Passion Love, Masculine Rivalry and Arabic Poetry in Mauritania

Abstract

Love was not born in the West during the twelfth century: the pre-Islamic Arabic poetry of the sixth century testifies to its existence in the ancient Arab world. These poems are well-known among Moors-the population in Mauritania who speaks an Arabic dialect called Ḥassāniyya-and inspire the local poetic forms. Unlike numerous traditions, poetic inspiration of Moorish poets is not spiritual but carnal because it takes root in the desire for a woman, who taste like Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. Love poems in Mauritania are not the privilege of a handful, they are primaly composed with the aim of reaching the woman's heart, like bedouin pre-islamic poetry. So her first name, her body, her qualities and defects, from erotized become poetized.In the Moorish society of Mauritania, the sphere of seduction and passion, very often poetized, coexists in parallel with the marital sphere. It is thus never his wife to whom the poet addresses his poetry but another woman that he desires. The lover's figure is a feminized figure, because he can no longer control himself and is subject to a passion that is annihilating him. However, even when the man is in this state in the seduction phase, marked negatively with passivity and suffering, it is only a temporary situation that represents minor harm on the way to conquering the woman and gaining a dominant position over other men. Courtship has commonly been a male prerogative, while women are often not supposed to manifest their desires except in an indirect way. The fact that the man is considered the desiring subject and the woman the desired object is a major cross-cultural gendered element which justifies men's appropriation of women's bodies.

The arrival of white women: Tourism and the reshaping of beach boys’ masculinity in Zanzibar

“…In other words, one way of circumventing the stigmatization involved in intimate relations with economically more powerful women consists of (over) emphasizing another component of masculinity: the appropriation of women's bodies through sexualized interactions and sexual conquest through competition with other men in displaying these interactions to their peers. As the work of Corinne Fortier (2004Fortier ( , 2018 in Mauritania and Daniel Smith (2017) in Nigeria has clearly shown, seducing women chiefly serves as a way for men to reaffirm their masculinity by comparing themselves with one another.…”

Le désir poétisé ou le goût des Fleurs du mal (poésie maure de Mauritanie / poésie arabe antéislamique)

“…La rivalité entre jeunes hommes (Fortier 2021) a d'abord pour enjeu la déclamation du plus beau quatrain ( gāf ) à celle qu'il souhaite charmer. Le concurrent augmentera la difficulté en composant sur la même rime que son prédécesseur un poème plus long qui deviendra un septain appelé ṭal'a.…”

Introduction

“…Dans le jeu amoureux, la femme n' est qu'une proie, une gazelle, selon l'image poétique arabe, qu'il s'agit de capturer (Fortier 2021a). Pour ce faire, la poésie, qui, jusqu'à une période récente dans la société maure, était exclusivement masculine, constitue une arme de choix, de même qu' elle était l'arme préférée des troubadours dans l'Occident médiéval (Lavaud, Nelli 2000).…”