[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”29470″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]The Amazigh (known historically as Berber) people have been around for a long time. Don’t believe me? Check out this dude on my left from the tomb of Seti I. Or look up the 7th century war queen Dihya. But it’s a more recent cultural development that we’re here to talk about today.
That’s right, in the relatively recent 19th century, the poet Si Mohand ou-Mhand n At Hmadouch became known internationally. Because, well, racism, he is often referred to by French scholars as “the Kabyle Verlaine” because people can’t just have nice things or do well on their own without being compared to other people. If you can get past the colonial attitudes of the sources, though, it’s worth doing some research. I mean. Itinerant poets who fight epic poetry duels don’t just come along every day.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Before we dig into the form itself, I want to get a few linguistic niceties out of the way.
First, and I know this is going to come as a surprise to those of you who think I know everything, I don’t speak Tamazight. Or even Tuareg Berber. Probably you don’t either. But I have a very deep seated and sneaking suspicion that the folks responsible for codifying the naming of poetry forms just grabbed the word for “poem” here. So if you do speak the language, and there’s a specific and more appropriate word for the form than what’s commonly used in America, hit me up so I can fix this post.
Second, the plural of asefru is isefra. So “I wrote an asefru, but when I linked it up to the grid there were already five isefra on there!” Now you know.
OK. That’s pretty much it, so let’s delve into the structure of the asefru itself, which is actually a whole lot simpler than the political and racial backdrop against which Si Mohand wrote his isefra.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Structure
Three stanzas, three lines, two rhymes. That’s it. If you want to get fancy you can go for the full formal definition, which is three strophes of three stanzas, three lines, two rhymes. (Rowan, what’s a strophe? It’s a group of stanzas, kiddo. Like a poem-within-a-poem. I’ll show you again at the end of the post, ok?)
Three stanzas
If you’re reading this, you probably already know that there’s not really a functional difference between “stanza” and “verse” although to avoid confusion I usually use “stanza” when I’m talking about a group of lines in a poem, because “verse” is also a word for a particular set of non-repeating lines in a song as well as being a word for categories of poetry (“free verse” “blank verse” &c.). Isefra have three stanzas. Each stanza has…
Three lines
The lines of an asefru don’t have to “scan” or have a particular pattern of stress on the syllables. That doesn’t get you off the hook for counting syllables, though – the lines of each stanza follow a “7-5-7” syllable pattern. Don’t be fooled: It’s not a haiku. It’s not 5-7-5. It’s 7-5-7.
Even though you don’t have to make your asefru scan, you should give some thought to how it sounds out loud. Isefra are often sung or chanted, so to really get the feel of your poem right you should write it with performance in mind.
Another thing that’s going to help tie all those lines together is the…
Two rhymes
I probably don’t need to explain what a rhyme is, but you might not be immediately familiar with poetic rhyming notation so here’s a quick refresher.
When you look at rhymes, there’s a particular sound you rhyme with. Like frog and log and dog all rhyme because they have an “og” sound at the end, and through and blue rhyme because they have an “oo” sound. If you’re trying to see whether your poem rhymes, you’ll assign a capital letter to the sound that ends each line, in the order you come across it. When you come across that sound the next time, use the same letter you assigned it the first time.
Make sense? No? OK. Let’s try two poems.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
the wasteland
As you read this excerpt from TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland” try to assign the line-ending sounds a letter. Then we’ll look at how you did.
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An Ex-Judge at the Bar
Let’s check out the rhyme scheme in the first three stanzas of Melvin B. Tolson’s “An Ex-Judge at the Bar.” You already know how the annotations work, so I’ll just add the letters after each line.
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Back to the asefru, though…
Now that we know how to describe rhyme schemes, isefra have the scheme AAB AAB AAB.
That means the first two lines of each stanza rhyme with each other and with the first two lines of every other stanza. The third line of each stanza rhymes with the third line of every other stanza but not with any other lines in its own stanza.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
TL;DR
I know that sounded like a lot, so let me sum up:
Three stanzas. Each stanza has three lines with 7-5-7 syllables and an AAB rhyme pattern.
Even though you probably can’t read the language, you can see the patterns in this work by Si Mohand:
- Ggulleɣ seg Tizi-wuzzu
- armi d Akfadu
- ur ḥkimen dg’ akken llan
- A neṛṛez wal’ a neknu
- axiṛ daεwessu
- anda ttqewwiden ccifan
- Lɣwerba tura deg uqerru
- welleh ard a nenfu
- wala leεquba ɣer yilfan
Look for the line counts, the syllable counts, and the rhymes. See them? Great. You’re on your way to writing your own asefru![/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
wait hold up what was that strophe thing you were talking about way back there
I bet you thought I’d forgotten. OK. Although three verses, three lines, 7-5-7 and AAB is a complete poem, you can also treat it as a building block. When you build a poem out of groups of verses like this, each group of verses is called a strophe. So to really follow the formal definition of an asefru, you would write three strophes of three verses each, for a total of nine verses.
Although each group of verses has to have that AAB rhyme scheme, the scheme doesn’t have to extend between strophes (so if you look at a full, nine-verse asefru, it might rhyme AAB AAB AAB * CCD CCD CCD * EEF EEF EEF). Of course you can use the same two rhymes for all 27 lines, but because of the structural differences between English and Tamazight, it’s probably going to work better to use different rhymes for different strophes. That technique also helps create a visual and emotional break between the strophes, showing your reader where to move on.
That’s it – I hope you enjoy trying out an asefru this month, and good luck![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
