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An Interview with Prof Lidwien Kapteijns (Ladan) on Somali Arts and Literature

Editor’s note: Prof Lidwien Kapteijns (Ladan) is not new to Somalia or Africa. Prof Lidwien teaches African and Middle Eastern history at Wellesley college and is the author of Clan Cleansing in Somalia (2013), Women’s Voices in a Man’s World (with Maryan Omar Ali, 1999) and numerous research papers that  have contributed to the Somali scholarship. This interview focuses on Prof Ladan’s work in Somali arts and literature through her book “Women’s Voices in a Man’s World”. The interview was conducted by Abdelkarim A. Hassan for WatrdheerNews.

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WDN: You have written the book Women’s Voice in a Man’s World. Can you share with us what the book is about?

Prof. Ladan: Yes, that book came out in 1999 and was my first book about a Somali rather than Sudanese subject matter. To explain the background, I must take you back briefly to my student days in Amsterdam. When I became interested in African history, I was surprised how difficult it was, at that moment in time and in the libraries accessible to me, to find African historians who wrote about Africa. This absence left an indelible stamp on my approach to history: I have tried to make a principle of always including in the sources I study what people of the society and culture I studied themselves one said/wrote/sang about their past. In the context of my work on Sudanese history, this meant that I co-edited two volumes of historical documents. In the case of Somali history, it led me to study Somali cultural production, especially texts that are often called folklore texts and that Andrzejewski called texts of the “time-free stream,” as they often cannot be precisely dated.

I found two waves of published folklore texts. The first was the one produced by colonial linguists and ethnographers who interviewed (sometimes employed) Somali respondents. The second wave resulted from the flood of publications in Somali following the introduction of the Somali orthography in 1972. I collected and read those texts and, in the first part of Women’s Voices in a Man’s World,  I asked by what criteria they judged a good Somali woman and girl.  You can read the results in the book!

womens voice_mans worldThe conclusions I reached on the basis of these texts was that Somali society was undoubtedly patriarchal, that is to say, found men more important than women and organized itself politically by giving more power to (married) men than to women. However, these sayings and tales are often so boisterous, humoristic, tongue-in-cheek, and contradictory that they undermine the very gender regime they purport to uphold. As a result, one women’s power and influence emerge clearly, even if between the lines.

I will give you two examples. First, there is a “saying-in-three” (saddexleh) that says: Three things are disastrous: an oldest son who is a coward, a daughter who is ugly, and a wife who is gluttonous (hunguri-weyn). I puzzled over the latter for a while, for I could understand why a father would want a first-born son who could defend his community and a daughter who would easily find a husband. But why emphasize a wife’s gluttony? And then I realized that in most social contexts in Somalia it was the wife who not only processed food from its raw components but also managed its distribution. If she was unable to control her appetite, food would be poorly managed and the family might not survive. So a humorous saying indirectly revealed how indispensable and  influential married women were.

A second example would be the contradiction between the saying “kal caano galeen kas ma galo” (which implies that womanhood (i.c., the ability to lactate) and rational thinking cannot go together), However, how about other sayings such as reer waa naag (“a household belongs to (or depends on) the woman”); naag la’aan waa naf la’aan (“to be without a woman is to be without life”), rag naagaa is dhaafshaa (“men outdo each other because of [the qualities of] their wives”) and my favorite, nin waliba waa hooyadii oo gamba la’ (“every man is his mother without a headscarf”). I made a Somali elder very uncomfortable once by quoting that to him.  Moreover, if women are not capable of rational thought as the first saying appears to suggest, what to do with the many stories about how young men and women would test each other’s intelligence, as neither wanted an unintelligent, stupid spouse.

On the basis of my study of these Somali folklore texts, I have proposed that wherever “patriarchy” exists – we really do not use that term anymore in such a general way – it is always dynamic and the struggle to keep women “in their place” is never easy. The noisy and multi-voiced discourse about gender in these Somali folklore provide evidence for this.

When I had written up the analysis of the folklore texts, I found that my manuscript was too long for an article and too short for a book. It was Prof. Jean Hay, a pioneer of African women’s history at Boston University, who kept encouraging me to find a solution to this. That was the time Maryan Omar Ali and I were spending our spare time with the Somali popular songs, and thus, thanks to Maryan’s help with those song texts, the second part of the book came to focus on what Somali songs of the period 1955-1985 had to say about changing gender relations in Somalia. Perhaps this became the most interesting part of the book and it also led to other

WDN: Both Somali men and women have significantly contributed to the suugaan (literature), particularly the heeso (songs), but one may infer from the title of your book (Women’s Voices in a Man’s World) that men dominated Somali cultural production. Can you talk about that?

Prof. Ladan: Of course men and women have both contributed, but the ways in which Somali oral culture has been transmitted has favored men and what men –  Somali experts as well as the first foreign researchers who collected and recorded Somali oral texts – found important. Imagine that the first foreign academic researchers had been women and had only talked to Somali women! Our image of Somali history would perhaps have been very different!

In Women’s Voices I have argued that the Somali canon of “traditional“ texts (or texts of the time-free stream) “muted” women’s voices when women expressed themselves in the public sphere.  The texts suggest that “proper” women were expected to be heard only in the private sphere of immediate family or among other women and that, when women broke this rule, male society did formally register their voices even if they spoke for all to hear. This is better explained in the book.

When it comes to the popular songs of the nationalist era, we are told that, with very few exceptions, men created the words and melodies even when women’s voices brought those songs to the public. Although I am convinced (and others have also made this point) that male artists crafted these songs in collaboration with female artists, it appears that in this period women mostly sang words composed by men. This is why I called the book Women’s Voices in a Man’s World.[i] 

WDN: Talking about the popular songs, do you remember the first Somali songs you liked and memorized?

Women voicesProf. Ladan: That is actually a funny story, which I have told before. After I had completed my M.A. at SOAS, Prof. Andrzejewski once came to Amsterdam to give a talk at my university. While he was visiting me in my student apartment, he noticed that time for one of the daily broadcasts of the BBC Somali Service. Now I did not have a short wave radio and only had this old thing I had inherited from my parents’ house, the type with a cloth front cover, and not a modern short wave. But Goosh was undaunted and there we were, lying on our bellies on the floor trying to find the BBC Somali Service. And suddenly, against all expectations, the voice of Xasan Aadan Samatar singing “Aaminaay Xusuusnow” flowed into the room. That is when I fell in love with the Somali popular song, even though it took years before I would understand this song. When I was in Mogadishu in the summer of 1987 (my only visit to Somalia ever), I heard many more songs: Samatar’s “Siraadey” and “Diinleeye,” and many more.

In the period 1955-1985 Somalia had a multitude of extraordinarily talented singers – from  Cabdulqaadir Jubba to Maxamed Suleebaan and from Maandeeq and Magool to Khadra Daahir, Saado Cali and Sahra Axmed. I hope all other singerss feel included and respected as I mention just these names, for they all brought something unique and special to Somali music. Most of them also sang songs of different genres, from qaraami to waddani and from love songs to religious and political songs. However, Somalis are not always aware of the singers from Djibouti. The qaraami by Nimco Jaamac and Fadumo Axmed are really up there with those by Magool and Maandeeq. Afropop recently did a web-based program about the Somali pop songs, so I hope WardheerNews  readers will check out those links.[ii]

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