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Kyoto Lecture

I. The Root

The colonisation of the African continent was strongly determined by its literary geography. On the one hand, pre-colonial Africa possessed a vast expanse of oral literature bounded by the sub-Saharan redoubt of the Berber Tifinagh script and Ge’ez, used between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Following colonisation, new written literatures redrew the map of the continent. While North Africa developed national literatures from Morocco to Egypt, passing through Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, after centuries of Arabic dominance, sub-Saharan Black Africa gave rise to a different written literature. More akin to North American Black literature, it formed the basis of what later became the Negritude movement. Despite their linguistic and geopolitical differences, these African forms of writing share key similarities. Albert Memmi’s Anthologie de la littérature maghrébine does not differ from Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la poésie négro-africaine. In both cases, Francophone poets from the north and south of the Sahara share the French colonial language and the same forms and styles influenced by surrealism. Thus, Tahar Ben Jelloun of Morocco is closer to the poet Senghor of Senegal, fathers of Négritude, than he is to an Amazigh Moroccan poetess like Mririda Na’it Attik.

Beyond these divisions of African literature, oral tradition has thrived in all its diversity across the continent’s many languages. Spoken by one of these two thousand language groups, Hassaniya gives us a unique example of women’s poetry: the tebrae, two-line poems shorter than haikus.

In this fifth year of the Reiwa era, I take the floor at the Center for Contemporary Africa-Asia Cultural Studies at Kyoto Seika University to speak about these tebrae of the African Sahara desert, which are two-line poems, the first having 6 syllables and the second 8. The Japanese haiku consists of 17 morae divided into three verses following a 5/7/5 scheme. In its current form, its birth is attributed, among others, to the poet Matsuo Bashô.

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The Definition

According to the Mauritanian scholar Ahmed Bâba Miské, in his Tableau de la Mauritanie au début du XXe siècle (published by Librairie C. Klincksieck, Paris, 1970), etymologically tebraa derives from the verb baraa, which in classical Arabic means to excel, to surpass.

Aline Tauzin, in an article titled “À haute voix, poésie féminine contemporaine en Mauritanie,” uses this definition from Ahmed Bâba Miské’s 1970 text.

Catherine Taine-Cheikh, Director of Research Emeritus at the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), in the edition of Tebraa, poésie féminine hassanie (published in Rabat by the Académie du Royaume du Maroc), points out that the Arabic word baraa does not exist in Hassaniya. She shows that “the only attested verb for this root is tbarraa ‘to compose a tabra‘.” This derived verbal form corresponds in classical Arabic to tabarraa, which means “to give something as a gift.”

Fatma mint Mohamed Khaled, who wrote a dissertation on women’s popular poetry in 1985, links the short form of tebraa with the idea of a gift. In her view, tabraa comes to mean a concise poem offered selflessly. However, these attempts to define the word remain purely hypothetical.

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Genesis

Just as the haiku originated from haika no renga, a form described as playful, frivolous, light, and cheeky, the tebrā grew out of the le-gne or gna in Hassaniya. This was an equally light poetic song, viewed as secondary to classical Arabic poetry, which remained the exclusive domain of the educated elite.

According to Ahmed Bâba Miské, the tebra took off in the 1960s. Until then, Saharan poetry, ever since Attabla, who was compared to Shammâh Ibn Dirar upon completing his Jîmiya (a poem ending in the rhyme letter j) remained bound to a classicism that clung strictly to the pure language. Across the entire Saharan region, from Chinguetti to Timbuktu, its rules had been laid down by Ibn Mâlik of Jaén and his many commentators.

The poet subjected to classicism was more concerned with not committing a lahn, a grammatical error, than with anything else. These poets of grammatical correctness in the classical language strictly used in their prosody the classical meter already codified by tradition, catalogued, and known. This classical poetry was also thematically fixed. Each poem opened as a ghazal, describing the beloved and the torments of love, or as a nasîb, recalling familiar places and nostalgia for the countryside. This drove Saharan poetry into an often servile imitation of the ancients, producing an impersonal verse where only true genius could overcome rules that stifled creative spontaneity.

