# Somali women's poetry: buraambur and the poets who broke through

> Buraambur and Somali women's poetry: the form, why women's poems did not travel, and how radio, cassettes and groups like Allah-Amin carried them.

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Last checked: 2026-11-13
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## The women's form

The folklorist Zainab Mohamed Jama, writing in the journal Oral Tradition in 1994, lists four main styles of Somali classical poetry: gabay, geeraar, jiifto and buraambur. Following Andrzejewski and Lewis, gabay, geeraar and jiifto are seen as male forms and **buraambur** as the female one ([Jama 1994, Silent Voices, Oral Tradition 9/1, p. 186](https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/9i/9_1_complete.pdf)). The University of Roma Tre's Somali archive describes buraambur as a genre composed only by Somali women ([Roma Tre archive record](https://arcadia.sba.uniroma3.it/handle/2307/4677)).

Jama found the line less fixed in practice. Women from the northwest who took part in the nationalist struggle and the armed opposition of the 1980s composed in gabay and geeraar, while buraambur by a poet named Haynwade from the central regions was recited to her by Aden Artan in 1987 ([Jama 1994, p. 186](https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/9i/9_1_complete.pdf)).

## Why women's poems did not travel

Somali poems spread through memorisers who learned a poem from the poet and recited it elsewhere. Andrzejewski described how a hundred listeners could each pass a poem to a hundred more ([Jama 1994, quoting Andrzejewski 1985, p. 37](https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/9i/9_1_complete.pdf)). Jama wrote that the memoriser was always a man, that male reciters saw reciting a woman's poem as demeaning, and that women's political poetry "tends to die with its author". She added that, after the 1972 script, collectors also wrote down mostly men's poems; women's work songs and lullabies were collected, their political verse was not.

## Radio Mogadishu

From the 1970s Radio Mogadishu broadcast women's poems. Jama names **Xaliimo Cali Kurtin** (Halimo Ali Kurtin), whose long poem on the role of women said they gave everything for the flag yet "were still left in hunger", and **Xaawo Aaje Maxamed**, whose poem praised collective farms ([Jama 1994, pp. 187 to 189](https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/9i/9_1_complete.pdf)). Under the military government, poems on the radio could not criticise the government.

## Opposition radio and cassettes

**Maryan [Xaaji Xasan](/en/people/sheikh-hassan-barsane/)** (Mariam Haji Hassan), a founding member of the SSDF in 1978, sent her first poem in 1979 to Radio Kulmis, the opposition station in Addis Ababa, under the name Araweelo Ararsame ([Jama 1994, p. 190](https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/9i/9_1_complete.pdf)). In one poem she pictures the nation as **Haybad**, a she-camel rich with milk that "fell into the hands of ruthless people". Jama recorded her in Nairobi in August 1991.

**Xabiiba Xaaji Aadan** (Habiba H. Aden) recorded gabay and geeraar poems from 1988 to 1990, during the war in the north. Her cassettes spread through the Gulf states and reached America and Australia, and men listened to them as classical poetry ([Jama 1994, pp. 193 to 194](https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/9i/9_1_complete.pdf)).

## The Allah-Amin group

**Allah-Amin** ("those who trusted Allah") was a women's group working in SNM-held areas of the north in 1988 to 1990. Its members nursed the wounded, cooked and ran schools under trees for displaced families, and kept a cultural troupe. They set new words to old work songs and religious tunes; a solo singer chanted the new lines and the chorus answered with familiar ones, with clapping ([Jama 1994, pp. 195 to 197](https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/9i/9_1_complete.pdf)).

## Read more

- [Somali poetry](/en/society/somali-poetry/)
- [Women in Somali society](/en/society/women-in-somali-society/)
- [Somali work songs and children's verse](/en/society/somali-work-songs/)

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