Tidcan: Multiple Alliteration of Somali Songs – New Insights

This paper formulates some changes in Somali poetry composition through the transition of the Somali literature from oral to a written culture since the introduction of a writing system for the Somali language in 1972. These changes are first observed through the comparison of themes and styles of poetry used by the classic nomadic and pastoralist poets (1800-1970ies) versus the themes and styles used by the educated university graduate poets in the cities (post-1972). A second comparison is done between the first generation of educated poets (1970ies - 1990) and the current generation of young poets in the era of social media, and how these changes are observed in the literature both in terms of imaginative themes on social issues, and the introduction of new styles and structures of poetry by the contemporary poets. To understand better the comparison, the peculiarities of Somali poetry, including the alliteration and meter system, are briefly explained. In the second part, the paper explores new insights and developments in Somali lyrics writing where contemporary lyricists are experimenting with new styles of poetry writing, including the introduction of multiple alliterations and the expansion of the Somali lyrics to a rhymed style. A corpus of 21 selected songs is identified within the Somali Corpus (see www.somalicorpus.com) and analyzed focusing on the introduction of the multiple alliterations and the use of the poem's rhyme style. The songwriters have been interviewed on their views of these new developments and to fact-check with them the contents of the peoms (order of the verses in the lysics and their meaning), and some of the lyrics have been translated into English to reflect on the themes they deal with. The term Tidcan as a poem with more than one alliterative sound for the entire poem is coined here by using an existing Somali word with another meaning. In fact, the word “tidcan” means literally braiding: like tima tidcan=braided hair. The paper finally questions the impacts of these developments on music composition for the Somali song.


Introduction
Somali creative and literary production until recently remained an entirely oral art. The composition, preservation, sharing and transmission of Somali poetry have been exclusively done orally. For the Somali language, only from 1972 there is an official system of writing established with a presidential decree after a long period of discussion and rivalry between indigenous and borrowed alphabet proposals to write the Somali [1]. At the same period (mid nineteen seventies), there was also the first generation of poets who had got university level education and started to study Somali literature academically. The Lafoole College of Education (formerly National Teachers Education Centre -NTEC) was a pioneering school where scholars and future educationalists used literature and performing art (including theatre) for forming students and informing the public [2]. Historically traditional poetry, specially the Gabay meter, belonged exclusively to nomadic wise men, respected and looked up in the society. This time young, educated elites jumped into the field of traditional Gabay, and transformed it in a very powerful medium to shape the society's vision 1 . Even those formally educated literary giants continued to prefer to record their voice on tapes and share their literary production with the audience orally instead of by writing.
Somali verse is structured text divided into lines that has well-defined constituent structure in each line through the entire poem. Along with its metrical scansion, a Somali poem is identified by its alliteration, which consists of having through the whole poem a word with the initial same sound in every line (or every half-line according to the meter or scansion pattern) 2 . Xarafraac (alliteration which literally means 'following the letter') in Somali poetry is an "established structural feature, which has resisted modern changes" [3]. One of the most academically important contributions to the scansion system of Somali poetry during last five decades is probably defining clearly how scansion works in Somali poetry: the ground-breaking works by Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac "Gaarriye" [4], and Cabdillaahi Diiriye Guuleed "Carraale" ( [5], [6]) pointed out that vowel quantity played a major role in Somali scansion and that its basic unit was not the syllable but the mora. Other important works followed since then on Somali scansion (see for instance [7], [8], and [9]), some of them linking meter and musical composition [10]. While scansion got the attention of many scholarly works, alliteration has not been much on focus in terms of research and it looked like a static area, despite early comments on alliteration in Somali poetry dates back early 1900 (see [11]). In this paper we coin the word "tidcan" as a poem (mainly song) with multiple alliteratation or with rhymed ending or structural parallelism respected for the entire poem. The first part of this paper, however, briefly formulates the typical oral peculiarities of the Somali poetry affected by the writing culture since early 1970ies when Somali became a written language, and how these oral peculiarities changed. We will also mention positive contributions of the written language for the Somali poetry. The core of the paper mainly examines how contemporary poets are exploring to expand the concept of alliteration, by introducing multiple alliterations in Somali poetry, and even introducing rhyme at the end of lines, a system similar to classic Arabic poetry, as well as Amharic and Oromo poetry [12]. Unlike the Somali poetry, in Somali proverbs, the words rhyme (see below examples), and introducing rhymed words in each line throughout the entire poem is new phenomenon to the Somali poetry. The paper finally questions if this new expansion and adding rhyme have effects on the musical composition of Somali songs, and two contempory music composed are interviewed on the impact of these development on the music composition.