Facing this frozen world of shir (classical Arabic poetry), another form of creation awakens: that of laghna, which uses the popular language of the Moors, Hassaniya. The prosody of the ghna (meaning song in Hassaniya) is simpler than that of shir, using meters characterised by the syllable count. The verse or tavalwît (pl. tivelwatan) is not divided into two separate and equal hemistiches. There are eight-syllable verses (labtayt at-tâmm), and others of 7, 6, 5, 4, or 3 syllables, or even a single one. Generally, a ghna cannot stand on its own. At least four tivelwatan are needed. This basic poem is the gav, which is simply composed of four verses with alternating abab rhymes. Another poem form, the tal`a, whose third and fifth lines differ from the fourth and sixth lines, takes the form aaabab.

Gav and tal`a are used as stanzas in poems employing the quatrain and six-line poems.

Ghna and its derivatives are considered by scholars of classical poetry to be vulgar, minor poetry, cultivated by the ‘iggâwan, Moorish troubadours, who are called the inventors of the genre. Since ghna was considered a minor literary form, women found in it an ideal medium for expression, whereas shi’r remained the exclusive preserve of men. Women not only composed ghna but also exclusively practised the tebræ (singular tebria), which derived from gna.

Available sources offer neither an approximate birth date for this poetic genre nor any analysis showing it evolved from earlier forms. It is undoubtedly an original creation by desert women in a world where poetic expression was forbidden to them.

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Tabrā`: The Form

Ahmed Bâba Miské indicates that a tabri`a is composed of two tîvelwâten; it is “a short poem of two verses that rhyme together, of course, and have the same meter.”

According to Catherine Taine-Cheikh (1988, 80), “the tebria is a small two-verse poem with a uniform rhyme—often, but not necessarily, of five and eight feet respectively.” In her preface to the anthology published by the Académie du Royaume du Maroc, she indicates that these two verses could originally be “two hemistiches of the same line that rhymed with each other, but generally of unequal length.”

Ahmed-Salem Ould Mohamed Baba, in a study titled “Poesía amorosa hasānía exclusiva de las mujeres: et-tebrā”, also states that tebrā are composed of a single verse. As Catherine Taine-Cheikh has suggested, this should be understood as a verse of two hemistiches. He confirms this later: “From a formal point of view, ət-təbṛāˁ consists of a single gāf (of two hemistiches).” He also points out that, from a metric point of view, each təbṛīˁa has five mutaḥarrik or “feet” (and sometimes six) in the first hemistich and eight in the second, but, in general, the poem is not subject to any metric norm.

Catherine Taine-Cheikh notes that “formal constraints are especially reduced because the tebrâ` verses do not respect metric mandates (the existence of short versus long syllables, a regular number of syllables in the verse, the presence of long syllables only in certain meters and in certain places) that are found in both gnä and täydin.” Given this flexibility and freedom, the first verse can be shorter than or equal in length to the second. As Mauritian scholar Ahmed Bâba Miské has shown, the first verse usually has five (or six, according to Catherine Taine) verses and the second eight, but this is not always the case; some poems have seven verses in the second line.

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Tabrā`: Production

Ahmed Baba Miské, Aline Tauzin, and Ahmed Salem Ould Mohamed Baba point out that the tabrā` is an exclusively women’s poetry.

The Delivery

Tebræ are therefore produced in an exclusively female environment. The poet expresses her feelings in two verses, transmitted orally to a restricted audience of other women, though not always from her same social class. Hassaniya society is highly stratified, assigning women a distinct, discreet, and nearly subordinate position relative to the masculine world around which the social order revolves. Man has reserved public expression for himself, and woman, excluded from this world, is the hidden, protected being, reduced to a silence that she cannot and must not break for fear of violating the laws of modesty and discretion. Within this unequal social structure, there exists another structure: that of the nobles and the haratines, the slaves. From her marginal social position, a woman voices her feelings through the poem within this circle of unmarried women.

Ahmed Bâba Miské points out that “originally it was used by young women in love to express feelings that social taboos prevented them from expressing publicly. When they were alone (on a dune, far from prying ears), they confided their ‘works’ to one another—generally very naive and unelaborate, and which anyway were not meant to ‘publish.’ Sometimes, the maid would bring them back, in strict secrecy, to the fortunate one.”

