Nazhun al-Garnatiya bint al-Qulai’iya
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Nazhun al-Garnatiya bint al-Qulai’iya (eleventh-century) was a Granadan courtesan and poet, noted for her outrageous verse, her learning, and her low-status origins (possibly as a slave). Although little of her work survives, she is, among medieval Andalusian women poets, second only to her contemporary Hafsa Bint al-Hajj al-Rukuniyya in the quantity of her work preserved; she usually appears getting the better of male poets and aristocrats around her with her witty invective. In Marla Segol's words, 'as a rule, Nazhun represents her body in ways that disrupt conventional strategies for control of women’s speech and sexuality, and protests the merchandising of women’s bodies'.[1]
In the translation of A. J. Arberry, one of her various ripostes runs:[2]
- The poet al-Kutandi challenged the blind al-Makhzumi to complete the following verses:
- If you had eyes to view
- The man who speaks with you—
- The blind man failed to discover a suitable continuation, but Nazhun, who happened to be present, improvized after this fashion:
- However many there may be
- All dumbly you’d behold
- His anklets’ shining gold.
- The rising moon, it seems,
- In his bright buttons gleams,
- And in his gown, I trow,
- There sways a slender bough.
Sources
- Arie Schippers, 'The Role of Women in Medieval Andalusian Arabic Story-Telling', in Verse and the Fair Sex: Studies in Arabic Poetry and in the Representation of Women in Arabic Literature. A Collection of Papers Presented at the Fifteenth Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et des Islamisants (Utrecht/Driebergen, September 13–19, 1990), ed. by Frederick de Jong (Utrecht: Publications of the M. Th. Houstma Stichting, 1993), pp. 139–51 http://dare.uva.nl/document/184872.
- Marlé Hammon, 'Hafsa Bint al-Hajj al Rukuniyya', in Medieval Islamic Civilisation: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Josef W. Meri, 2 vols (New York: Routledge, 2006), I 308.
- Marla Segol, 'Representing the Body in Poems by Medieval Muslim Women', Medieval Feminist Forum, 45 (2009), 147-69: http://ir.uiowa.edu/mff/vol45/iss1/12.
References
- ↑ Marla Segol, 'Representing the Body in Poems by Medieval Muslim Women', Medieval Feminist Forum, 45 (2009), 147-69 (156) http://ir.uiowa.edu/mff/vol45/iss1/12; cf. Marlé Hammond, 'He said "She said": Narrations of Women's Verse in Classical Arabic Literature. A Case Study: Nazhuūn's Hijaū' of Abuū Bakr al-Makhzuūmī', Middle Eastern Literatures: Incorporating Edebiyat, 6 (2003), 3-18, DOI: 10.1080/14752620306884.
- ↑ Moorish Poetry: A Translation of ’The Pennants’, an Anthology Compiled in 1243 by the Andalusian Ibn Saʿid, trans. by A. J. Arberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 92; For the Arabic see El libro de las banderas de los campeones, de Ibn Saʿid al-Magribī, ed. by Emilio García Gómez (Madrid: Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, 1942), p. 60.
