ literature or to the Qur’ān. Thus, important questions have not been asked: How did the Arabic stories of the prophets arrive on the Swahili coast? How did poets appropriate these stories and forge them into a new narrative discourse? In this paper, I focus on tafsiri as a form of appropriation and adaptation, applying Gérard Genette’s concept of "palimpsest" to analyse the textual relationship between Arabic Muslim and Swahili literary texts. This will allow me, through a close reading of these texts and consideration of both language and genre, to identify the palimpsestuous presence or rather copresence of Arabic source texts within Swahili works. Ultimately, this method offers a model for future philologies of world literature. Show less