The poem is produced in nocturnal gatherings where men and married women are excluded. It can be a single two-line poem or a chain of poems in sequences grouping several together. In the case of sequences, one poem calls upon another through formal devices, as Tauzin says in her article À voix haute: “such as repetition and symmetry, which thus take precedence over the levels of prosody and meaning.” The formal game is thus part of the poem. A poet launches a first poem. One of the verses of the first may be taken up to give a second and respond to the first. A third poet repeats a verse or the meaning, embroidering a third poem onto the two.

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The Borrowed Verse

To write their tabrā, the girls of the Sahara borrow a first verse from an already famous poet. Sometimes, they draw upon a verse of the Quran and follow this borrowed verse with a verse of their own. Often they follow the continuation of a first verse of a tebria and add a second of their own, thereby turning their poem into a variation of the first. In the production of tabrāa, composition is sometimes done in a group. As we have indicated, the first verse is sometimes kept and each poet composes a second verse that rhymes with the first, sometimes drawn from classical poetry. In this case, as Aline Tauzin says in her article “À haute voix, poésie féminine contemporaine en Mauritanie” (Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée, no. 54, 1989, Mauritanie entre arabité et africanité, pp. 178–187), there is “the resumption of a first verse of ancient poetry and the addition of a second, new one” (1989, p. 180).

men meten sqamu

tālet eeleye l-eyāmu

My intense love for him

makes my days so long.

men meten sqamu

nesmae men tūnes kalāmu

For the love of my love for him.

I hear his words from Tunis.

In other cases, the elaboration of the poem resorts to a first verse “quwwa” which is found again in the first verse of the second poem.

šivtu ve l wete

lā howla u lā quwwata

I saw him in the car.

Only God could have made him so handsome.

šivtu maa el-kuwwe

lā neabudu illā huwe

I saw him at the window.

There is no devotion other than to Him.

The final poems refer to a religious sentence in the second verse; with the difference of a few words, the first verses resemble each other. The third poem, as in the case of Issa Kobayashi’s poems, takes up the first verse without modifying it:

švtu ma`a el-kuwwe

xalla glaybi allā yetlowwe.

I saw him at the window.

My heart skipped a beat.

Thus, tebraa are produced individually or collectively in the concatenation of several two-line poems transmitted like a joust in which each poet emits her production starting from that of the others. Tebraā are transformed into variations on the same theme. In some haikus of the Japanese poet Issa Kobayashi, the first and last lines are identical and the middle line changes, producing certain variations from one poem to another.

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A Feminine Voice

Whatever the forms of composition, one thing stands out: the voice of the woman taking shape and expressing herself in a radically masculine world. In the Hassaniya world, men write in classical and consecrated genres, while women, far from the gaze of others, speak and sing. Writing is made to last, words to fly. It is here, in this ephemerality, that woman has her place; an almost non-place in a stratified society where women comes second after men. She moves between her father’s house and her husband’s house; between the two places where she moves and lives is the brother who watches over her, whose honor, if lost, can dishonor the family and tribe, bringing shame and death. Since the Mu’allaqat, her presence in poetry is nothing more than the metaphor of an absence; she exists because man lends her being a place within the order of his poetic discourse.

When male writing comes into contact with woman, it transforms her into an object of its own language. From then on, the male poet addresses not the woman herself, but rather her eardrum—treating woman as a category already fixed within his language, one that allows him to hear and understand her strictly within the bounds of his own discourse. Everything that man says about woman in his poetry is directed at man: at his gaze, where woman is locked away; at his eardrum, where everything returns to enchant his world in a word that is already codified, that appropriates its objects and all exteriority, all alterity, and makes them its own. Thus, the woman in love is chosen, codified, appropriated like all the objects of metaphor capable of expressing a world: the world of man. Here, woman is both a presence and a present—offered in a time that is not her own, a time heard only in the moment she gives herself, framed as the object of a verb through which human feelings take shape. Her presence is effectively an absence, her poetic inclusion a physical exclusion. Her written trace is nothing more than the content a male poet allows inside the universe of his poem.

