Moorish Literature | Page 2

to feel as do peoples established for centuries on
African soil. Their ancestors, the Machouacha, threatened Egypt in the

time of Moses and took possession of it, and more than twenty
centuries later, with the Fatimides, converted Spain to the Mussulman
faith. Under Arab chiefs they would have overcome all Eastern Europe,
had it not been for the hammer of Charles Martel, which crushed them
on the field of Poitiers.
The richest harvest of Berber songs in our possession is, without doubt,
that in the dialect of the Zouaous, inhabiting the Jurgura mountains,
which rise some miles distant from Algiers, their crests covered with
snow part of the year.[2] All kinds of songs are represented; the
rondeaux of children whose inspiration is alike in all countries:
"Oh, moonlight clear in the narrow streets,
Tell to our little friends

To come out now with us to play--
To play with us to-night.
If they
come not, then we will go
To them with leather shoes. (Kabkab.)[3]
"Rise up, O Sun, and hie thee forth,
On thee we'll put a bonnet old:

We'll plough for thee a little field--
A little field of pebbles full:
Our
oxen but a pair of mice."
"Oh, far distant moon:
Could I but see thee, Ali!
Ali, son of Sliman,

The beard[4] of Milan
Has gone to draw water.
Her cruse, it is
broken;
But he mends it with thread,
And draws water with her:

He cried to Ayesha:
'Give me my sabre,
That I kill the merle

Perched on the dunghill
Where she dreams;
She has eaten all my
olives.'"[5]
In the same category one may find the songs which are peculiar to the
women, "couplets with which they accompany themselves in their
dances; the songs, the complaints which one hears them repeat during
whole hours in a rather slow and monotonous rhythm while they are at
their household labors, turning the hand-mill, spinning and weaving
cloths, and composed by the women, both words and music."[6]
One of the songs, among others, and the most celebrated in the region
of the Oued-Sahal, belonging to a class called Deker, is consecrated to
the memory of an assassin, Daman-On-Mesal, executed by a French

justice. As in most of these couplets, it is the guilty one who excites the
interest:
"The Christian oppresses. He has snatched away
This deserving young man;
He took him away to Bougre,
The
Christian women marvelled at him.
Pardieu! O Mussulmans, you

Have repudiated Kabyle honor."[7]
With the Berbers of lower Morocco the women's songs are called by
the Arab name Eghna.
If the woman, as in all Mussulman society, plays an inferior
rôle--inferior to that allowed to her in our modern civilizations--she is
not less the object of songs which celebrate the power given her by
beauty:
"O bird with azure plumes,
Go, be my messenger--
I ask thee that
thy flight be swift;
Take from me now thy recompense.
Rise with
the dawn--ah, very soon--
For me neglect a hundred plans;
Direct
thy flight toward the fount,
To Tanina and Cherifa.
"Speak to the eyelash-darkened maid,
To the beautiful one of the pure,
white throat;
With teeth like milky pearls.
Red as vermillion are her
cheeks;
Her graceful charms have stol'n my reason;
Ceaselessly I
see her in my dreams."[8]
"A woman with a pretty nose
Is worth a house of solid stone;
I'd
give for her a hundred reaux,[9]
E'en if she quitted me as soon.
"Arching eyebrows on a maid,
With love the genii would entice,
I'd
buy her for a thousand reaux,
Even if exile were the price.
"A woman neither fat nor lean
Is like a pleasant forest green,
When
she unfolds her budding charms,
She gleams and glows with
springtime sheen."[10]

The same sentiment inspires the Touareg songs, among which tribe
women enjoy much greater liberty and possess a knowledge of letters
greater than that of the men, and know more of that which we should
call literature, if that word were not too ambitious:
"For God's sake leave those hearts in peace,
'Tis Tosdenni torments
them so;
She is more graceful than a troop
Of antelopes separated
from gazelles;
More beautiful than snowy flocks,
Which move
toward the tents,
And with the evening shades appear
To share the
nightly gathering;
More beautiful than the striped silks
Enwrapped
so closely under the haiks,
More beautiful than the glossy ebon veil,

Enveloped in its paper white,
With which the young man decks
himself,
And which sets off his dusky cheek."[11]
The poetic talent of the Touareg women, and the use they make of this
gift--which they employ to celebrate or to rail at, with the
accompaniment of their one-stringed violin, that which excites their
admiration or inspires them with disdain--is a stimulant for warriors:
"That which spurs me to battle is a word of scorn,
And the fear of the
eternal malediction
Of God, and the circles of the young
Maidens
with their violins.
Their disdain is for those men
Who care not for
their own good names.[12]
"Noon has come, the meeting's sure.
Hearts of wind love not the
battle;
As though they had no fear of the violins,
Which are on the
knees of painted women--
Arab