Effects of Somali as Written Language to Poetry Reading
In the transition from oral to written culture, Somali poets adopted a hybrid system where the poets write down their poems on paper, read them from the notes when reciting in public, but still relay on the verbal expression to communicate in a society where the audience still prefer to "listen" the poetry instead of "reading" from the paper. Somalis used to record their history, wisdom and knowledge through oral literature and in particular poetry was the most important medium of archival. Having now written form and being recorded on the paper, the poetry still plays important role for wisdom and history archiving. However, writing had both positive and negative impact on the poetry in the Somali context.

What We Have Lost
"Gole ka fuul", the art of improvisation was a major feature of Somali poetry. This was a typical characteristic of the Somali poet, where a poem is composed in response to a particular situation, emergency or otherwise, and has a particular ostensible aim in view. Artists used to recite a very long poem on the spot on the current issues (making peace between the fighting clans, or inciting people to take arms in a battle ground, or praising the spouse in a wedding ceremony, etc.) Furthermore, both poets and audience had an incredible memorizing capacity for the verse, as you would normally see a poet reading even long poems by heart and audience 'recording' on the spot by heart and without writing. Finally, poetry was 'chanted' in a specific musically structured melodic form for each type of poetry (Gabey, Geeraar, Buraanbur, Saar, etc.) The introduction of written language, and the use of the new technology for recording, influenced all these aspects and peculiarities of the Somali poetry. Poets nowadays read poems from their prepared notes instead of reciting by heart but people [audience] still prefer to listen a poet orally than reading from books. It is also rare to see poem chanted with the appropriate melody and all poets prefer to perform the spoken word by reading like a prose. The gole ka fuul (improvisation) poetry composition became so rare that most of the contemporary poets write down their creative works and come prepared on the stage by reading from paper.

What We Have Gained
From the introduction of scanning metrical system of Somali poetry, many people had the courage to approach "learning poetry and becoming" poets. In the past, poetry was considered as a gift to the poet by birth, but nowadays people learn to write the verse by respecting the metrical system and alliteration. Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac "Gaarriye" writes in his ground-breaking article on Somali poetry metric system "Maqal! Ma jeclaan lahayd inaad gabaydo? Mase ogtahay inaan abwaan-nimada loo dhalan uun ee la samayn karo?" (Would you like becoming a poet? And do you know you can learn poetry?" [4]. In fact, many contemporary poets did learn through formal education on how a Somali poem is structured rather than being poets by birth, and therefore composed their poetry. With writing, poems became more philosophical and thoughtful poetry because the poet takes enough time to write, reread, reflect, edit and share with small group of people of critics, and still more editing to follow, before finally coming to the audience and recite a new poem. This is because both for the fact now the poems are written on paper (introducing the writing system) but also that the poets became more educated formally and equipped with critical thinking coming from the formal education. In the past, relying on passing memory from one generation to another, it was easy to change or revise some of the lines of poem, and was common to find conflicting verses or missing lines of a certain poem. Through publishing collections of poetry for single poets, nowadays, it is more accurate to refer to the originality of the literary works and finding different conflicting versions of the same poem is reduced to quite impossible. The rapid spread of literacy through schools assured new poetry-writers of expanding their circle of readers.
Finally writing the poetry on paper also allowed some poets to write down long poems, long form, sometimes up to 800 lines while in the past, because people should memorize and recite by heart, the average of the poems 20-30 lines maximum. Andrzejewski in [13] identifies four major eras for Somali literature production and documentation: the 1) "Golden Era", the pre-colonial era when Somali literature had no contact with outside world; 2) the era of "Fire and Embers" (1888-1944) when the literature and the language were dominated by the war and liberation movements; 3) the "Era of the Lute" (1944 -1969) which introduces balwo, the modern song of Somalis; and 4) the "New Era" (1969 -1991), the explosion of writing literature in Somali, the introduction of the Somali orthography, the Somalisation of curricula, the introduction of Somali text books. Jama Musse in [14] expands the classification by adding to it the "Diaspora Era" (1991 -present). The following graph compares between the number of lines, number of words, number of unique words, in average, of different poets in different and how these figures changed in eras, mainly before and after the Somali became a written language 3 . The horizontal axes represent the different eras, and to allow readers a visual comparing of the changes, in the vertical axes there is a multiplier factor for different scale in each block of data. It is interesting to observe that the number of lines grows in one poem as the written literature becomes more habit, so as to the average number of words used in one poem, but the astonishing confirmation is that older generation of poets avoided to use repetition of the same words in their poems. In fact the ratio (unique words / total words) is quite inversely proportional with eras.

