Nazhun al-Garnatiya bint al-Qulai’iya

Nazhun al-Garnatiya bint al-Qulai’iya (eleventh-century) was a Granadan courtesan and poet, noted for her outrageous verse, her learning, and her low-status origins (possibly as a slave). Although little of her work survives, she is, among medieval Andalusian women poets, second only to her contemporary Hafsa Bint al-Hajj al-Rukuniyya in the quantity of her work preserved; she usually appears getting the better of male poets and aristocrats around her with her witty invective. In Marla Segol's words, "as a rule, Nazhun represents her body in ways that disrupt conventional strategies for control of women’s speech and sexuality, and protests the merchandising of women’s bodies."^[1]

In the translation of A. J. Arberry, one of her various ripostes runs:^[2]

The poet al-Kutandi challenged the blind al-Makhzumi to complete the following verses:

If you had eyes to view

The man who speaks with you—

The blind man failed to discover a suitable continuation, but Nazhun, who happened to be present, improvized after this fashion:

However many there may be

All dumbly you’d behold

His anklets’ shining gold.

The rising moon, it seems,

In his bright buttons gleams,

And in his gown, I trow,

There sways a slender bough.

Sources

• Arie Schippers, 'The Role of Women in Medieval Andalusian Arabic Story-Telling', in Verse and the Fair Sex: Studies in Arabic Poetry and in the Representation of Women in Arabic Literature. A Collection of Papers Presented at the Fifteenth Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et des Islamisants (Utrecht/Driebergen, September 13–19, 1990), ed. by Frederick de Jong (Utrecht: Publications of the M. Th. Houstma Stichting, 1993), pp. 139–51 http://dare.uva.nl/document/184872.
• Marlé Hammon, 'Hafsa Bint al-Hajj al Rukuniyya', in Medieval Islamic Civilisation: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Josef W. Meri, 2 vols (New York: Routledge, 2006), I 308.
• Marla Segol, 'Representing the Body in Poems by Medieval Muslim Women', Medieval Feminist Forum, 45 (2009), 147-69: http://ir.uiowa.edu/mff/vol45/iss1/12.

References