بطاقة شكوى

Notes

1. Ṭīn, clay, is the stuff of which Adam, and so all humankind, was made (Qur'an 38:71 and elsewhere). In the first verse the Sayyid is the soul that lifts the poet above his earthly, bodily nature. The word returns twice more as a thread through the poem: the clans were one 'in the clay', since all descend from the same father, and human beings, made of clay, cannot rise above it except through God's religion. Each time, clay stands for common origin and for mere physical being, set against the spirit that ennobles. ↩
2. Sayf, 'sword', and ṭayf, 'phantom, vision', differ by one letter and rhyme (jinās): the Sayyid is a sword when injustice strikes, and the phantom that visits bringing victory when all seems lost. Ṭayf is the night phantom of classical poetry, the image of an absent loved one that comes to the sleeper. The verb ḥāqa ('closed in, encompassed') is the Qur'anic word for an evil that surrounds and overwhelms. Rayāḥīn, sweet basil and other fragrant herbs, stands for all that is gentle and lovely in the land and its people, now trampled. ↩
3. Ummah, 'a nation', echoes the Qur'an's praise of Abraham: 'Abraham was a nation' (16:120), meaning that one man held within him the virtues of a whole people. Habāʾ, fine dust, recalls the Qur'anic image of worthless deeds turned into 'scattered dust' (25:23). The verse sets the one man who weighs as much as a nation against the multitudes who weigh nothing. ↩
4. Richard Corfield commanded the Somaliland Camel Constabulary and was killed by the Sayyid's Dervish forces at the Battle of Dul Madoba in August 1913. The Sayyid's poem on his death is among the most celebrated in Somali. 'Kofil has come back' is figurative: the poet sees the old colonial oppression returning to the land, this time welcomed by one of the country's own, the 'base wretch' of whom the following verses speak. The poem names no one; it was written in Mogadishu in 1988, in the last years of military rule. Since the Sayyid killed the first Kofil, he is the one the poet calls upon against the second. ↩
5. Hulagu, the Mongol commander who sacked Baghdad in 1258 and ended the Abbasid caliphate, and Nero, the Roman emperor remembered for burning Rome and persecuting its people, are both bywords in Arabic for bloodthirsty, destructive tyranny. ↩
6. Muhājīn is the plural of hajīn, in the old Arab reckoning a man born of a free father and a slave mother, and so of mixed or inferior descent; the word came to mean low-born, ignoble, and is also used of mongrel animals. The verse contrasts nasab, lineage, with fiʿl, deeds: by blood he is ours, by conduct he is base. ↩
7. Naṣṣābū al-nayāshīn joins two senses. Naṣṣāb is the ordinary Arabic word for a swindler or con man, while the root n-ṣ-b also means to set up or pin on, so the phrase is at once 'the medal swindlers' and 'those who pin on medals': decorated officers whose decorations are a fraud, since they fail the people when battle comes. ↩
8. Al-ghurr is the plural of agharr, a horse with a white blaze on its brow, and hence a noble, illustrious man. Ḥanẓal, colocynth, is a desert gourd proverbial in Arabic for its bitterness. Yakraʿūn means to drink by putting the mouth straight to the water, as animals do: the noble are reduced to gulping their bitter draught like beasts. ↩
9. Ghirr (callow, naive, easily fooled) and ghurr (the noble, literally 'white-blazed' horses, as in the previous verse) differ only in their vowels (jinās). The tyrant flattens both into dwarfs. Jūn usually means 'black', though it is one of the Arabic words that can mean both a thing and its opposite, black and white. Set against al-ghurr, the white-blazed, it stands for the dark, undistinguished and base: he cannot tell the noble from the common. ↩
10. Al-ṣīd is the plural of aṣyad, a man who carries his neck high out of pride and lordliness; it is a classical word for chiefs and nobles. Al-ubāt are those who refuse to accept humiliation. ↩
11. Barādhīn (singular birdhawn) are non-Arab draught horses or hacks, heavy and slow, the opposite of the noble Arab steed, and nahq is the braying of donkeys. The double insult pictures the battlefield, where true warriors should be, filled instead with inferior nags that bray like asses: the loud and unworthy drown out the truth. ↩
12. The poet makes the clan names themselves the rhyme words of the poem (Rahawīn, Ūghādīnī, Majartīnī), so that the proud tribal cries of the partisans ring out, with mocking effect, in the very cadence of his lament. The Majeerteen were historically ruled by their own sultans, notably in the Majeerteen Sultanate of the north-east, which is why the boaster calls himself 'son of kings'. ↩
13. Talwīn, 'colouring, dyeing', means here a surface paint over something unchanged beneath, and also the shifting of colours, as of a chameleon: the religion the people preach is mere outward show, changed to suit the occasion. ↩
14. Ṭuf bi-nā, 'come round among us', is from ṭāfa, yaṭūfu, 'to go round, to make the circuit' (the verb of the ṭawāf round the Kaaba). It is close in sound and sense to ṭāfa, yaṭīfu, said of the night phantom (ṭayf) that visits the sleeper in classical poetry, and so picks up the 'vision of victory' (ṭayf naṣr) of the second verse: the poet asks the Sayyid's spirit to come among his people as a visiting presence and put strength into their arms. ↩
15. Al-ʿarānīn is the plural of ʿirnīn, the upper part or bridge of the nose. In Arabic a high nose is a sign of pride and nobility, and the word is used by metonymy for chiefs and grandees. Here it points to the arrogant masters of the throne of injustice, on whose proud heads its ruins are to fall. ↩
16. Ṭawāghīt is the plural of ṭāghūt, a Qur'anic word for false gods and, by extension, for tyrants who make themselves objects of obedience in place of God. ↩