Arabic and Other Rhymed Poetry Influences to the Somali Poetry
Andrzejewski writes in 1968 "In its formal characteristics Somali poetry shows hardly any signs of Arabic influence. Rhyme in Somali poems is not essential, while alliteration is a universal requirement in all genres, and is even usually applied to proverbs" [15]. Oromo and Amharic poetry, both close regional neighbourhood to the Somali poetry, have strongly rhymed structure, but the traditional Somali poetry, merely defined by alliteration and metric scansion, resisted until recently any such influence from neighbouring poetry. It has been observed that alliteration and rhyme coexisted in Somali proverbs [15], but there has no been evidence for such coexistence in Somali poetry. In this paper we observe a new phenomenon in which contemporary lyricists are introducing rhyme at the end of lines in Somali poetry, a feature that music composers are praising as it creates musicality in the songs [see chapter 4 for list of examples].

Alliteration in Somali Poetry
Alliteration is a constantly respected stylistic feature in each line of poem, which requires at least one word beginning with the alliteration sound in each line for shortlines metric types (Baarcadde, Jiifto, etc), and in each halfline for each long-lines metric types (ie. Gabay). In Somali poetry, consonants alliterate with only identical consonants while all vowels alliterate together, because a word that seems to begin with a vowel, actually begins with a glottal stop, i.e., alif, and the same alliterative sound is used throughout the entire poem. The following poem 4 by Mohamed Ibraahim Warsame "Hadraawi" is in the Baarcadde meter (1-2-1-1/1-1-2) and is alliterated on the sound B, which means each line has a word starting with b [16]. Alliteration is a basic skill required in Somali poetry and it makes poetry composition more difficult because poets need quite a large number of words with the same sound and must have rich lexical proficiency in the language. Orwin notes that the use of "the same alliterative word in different verses within a poem happens occasionally, but using a word more than a couple of times, and certainly doing it more than a couple of times with different words, would indicate the poets "lack of skill and would be recognized as such by the listener" [17]. On the other hand, in oral societies, "language uses alliteration as a tool to keep its words alive and in circulation" [8]. In the past, a poet who repeats the same word in several verses of the poem was regarded as " bayd gaab" (literary " short in verse" ) which means "less good" than other poets [see above figure 1] unless this is not deliberately built style. Nowadays, when a poet composes a long poem, with over 800 lines, it is difficult for the audience to capture even if the words are repeated. For further analysis of alliterations in Somali poetry, see [17].

