MARLE
HAMMOND
He Desires Her? Situating Nazhun's Muwashshaha in an Androgynous Aesthetic of Courtly Love
by Marle Hammond [Oxford]
SUMMARY:
The muwashshaha by the twelfth-century Granadan poet Nazhun is, to
my knowledge, the only extant Andalusian muwashshaha to be attributed to a woman. Its very existence
challenges our notions about the form in that most discussions of woman's voice
in this particular brand of strophic love song are limited to the kharja or
'final refrain' where male poets frequently cite the words of a female speaker.
Here, woman's voice is the authorial voice and cannot be relegated to the
kharja. Those of us who are interested in the dynamics of écriture
feminine might latch on to the
composition's unique status and be tempted to read it as a kind of feminist
subversion of a masculine paradigm. Yet there are very few clues in the text
itself as to the sex of the poet. Moreover, the aesthetic of the muwashshah, especially in its more refined and less bawdy
manifestations, is replete with sexual ambiguity, and the gender roles
associated with the personas of the poet and the beloved are rarely clearly
delineated. Nazhun's poem therefore poses a dilemma: how may we – and why
should we – read it as a woman's text?