Moorish Literature | Page 2

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 r?le--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 women, who were not fed on sheep's milk;?There is but camel's milk in all their land.?More than one other has preceded thee and is widowed,?For that in Amded, long since,?My own heart was burned.?Since you were a young lad I suffered--?Since I