Definition
We define Tidcan as a poem with more than one alliterative sound for the entire poem. We could not identify so far, any poem in the past with these characteristics. It can happen that in one or two lines, one displays multiplealliteration, and is thus different from the other lines of the poem. A well-known case is the gabay line in one of Queen Arraweelo's tales: "Maantana far baan maydhayaa, ha ii fadhiyo geelu" (also today, I am washing one of my fingers, the camels should wait [to travel]) where the one lines is alliterated on both M and F sounds. Other cases of one single line composition like proverbs register, with multiple alliterations, can be found in the literature. For example, [18] 5 : Nin aanad saacad ku baran sannad kuma baratid.
(The man whom you failed to know within an hour you will not know within a year) Ninkii 'soo joog' laga waayo 'soo jiifso' ayaa laga helaa.
(A coward [lit.: a man whose cowardice is betrayed by his eyes] is beaten with his own stick) An important feature of alliteration is that "the alliterating words must be ones with lexical substance (nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs)" [17]. New generation of poets are nowadays testing and making alliteration more difficult by introducing multiple alliterative sounds in one poem, which means that in the same line (or half-line) there should be two words with different sounds but these two should be throughout the whole poem. We denominate this type of maanso a Tidcan (literally meaning braiding: like tima tidcan=braided hair).

Examples of Multiple Alliteration
The examples presented here will be mostly in Baarcadde and Jiifto meters, as we will be focusing on songs with musical arrangements -the average lines consisting of 11 to 16 syllables. I did not so far come across other meters (Gabay, Geeraar, Buraanbur, etc.) with multiple alliterations in all its lines systematically.

Rhymed Somali Poetry
Some contemporary poets are making things yet more complicated by adding rhymes to the end of the line, which makes the end of each line sounding musically equal throughout the whole poem by imitating classic Arabic poetry or Amharic and Oromo poetry. Already, in the past Abdisalaan Xaaji Aadan experimented similar new composition of poetry without alliteration but based on the rhyme at the end of each line This experiment did not have the desired result, as the song was not regarded as a poem because it lacked both metric scansion and alliteration. One of the few cases that worked with certain level of success, with music, is Cabdi Aadan Xayd "Qays" written and sung lyrics Hoobeeyooy. It has no regular meter, nor it has alliteration throughout the entire poem, but like some Buraanbur meter, each line (or group of lines) seems to have semi-regular alliteration. The music is composed by Cabdi Qays himself and he also voiced (See [19] La jiifiyaana bannaan, la joojiyaana bannaan. (It is level at the rod standing upright and it is level at the rod lying flat.)

Multiple Alliteration with Arabic Poetry Style Falling-Down Melody
Nowadays, new contemporary poets are combining alliteration (so it qualifies for Somali poetry) but also adding rhyme (i.e., each line ends with 'a' making the final rhyme equal all throughout the poem) and most importantly introducing the double alliteration.
Expanded The following song by Cabdiraxmaan Cismaan Cumar "Xaaji", already double alliterated on Dh and X, applies parallelism in syntax where the focus marker (baad/aad) is repeatedly taking the attention of listener to different yet positive description of the subject and with the tahay is the same place in throughout the entire poem [20].

Dhal xalaal ah baad tahay
You are Halaal daughter Dhar xariir ah baad tahay Shining like silk cloth Dhul xareed leh baad tahay You are like raining water Dhir xayaab leh baad tahay Ever green land

