So much of our culture is dependent on the narratives we listen to, that we tell ourselves, create for ourselves, ascribe to others—we are so wedded to ideals and ideas, searching for labels, definitions, categories that will make our world feel less chaotic or unknowable. And yet those descriptors keep frames around us and between us, setting limits around what we can truly know.
I was thinking about this when I read of the poet al-Khansā’—of how what she did, what she created, was based in an oral tradition of spoken word performance, and of lamentation before it became a part of a textual tradition. Of how clearly her work—and those of many writers—gives voice to the silenced, acts in leading the public through the catharsis that is needed to mourn, to rage, to weep, or even to celebrate joy. In many cultures throughout millennia, women have publicly led the mourning of deaths from war with public chants, laments, and elegies. Some have argued that much of this may have been the basis for what became later canonical texts that the world knows as the works of men.
Such public lamentations, cries of grief, become something wider and more than the simplicity of a title such as ‘mourner.’ It is prayer, a call to action, an invocation of power in the face of weakness, a call to community. Even in the derivation of the word hymn, there is a meaning of ‘woven or spun speech’—and in early Greek use, a hymn was understood as something that happens when song and speech are woven together.
The weaving of women was not only done with thread.
Al-Khansāʾ (Arabic: الخنساء), a 7th-century tribeswoman living in the Arabian Peninsula, was one of the most influential poets of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods.
The Ummayad era (c. 661-750)—the first empire builders in an Islamic world—was a liminal time of shifting influences and ideas, as the Prophet Muhammad gained influence. Court poetry became useful as a signature of authority and flourished under the new spiritual direction. And looking to Byzantine and Persian neighbors for other signals of authority, viral poetry that was transmitted through public performance thrived. Yet it was a time also riven with war—another reason for poets to help rehabilitate reputations, and console the bereaved.
Poets inherited a mythic role from earlier eras as oracles, and used that legacy to craft new forms of genres—such as the ghazal (love poetry), ‘udhiri (tragic love poetry), hijā’ (lampoon), naqā’id (comic flytings), madīh (heroic praise), fakhr (heroic boast), rithā’ (elegiac), and khamrīyah (celebrating wine), and mujūn (comic bacchanalia). Later genres of hamāsah (romanticized valor) and tardīyāt (hunting) would arrive in the following ‘Abbāsid era.
Like other literary histories, scholarship has long assumed that women had little to do with this rich tradition of pre-Islamic and Islamic poetry, but surprise—there are hundreds of women poets from this era. An anthology by ‘Abd al-Amīr Muhannā, (802–858 CE), a literary scholar of the early Abbasid era, catalogs the work of more than four hundred women poets—a number that some believe is unparalleled in other medieval literature—but most likely it is the result of the similar legacy of scholarship that has for too long prized only the male voice.
Al-Khansā’ (c. 575 - 644 CE) is considered an outsized name in Arabic poetry, well known for her elegiac poetry. She was born in Najd, in the heart of what is now Saudi Arabia, into the tribe of Sulaym, the daughter of the head of the al-Sharid clan. In pre-Islamic society, the role of a woman poet was often to compose elegies for tribesmen killed in battle, and al-Khansā’ is most well known for her poetry composed for her two brothers. When her brother, Mu'awiyah, was killed by men from another tribe, al-Khansā’ insisted that her other brother, Sakhr, avenge Mu'awiyah's death—and Sakhr was also killed.
As it does now, elegiac poetry transcends beyond the initial time of mourning, taking on new life of its own. In al-Khansā’’s era, lamentation poetry was also performed in public oral competitions—which is how her work came to be widely known.
Al-Khansā’ is also known for her conviction in the power of her poetry. A favorite story that appeared in several accounts of her work is that the poet Al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī told al-Khansā’ that she “was the greatest poet among those with breasts,”—to which she replied, “I am the greatest poet among those with testicles too.”
She later traveled to Medina, to perform there and meet the Prophet Muhammad, and came to embrace the new religion. Many claimed that al-Khansā’ was his favorite poet, weeping when he listened to her elegies, and encouraging her to continue. Later Muslim scholars collected and studied her poetry as a guide to the language of early Islamic texts. She wrote over a hundred elegies for her two brothers alone, and over a thousand lines of her poetry still exist today.
The brevity—and power—of the lines below, in particular, have stayed with me since first reading them:
Night is long, denies sleep.
I am crippled
by the news—
Ibn ‘Amr is dead.
Then Time came,
and harvested its malice.
Time never fails.
When I read Amelia Lanyer’s work—thought to have been one of the first women to write a proto-feminist text in English, and the first to print a volume of poems with her own name attached (in the same decades as Shakespeare)—I was struck by her conviction in defending women through spiritual texts. Her volume of religious poems Salve Deus Rex Judæorum argues that men sinned twice—first for following Eve to the apple (since as the first creation of God, he should have demonstrated leadership), and second for the judgment and crucifixion of Christ. But women were exonerated from their one sin, by Lanyer’s argument—because women lament. Women attended to Christ and were the first to witness the resurrection—they were there to weep, to mourn, to honor, to care. Women lament and are redeemed by bearing witness.
The poetry of al-Khansā’—her elegies, lamentations—echoes in Lanyer’s poetic argument centuries later.
I also thought about Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet, who wrote her masterpiece Requiem after standing outside for 17 months, along with many other women hoping to hear of their loved ones, who were imprisoned under Stalinist policies. Akhmatova’s writing had been unofficially banned under Stalin, and while she could not publish, it didn’t stop her from writing. She termed these times her “Vegetarian Years.”
As she stood in line with the other women, weary and numb to the threat of death and missing loved ones, a timid woman approached her, recognizing her. Akhmatova relays the story in the introduction to Requiem:
One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said ‘I can.’ Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had been her face.
Akhmatova wrote about what she saw, bearing witness to the experience of so many injustices— the horror and numbness from arrests, trials, exiles, deaths, suffering. She burnt the poems after they were committed to memory by friends (as a printed poem could mean a death sentence), and these poems of experience were shared, circulated in secret, whispered aloud to others to ensure their existence. A network of collective memory, based on one individual writing about—lamenting over—what she saw. And the roots of that experience are woven through time—of women lamenting, mourning, witnessing, and writing. The broader voice of experience shared and recognized is what made them so remarkable and powerful still today.
In reading al-Khansā’ and the work of women writers in the role of lamentation, I couldn’t help but also think about the Valkyries of Norse myth—women ‘choosers of the slain’ in battle, determining those who live and who die, flying the dead to Valhalla. Similar to seeresses of myth—of the Norns weaving fate, of Sybils’ prophecies—all women presiding over the liminal transitions between past, present, and future—the living and the dead.
These early lamentation-prayer-invocation-prophecy-poems, have crystallized into texts that still have so much to tell. They give voice to the common experience of loss across time.
Further reading:
Loss Sings, by James Montgomery. “A translation of a number of al-Khansā’’s dirges from the Arabic and weaves a cahier around them.” A review can be read here.
Arab Women Writers, edited by by Radwa Ashour + Hasna Reda-Mekdashi.
interesting and catchy site, I will be your friend as to poetry and witings on the world of women and beyond..grateful to have found a place like this..