Suddenly right there, speaking in her own poetic genre, the woman breaks a tradition rooted in the Mu’allaqat, pre-Islamic poetry. There, women do not sing; they are sung to, wept over, and adulated as objects. And when women speak in the works of Imru’ al-Qais or ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad—if indeed they speak at all—their words are merely lent to them. They are granted a presence made possible only by the hollow of their absence. To claim the floor, then, is to create a rift, a fracture, a fissure in the traditional genres supposed to speak for them. By taking the floor, a woman establishes herself as a subject, shattering the object she once was (or at least multiplying it through her own gaze) and making man, in turn, the object of her word.

The woman speaks. In the Tabr`a, she appropriates a world (that of discourse) and makes subversion a mode of being; she is not an object, man is her object. This transmutation opens up by changing roles, and she becomes an expressing subject, casting outward an interiority denied within the order of discourse. She acquires a face, a form, placing before the gaze of the other the precedence of her presence and the feelings that constitute her here and now.

The woman shows herself as a being who loves, envies, grieves, weeps with nostalgia, shows herself capable of desire, and disturbs the world where man has elevated her onto a pedestal to keep her there like a statue. A statue is beautiful and normal as long as it remains immobile; a woman has stepped down from the elevation where man placed her, abandoning the lofty clouds to become a simple human, like Majnun, or Majdub the sarcastic, and a thousand knights of love.

Love, then, is the soil that woman has chosen to cultivate through poetic verse. She enriches it immeasurably through semantic subtleties, where the sign “to love” unexpectedly connects with other spheres of her language. She questions her world, our world, challenges existing genres, and reveals the nuances of love as the sole purpose assigned to the labours and days of the heart.

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The Time of Delivery

The woman has become a mganniyat, an author. This fact, which is the expression of a rupture in gender relations in the Hassaniya world, dates back to a fairly recent period: the second half of the 20th century, according to Ahmed Bâba Miské.

In fact, we have few vestiges that allow us to date the tebrā and know at what time they formed as a poetic genre. Ahmed Bâba Miské’s research on tebrā was published in al-Wasît in 1970. Ahmed-Salem notes that the National Radio of Mauritania recorded tebrae singers such as Maḥžūba Mint əl-Mäyddāḥ in 1966 and Dīmi Mint Āḅḅä in the 1990s. We are therefore dealing with a production of tebrā` that does not go back further than the 1950s and took off in the 1960s.

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The Space of Delivery

The corpus compiled by Ahmed-Salem Ould Mohamed Baba comes partly from Mederdra (Trarza Wilaya). The texts provided by Tauzin belong to the Mauritanian zone. In his thesis on the tabrā, Maa al-Aynin Al-Aliyat cites 216 coming from the southern zone of Morocco. Catherine Taine-Cheikh cites an anthology of tabrā by a woman from the Tagant region in Mauritania. Although the corpus currently available to us comes from the area between Mauritania and southern Morocco, it is clear that tebrā` are a product of the Afroasiatic Hassaniya language. The geography of this language of 10,000,000 speakers extends as follows:

Algeria: 4,860,000 (2018)

Mali: 123,000 (2014)

Mauritania: 3,560,000 (2017)

Morocco: 706,000 (2018)

Senegal: 196,000 (2017)

Libya: 49,800 (2016)

Nigeria: 22,600 (2014)

The late Timbuktu librarian Ahmed Shoued collected tebrā` in southern Algeria and northern Mali, in Timbuktu and Arawan, which today we consider lost.

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Transmission

Once a poem is produced, it is the responsibility of a caste woman to make it public. As Georges Voisset notes in his Enquête sur la littérature mauritanienne, formes et perspectives: “Entrusted to the tigiwit in a contract of anonymity—the sole guarantee of its spontaneity—the tebrae is one of the sites of expression where modernity can find a place. Ultimately, being composed of two verses with unequal rhymes (generally five units of metre plus eight units of metre), it is ideally suited to reflecting the unstated aspects of Mauritanian society. Its thematic evolution thus serves as a vital accompaniment to the revival of Hassaniya poetry:If I were a Mercedes

I would push myself and shift gears.”

The tigiwit guarantees transmission and anonymity. She never states who the sender of the poem is, yet she directs it to the recipient, who will recognise themselves in the description or allusions that give meaning to the couplet. Several tīggäwātən compose songs using these tabrā` without being their authors.

