Somali poetic metre (miisaan): how gabay, geeraar and jiifto are measured

Rules everyone hears and few could state

Somalis judge a line to be poetry when its parts alliterate and balance one another with a regular rhythm. The scholar Said S. Samatar wrote that even the best poets and reciters "are unable to clearly express the complex rules of Somali verse" (Rirache, Somali poetic genres, quoting Samatar in Somalia in Word and Image, 1986). In 1854 the explorer Richard Burton wrote that the country teemed with poets and that every man had an ear for a good poem; in 1964 B. W. Andrzejewski and I. M. Lewis praised Somali poets for their results in "the very difficult medium of Somali prosody" (Rirache, citing Andrzejewski and Lewis 1964, pp. 45 to 46).

The two building blocks

The metre counts syllables by their vowels. A long vowel (as in aa) counts as two units and a short one as one. The SOAS scholar Martin Orwin describes the patterned units as long-vowel syllables, short-vowel syllables, and short-vowel syllables that end in a consonant (Orwin 2018, Metre and extrametricality in the geeraar). Alongside the metre, every line must alliterate on one chosen sound through the whole poem; see Somali poetry.

Who decoded it

According to the Djibouti scholar Maxamed Cabdillaahi Riiraash (Rirache), the metres were first identified, "shortly after the Somali language was put into a script", by Cabdillaahi Diiriye Guuleed ("Carraale") and Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ("Gaarriye"), on the basis of the number and order of vowels (Rirache). Orwin dates Gaarriye's first published account of the geeraar metre to 1976, and an article on the jiifto to the same year (Orwin 2018). Carraale's latest statement of his system appeared in 2016.

Other scholars who have published on the metres include Cabdalla Cumar Mansuur (1977), the American folklorist John William Johnson (1979 and 1996), Francesco Antinucci with Axmed Faarax Cali "Idaajaa", Giorgio Banti and Francesco Giannattasio (1996), who also studied the chanted performance, and Faarax Axmed Cali "Gamuute" (Orwin 2018). Orwin and Riiraash published a joint study in 1997 using what Orwin calls the "Djibouti approach". The writer Cabdiraxmaan C. Faarax "Barwaaqo" built software that checks a line's metre (Orwin 2018).

The main metres

Riiraash groups the metres by how many vowel units a line holds and how they are split into two balancing halves (Rirache):

• Jiifto (also called jiib): nine units split 4 and 5. Most songs that go with folk dances use it.
• Geeraar: usually ten units split 5 and 5, with nine or eleven allowed. It was traditionally recited on horseback.
• Gabay: the long serious line, made of two half-lines. Wikipedia's summary gives 14 to 16 syllables a line (Somali literature, Wikipedia).
• Buraambur: the main genre composed by women; see Somali women's poetry.

Zainab Mohamed Jama lists gabay, geeraar, jiifto and buraambur as the four main styles of classical poetry (Jama 1994, Oral Tradition 9/1, p. 186).

Short metres and new ones

Riiraash and his colleagues Cabdi Migane and Cumar Macallin found far more metres than expected, many from work songs and children's songs, which he sees as the base of the longer forms. A line of a short metre can be doubled, or two metres joined, to make a new one; the dance metre hirwo (also wiglo or dhaanto) is two shubaal lines joined (Rirache). See Somali work songs and children's verse.

Read more

• Somali poetry
• Geeraar
• Hadraawi