Issue 315

In Memory of Somali playwrite Hassan Sheikh Mumin (1937-2008)

Translated By B. W. ANDRZEJEWSKI

Somali oral literature is becoming among the best-known and most fully studied of all African oral literatures and the studies and translations of Somali prose and poetry by a series of scholars have brought both delight and enlightenment to many English-speaking readers.

Among Somali literary forms, drama is one well-developed genre, and at present provides one of the main forms of public entertainment in Somali towns as well as reaching villages and nomadic encampments through radio broadcasts and tape recordings. Until now, however, little has been known outside Somalia about these dramatic forms and no Somali play had been published before in translation or original.

The present book is thus doubly welcome in both filling out our knowledge of Somali literature, and at the same time providing us with text and translation of a readable, witty, and at times moving play by the established playwright, poet, and broadcaster, Hassan Sheikh Mumin, supplemented by an introduction and notes by B. W. Andrzejewski.

From the introduction as well as the text of the play, it becomes clear that in certain senses at least modern Somali plays are rightly termed oral. The actors learn their parts not from scripts but from the playwright’s oral delivery aided in recent years by the use of the tape recorder. Most (not all) Somali playwrights have used some private form of writing, but, as Andrzejewski explains, ‘usually only they themselves have been able to read [it], and even that very slowly. In fact they have used writing to a large extent merely as a visual aid to their oral memory.

A large part of a typical play is composed in alliterative verse which follows the traditional patterns of Somali oral poetry both in form and content. It is only these parts that are written down in the playwright’s notes; the prose sections are simply ex plained to the actors in general terms, and they then invent their own lines to suit the requirements of the plot’ (p. 3). lathe verse sections of the play the traditional alliterative forms help to prevent change and remain fairly constant; but the prose parts are relatively fluid: here ‘the actors are in a limited sense co-authors’ (p. 4). The oral nature of Somali plays is also reinforced by the singing of some of the poetic portions as solos or duets, sometimes accompanied by a chorus consisting of the rest of the cast, and an orchestra.

The oral nature of Somali plays is of interest to wider scholarship as well as to Somali specialists, for the well-documented blend of media—word of mouth, writing, radio, tapes— by which it is created and/or reaches its audience provides an interesting instance to set against the view put forward by many of the influential ‘oral-formulaic’ school among others that there is some basic divide between ‘oral ‘and’ written ‘modes with no possibility of transitional types. So too, the blend of traditional alliterative verse and topical urban concerns in Somali drama gives the lie to those analysts of social change—still amazingly prevalent—who regard ‘traditional ‘ or ‘oral’ institutions as separated by a vast gulf of time and evolutionary development from the concerns of contemporary polities.

The play itself is likely to appeal to many English readers for its own sake too, quite apart from any wider theoretical interest. The translation is a readable and lively one and the story of the heartless ‘Leopard’ among the women and his seduction of the innocent Shallaayo is amusing and ironic as well as touching on that abiding subject of interest:

the relationship between men and women. To a foreign reader—unlike, presumably, spectators involved in the musical and dramatic emotion of the performance in the context of Somali culture—some of the moralising occasionally seems a little tedious; but then one encounters passages like Shallaayo’s song to the orchestra in complaint against Shabeel which can appeal across all cultural divides.

Like a suckling lioness when she has lost her cubs
Or like a mountain oryx with an arrow in his body,
Lamenting and calling, yesterday at dead of night.
Again and again I stumbled down the steep banks—but sought you all in vain.
You know what seared me—then judge it fairly, for you have wronged me!
His prosperity, and the sour milk he used to drink, all gone
And who sits in an empty corral, his children hungry
And his camel-calves orphaned—thus am I ill with bitter grief.
You know what seared me-then judge it fairly,
for you have wronged me’ (pp. 111, 113).

It is right that the play should appear under its author’s name-and typical of Andrzejewski’s scholarly integrity and personal modesty that, in contrast to some earlier editors of oral literature, he should have ensured this. But one must also note the immense amount of work by the editor and translator that lies behind the volume: the recording and transcribing of the text (no light matter from a tape-recorded version of a live performance), the addition of stage-directions, the meticulous appendix of conjectural readings and eniendations, and the detailed bibliographical references, not to speak of the illuminating introduction.

Without the intensive but unobtrusive work put into this edition by Andrzejewski it is most doubtful whether English readers would have had the opportunity of appreciating this lively play, specialists of adding yet another volume to the growing collection of Somali studies, or those with wider interests in oral literature, in the implications of literacy, or in the dynamics of ‘development’ of gaining some acquaintance with a fascinating and first-hand instance of the kinds of processes it is often easier to generalize about than—as here-to pin down to precise illustration.

By Ruth Finnegan

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 39, No. 1. (1976), pp. 222-223.

(School of Oriental and African Studies.) xi, 23Opp.
London , etc.: Oxford UniVersity Press, 1974. £4.50.