The Impact of Multiple Alliteration on Music Composition
Lyrics with musical accompaniment, popularly known as heello (i.e. nowadays hees), emerged out from mid 1940ies and late colonial period (towards 1960) up to early years of independence. The immediately subsequent popularity of theatre production, which became more for political discourse and social engagement in 1970ies, produced impressive quantity of love songs. To produce such creative work, it was needed the strict collaboration of a lyricist (usually a poet who composes the poem), a music composer who specifically composes a unique musical composition (laxan) for that lyrics, a musician (usually more than one person if not an entire band) to play the music in different instruments together, and finally a vocalist, a singer to voice the final artwork production. There is no school or written tradition for Somali musical composition, but in the past, the music composer, usually self-thought and generally neither with knowledge of playing any instrument nor with how to read/write musical sheet notes, muttors in front of an Oud player, who follows with playing the instrument until the entire song is musicalized. Nowadays things changed as for the new music composers, there is a piano keyboard with pre-recorded rhythms and voices. This on one side facilitated the number of musical compositions created, but at the same time lowered hugely the quality of the music composed.
Both Cabdiraxmaan Xadanteeye [22] and Sir Maxamuud Cumar Yare [23], two music composers, believe that adding the rhyme at the end of each line already creates musicality for the Somali songs, therefore making it easier to achieve an adequate musical arrangement for a new song. Yet both of them agree that multiple alliteration with different sounds complicate it.

Analysis -List of New Songs with Multiple Alliteration and End Rhyme
Somali Corpus (www.somalicorpus.com) is a repository of structured data consisting of over 7 million tagged words in a grammattically checked text, with tools for searching and analysis [24]. It is an annotated and balanced Somali language corpus produced in two phases, firstly using a combination of an automatic tagging system specifically developed according to the Somali grammatical rules, and subsequent manual corrections of the collected data, and it covers both prose and poetry literature of published Somali works. For the purpose of this paper, we identified 21 songs written by 7 different contemporary poets, and in each song, we observed either the multiple alliterations or rhymed style properties, or in some cases the song has both properties, and we created a sub-corpus of 'tidcan' songs within the system. The author is grateful for the translation support provided by Hamdi Ali Mahamud, Hamda Abdiwahab Saeed, Mohamed Abdirahman Yusuf, Mustafa Ahmad, and Nasra Dahir Mahamed.    [20]. Translated by Nasra Dahir Mahamed and Jama Musse Jama.

H < >san
Won't trade for anything -Welcome.

Hawraatiyo maayad midhaa hodankooda
Xumaan iyo godob xabaala, Haddaan xiiqoon xabeebtay, X X I have been waiting for you Xuskaaga haddaan xadreeyay, X X And struggle to find you Xaqbaan xiddigyeey u yeeshay! X X and you earn it

Conclusion
Classical Somali poetry had mainly social themes pertinent to pastoral-nomadic life, including conflict, warfare, interclan politics, and later focused on anti-colonial patriotic sentiment and pan-Africanism in the late 1950ies. Labour songs, love metaphors, and lyrics on the beauty of nature were used as a political allegory against dictatorship and demand for social reform in 1970-80ies. See Woolner [28] for more information about Somali love songs and their engagement with social life. In Jama Musse [29] we discussed differences and similarities between the customs and habits of young and old generations poets, and between the genders, as well as tackling more philosophical themes such as the incessant migration from the East African countries to Europe and the US and the calamities met in the course of these often-reckless voyages. In this article, we consolidated the idea that urbanization and advancement of knowledge in science and philosophy are taking drastic changes to the place and social role of poetry in Somali society, and that new social themes are being dealt with orality. The use of poetry still maintains the fascinating role of medium of communication, but with the new generation of formally educated lyricists, the experimentation of new styles of poetry as well as new imaginative themes are becoming a new territory of art production. The Arabic influence of Somali poetry has been questioned by Andrzejewski in [30] and discussed by Morin in [32] but also recently by Orwin in [31]. In [31] in particular, the author shows how a specific Somali metrical pattern "can be seen as a Somalized analogue of the Arabic kāmil metre in its majzūʾ or dimetric form." In this article, we instead showed how contemporary poets are using the rhymed style of Arabic poetry in Somali lyrics. We finally introduced with examples the concept of multiple alliterations in Somali poetry, as a new style of transforming literature, and observed how this is also making difference in the musical composition of the Somali song. The 21 lyrics selected from the Somali Corpus repository as examples constitute a good representative of this new experimentation with a new style of poetry by contemporary songwriters and indicate the need for further research on the impact this has on the musicality of poetry reading and on musical composition for Somali songs.