Hassani Poetry

Hassani poetry is considered to be an integral part of popular poetry. Its differentia specifica lies in the fact that it is fraught with poetic meters that are measured by vowel articulation, ones which differ from each other in the way their syntactical constituents are made: ‘nasb’ (putting a noun in the accusative; or a verb in the subjunctive; ‘ghafd’ (putting a word in the genitive, for example); ‘raf’a’ (the pronunciation of a final word with a u) and ‘sukun’ (the vowellessness of a medial consonant). Some of these poetic meters, be it noted, are obsolete now.

The great professor and poet Badi Ould Mohammed Salem defined Hassani poetry thus: “it is a select type of talk taken from the common tongue and the local idiom. It is governed by certain rules that are in fact akin to the five rules of the Shari’ a (Islamic law); namely, the mandatory, the recommended, the permissible, the reprehensible and the forbidden.On the other hand, it is a form of prose that serves as the subject matter for the poet, who shapes up and weaves, so to say, and then thins it out in some corner. In some other corner, s/he would split it, and defame it so much so that s/he would cull from it a full-blown body that admits of no addition or diminution, one which takes up its position among all other creatures, having as it does beauty as well as ugliness and being as it is both long and short.

Like any other type of poetry, be it in dialectal or standard Arabic, Hassani poetry has its specific importance. And despite the fact that its writers take pride in its ability to go beyond the confines of standard poetry, vernacular Hassani poetry is fraught with terms in common use in standard Arabic, nay, with thoroughly meaningful sentences, in addition to lexical borrowings from other foreign languages, not to mention the fact that it draws on the Islamic religion, Quranic suras, prophetic sayings as well as on Arabic poetry that spans all ages.
Several people excelled in the writing of Hassani poetry. There is in fact a specific category of people who, in addition to the poets themselves, are adept at reciting this kind of poetry. These consist mainly of a group of singers who are in Hassani parlance called ‘Ikaoun,’ who, along with a number of eminent poets, engage in the criticism of poetry in order to sift good from mediocre Hassani poetry. One could in fact find some poets who learn by heart some poetry other than their own.

One of the difficulties that Hassani poetry suffers from is that it is scarcely recorded, which tosses it into confusion, distortion and loss. Such a situation, be it noted, obtains up to the present.