When Melodies Gather: Oral Art of the Mahra


Even though dāndān poems are presented in this archive as belonging to a genre marked category (and thus implying conceptual specificity), the term can be used to describe different types of poem performed in a variety of different settings. When used in the genre marked sense, dāndān poems refer to three types of poetic act: 1) couplets of hemistich verse composed individually or exchanged with another poet, 2) tribal-historical poems composed of hemistich lines, and 3) multiline, lyric/sentimental poems composed of hemistich lines. In the first case, dāndān couplets are the hemistich counterpart to tristich reǧzīt couplets. In the second case, dāndān tribal-historical poems are the hemistich counterpart to tristich ʾōdī we-krēm krēm poems. In the third case, multiline, sentimental dāndān poems are recognizable as such only when sung according to the characteristic dāndān melody, which is typically accompanied by dāndān metric filler. Due to the broad range of potential topics and formats of dāndān poems, some of my consultants defined dāndān not as a poetic type with specific formal and performative characteristics but as a melody that a number of different poetic types might share. Others, however, specifically identified specific poetic formats and performance occasions as intrinsic to dāndān poems.

Generally, my consultants felt that dāndān poems were less formal than tristich reǧzīt and ʾōdī we-krēm krēm poems. Unlike reǧzīt, for instance, dāndān couplets may address sentimental and jocular topics when performed at a festive event. In the words of Mahri poets ʿAlī Nāṣir Bālḥāf and Ḥājj Dākōn, collectively chanted dāndān couplets are performed later in the evening after the “serious business” of the collective reǧzīt is finished (personal communication, al-Ghaydha, 2004). However, dāndān poems were for the most part viewed as the hemistich counterparts to tristich reǧzīt and ʾōdī we-krēm krēm poems.

In this way, the term dāndān demonstrates both the range of the Mahri metapoetic lexicon as well as its lack of concern for strict generic boundaries. Indeed, it was the lack of specificity of the term dāndān that initially lead me to focus on genre unmarked poetry in al-Mahra, and thence to the conclusion that formal parameters—rather than genres—were the most effective way to describe the coherence of the Mahri poetic system. 

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