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Typology of the Tebrā`

Ahmed-Salem Ould Mohamed Bâba (2014, 80) classifies tabrā into three types: tabrā bayat, tabrā murad (where the recipient of the poem is designated), and anonymous tebrā.

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Təbṛāˁ Bayyāt

In this type of tabrā, poets use words and expressions such as mäžḥūd (“secret or unconfessable [beloved]”); ḏākəlli nəbġi (“the one I love”); ṣaydi (“my man”); vuˀādi (“my heart”); ḏä lli mənnu l-äsqān (“the one who brings me suffering”). In this type of tabrā, the issuer gives a name or pseudonym that makes it known to the receiver despite the anonymous nature of this genre of poems.

2.1. əffäyləḥ bayyāt // vläyyīḥ ulādəl-ḥuṛṛāt

Bayyāt is as handsome // as the sons of nobles.

2.2. bäyyātəššaˁṛa // gāləˁha mən gäwmu ḥamṛa

The beauty of Bayyāt // stole it entirely from his friends.

2.3. tväggäd yä-l-mäžḥūd // läyāli vīhum kənnä gˁūd

Remember, secret beloved, // the nights when we were together.

2.4. tväggäd yä-l-mäžḥūd // läylä miṯluhā yā yaˁūd

Remember, secret beloved, // that unrepeatable night.

2.5. ḥəḅḅi l-əl-mäžḥūd // v-gḷaybi ˁādəllā mazyūd

My love for my secret beloved, // in my heart does nothing but grow.

Təbṛāˁ Murād

This type scarcely differs from the first. Only the recipient changes.

3.1. murād äsqāmu // ˁliyyä əllā bāš mtānu

Murād’s love pangs // affect me more and more each time.

3.2. ḥubbi l-əl-muṛād // aṭṭamm mn-əl-ḥaṛb v-baġdād

The love I feel for Murād // is greater than the war of Baghdad.

3.3. yäxūti muṛād // mˁa ˁṛāžālä mā yugādd

You must know that Murād // has no equal.

3.4. ˁəzzi l-əl-muṛād // əllā bāš drəs bāš nzād

My love toward Murād // the more time passes, the more it renews itself.

3.5. u-lā tänsä muṛād // gəˁdətnä ḏīk ˁlä l-aqrād

Do not forget, Murād, // when we were sitting on the dunes.

Ahmed-Salem immediately gives 90 anonymous tabrā`. Let us cite a few:

4.1. lā ˀilāha ˀillä ḷḷāh // mäġlāh w-mäġlāh w-mäġlāh

Good grief! // How much, how much, how much I love him!

4.2. w-ˁṭāni mīˁād // əllā huwwä baˁdəl-muṛād

He gave me a date, // truly, the most desired thing.

4.3. läylət läṯnäyn ˁādət li // vīhä tārīx zwäyn

Monday night(s) has/have become for me // a lovely moment.

4.4. zwäynä tīlifūn yäswä // ˁād bˁīd (ə)mənn hūn

How nice the telephone is, even though // it is far from here!

4.5. Məndarti yäkān // ṛagg l-maḥšaṛ vīhəṣ-ṣəbyān

I wonder // if in the square of Judgment Day there will be lovers?

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The Themes of the Tebrā`

All the themes touched upon by the tabrā` are variations on love. Those treated by Catherine Taine-Cheikh are the following:

Evocation of the surroundings:

Of all the young men of this dune

Ould Beira is the most attractive.

Evocation of the surroundings:

What is the matter with my heart?

Here is the corral for his camels.

The solitude of the camp:

The eye scans the horizons,

but not a soul is seen.

Place names:

What feels good

from here to le-Bbeyr.

or again:

If the USSR were a stone’s throw away.

City life:

On the way to the hospital

I treated myself without medication.

or again:

His laughter in the office

[is nothing more than] dates, honey, and drinks.

A physical trait or a way of behaving:

And he has a lip contour

more forbidden than the property of orphans.

Descriptions and time of encounter:

He is lying beside me

his teeth looked like pieces of a mirror.

Intimate agitation:

The one whose love devastates me

aimed at me, fired, and killed me.

The hope of being with the beloved, the despair of loss:

Oh God, make it cease

to hope every day in vain.

Laments addressed to the beloved:

By God, my beloved,

here I am for you, lying and dying.

Expectations fulfilled:

Oh boy,

How many Tebriat were said before

your coming.

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The Evolution of a Genre: From Orality to Writing

In his preface to the anthology published by the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco, Abdeljalil Lahjomri, its Permanent Secretary, rightly underlined that “tabraâ deserves to be documented, popularised, and safeguarded as an expression of uncommon female sensitivity in the Arab world.” Today, while ethnographic research has worked to record the tebrā as a poetic genre, sedentarisation and urbanisation pose a serious threat to its survival. Stripped of the socio-economic conditions that enabled its birth, the form runs the real risk of disappearing. Women are abandoning the oral world through schooling to dedicate themselves to writing. Aichetou Mint Ahmedou from the University of Nouakchott (Mauritania) collects, transcribes, and translates tabrā, and writes them as well. The future will tell what these transformations will bring to a genre of oral poetry in a world where everything now depends on writing.

Even today, tabrāa do not have a definitive formal structure. The number of feet in tabrāa is not definitively fixed. The first verse measures five feet, the second 6, 7, or 8 feet. This is an initial weakness of this type. Tabrā` are generally limited to a single theme: love. Each poem is a variation of this single theme. This univocity reduces the field of expression of this poetic genre and makes it absent from other aspects of human life, of life in short, which is made of diversity and mobility.

What has been said above in no way excludes the great force of this concise poetry, which manages to state in few words the greatest things about love and the most intimate things of the heart, much like the haiku that speaks of the seasons.

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II. Poetics of Dissonance

Catherine Taine-Cheikh underlines in her preface to Tebraâ that “this poetic genre is considered almost exclusively female, although on occasion some men have been able to indulge in it.” Ahmed Bâba Miské makes the same observation: “tebrâ has grown considerably in recent years (particularly in Atar). It has emerged, so to speak, from clandestinity, favoured by the development of urban centres, by a certain disintegration of traditional social structures, and by the relaxation of prohibitions. It has become a very popular genre, and young people, bravely defying ridicule, even go so far as to use it to engage in real, and often very poetic, dialogues in… tebrâ with their lovers.” What Ahmed Bâba Miské condemns here is the incursion of man into the territory of woman, which for him implies exposing oneself to ridicule. Having made this observation, he continues: “tabrâ has very precise limits that prevent it from becoming a ‘great genre’: it cannot exceed two verses. Yet it often produces things so pretty! We are amazed that so much imagination, charm, freshness, and sometimes even depth can be contained in so few words.” What the scholar from Chinguetti criticises in the tebrâ is what makes the strength of this poetic genre, which I discovered in Timbuktu through an article by Tauzin titled “Literatura oral y relaciones sociales en la sociedad maura” from the late 1990s. It was the Mauritanian poet Marfall Diagne who gave it to me. That same year, Ahmed Choued, librarian of the Ahmed Baba Documentation Center in Timbuktu (CEDRAB), recited several poems of this type to me from memory. Brevity was not irreconcilable with excellence. The producers of haikus demonstrated this. It was then impossible for me to follow the Chinguetti scholar.

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Spelling

Scholars disagree on the transcription of the word. Ahmed Bâba Miské writes tabrâ. Aline Tauzin, tebrâɛ. Catherine Taine-Cheikh, tabraâ. I based myself on the transcription of the word by Aline Tauzin, through whom I discovered this genre, which I transcribed as Tebrae to avoid the difficulty of spelling tebrâɛ. Nimrod, the poet from Chad, proposed to me after the 2021 edition of Tebrae to Latinise the end of the word to tebræ, tebrae being the plural of tebria. The ending of the diphthong designating the plural is thus given in æ, as in the case of Latin words ending in -a. I thus established the distinction between tabrāa, which designate traditional two-line poems composed from the territoriality of orality, and tebræ, which are tabrāa written by poets without sexual distinction. Tebræ, therefore, derive from the tabrā of the Saharan women.

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Extraterritoriality of the Genre, Speech, and Rhyme

The first point to highlight is the extraterritoriality of the genre. Tebraā are traditionally the poetic compositions of desert women, delivered and transmitted orally. As soon as a man begins to write in this exclusively female genre, tebrāa cease to be exclusively female. Tebræ are an extraterritorial production of tabrā`a.

A second order of extraterritoriality is that of the transition from oral to written. Woman, in the production of tabrāa, remains within the order of the voice, of the oral. She composes verses from words that will be sung and memorised. We are in the territoriality of the spoken word. Writing tebræ means breaking with the oral, passing from voice to sign. Tebraā cease to belong exclusively to a female oral tradition.

A final form of extraterritoriality is that of rhyme. Tebraā are two-line poems, of 5 or 6 feet in the first verse and 6, 7, or 8 in the second. Given this fluctuation in the number of feet in the second verse, tebrae are written in free verse, thus liberating themselves from rhyme and meter. Ahmed Bâba Miské observed that “the tebrîa has very precise limits that prevent it from becoming ‘a great genre.’ It cannot exceed two lines.” We must make a virtue of this necessity. The brevity of tabrāa does not prevent them from having depth, nor from expressing with virtuosity the feelings of desert women. Haikus have only three lines of 17 syllables. From Bashô to Issa Kobayashi, Santoka, and Shiki, to name just a few, haikus have conquered an independent poetic territory whose beauty and depth no one denies today. Three-line haikus have entered and remain in the universal history of poetry. Tabrā`a have a long way to go.

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Tebræ: The Construction of a Two-Line Poem

Tebræ maintain the form of traditional tabrā`a, which are two lines. These two traditional verses are actually a single hemistich. We are confronted with a single verse divided in reality into two parts. What tebræ do is formally break with the hemistich to construct themselves as a distich: a poem of two independent verses. Here we have the meeting of two verses that form a complete whole.

In poetry, a couplet is the union of two verses, or the fragment of a work, forming a complete whole in meaning, for example, a maxim.

Tebræ consist of a shorter first verse. It has five feet in tabrā`, and a longer one of 6, 7, or 8 feet in traditional compositions.

Major and minor give tebræ two modes of poetic expression. Here, without rhyme or number of feet, they form a free-verse poem. Sometimes the first verse is borrowed, having been composed by another poet.

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The Borrowed Verse

In Tebræ, the poet uses a blank first verse already in use, signed by a third party or belonging to literature in general. To this blank verse, they give a second verse as a variation. This blank verse—which is unsigned or comes from another—is a major [verse] that expresses the universal.

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Exiled in Spain since 2012, ISMAËL DIADIÉ HAÏDARA (Timbuktu, 1957) is a librarian, poet, philosopher, historian, president of the Mahmud Kati Foundation in Spain, and director of the Kati Fund Library in Timbuktu, Mali. Gold medalist of the city of Toledo – Spain and member of Sites of Conscience in New York, he studied drama at the National Institute of Arts (INA) in Bamako and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENSUP) in Bamako, Mali. He is the author of several works and articles, including: Le statut du monde. Nécessité, possibilité et contingence chez Ibn Arabi, Cordoba, 1992 ; Yawdar Pasha y la conquista saudí del Songhay (1591-1599) Instituto de Estudios almerienses, 1993 et Rabat 1996 ; L’Espagne musulmane et l’Afrique subsaharienne, Editions Donniya, Bamako, 1997 ; Les Juifs à Tombouctou, Editions Donniya, Bamako, 1999 ; Los otros Españoles, mr ediciones, Madrid, 2004 ; Los últimos Visigodos, rd editores, Sevilla, 2003 ; Las lamentaciones del viejo Tombo, Maremoto, Málaga, 2006 ; Abana, Rihla, Córdoba, Almuzara, 2006 ; Monólogo del un carnero, Árbol de Poe, Málaga, 2012 ; Zimma, Vaso Roto Mexico, 2014 – Madrid 2015 ; Tombouctou, Andaluces en la ciudad pérdida del Sahara, Almazara, 2015. Une cabane au bord de l’eau, Genal, Málaga, 2016; Tebrae pour ma mère, Málaga, 2017 ; Sahel, Málaga 2017 ; Journal d’un bibliothécaire à Tombouctou, Almuzara, 2017. De Tolède à Tombouctou, Malaga, 2019. De la Sobriedad, Almuzara, 2020 ; Tebrae, Libros del Aire, Serie Mayor, Boo de Pielagos, Cantabria, 2021. He is also a regular contributor to Ars Notoria.