Bole is a Chadic language spoken in Yobe and Gombe States in
northeastern Nigeria. Like essentially all languages of the West
Branch of Chadic, of which Bole is a member, vowel length is
distinctive and syllable weight plays a crucial role in phonology and
morphology. The metrics of poetry/song in Hausa, Bole's
linguisitically relatively distant but geographically nearby cousin,
have been fairly well-studied. There are several distinct traditions
of Hausa poetry/song, all of which use quantitative metrics. There
has been virtually no study of the poetry/song of any other Chadic
language, but the assumption is that metrics in these language is
also quantitative.
In the course of doing NSF supported fieldwork since 2000, I have
collected audio and video recordings of Bole song performances,
mostly women's songs. These have been supplemented by audio
recordings made during the 1990's by my colleague, Alhaji Maina
Gimba. In these recordings, a song identified as kona, shows up
repeatedly. For an outsider, at least, analysis of this and
other Bole songs originally seemed intractable. The text is
highly allusive and non-linear; most of the performances have
been a cappella solos with little detectable text-related
rhythm. However, I had faith that the song had an underlying
regular quantitative meter, and a performance to drum
accompaniment provided a foot in the door for working this out.
Once a basic pattern was discerned, the base meter for all the
performances fell into place.
The song is organized into couplets of two four-beat lines,
with a required large syntactic boundary between the lines.
Moreover, each line is divided into hemistiches with an
obligatory caesura, generally marked by a smaller syntactic
boundary than that separating lines. This contrasts with
Hausa practice, where line-internal caesuras are never part
of the basic metrical structure.
The base meter for a line is / - v - v | - - v - /, where
veritcal stroke marks the caesura. Below is a
representative verse. Doubled vowels = long vowels. The
first line begins with an extrametrical "pick up".
Na | luula Diisa | juutuu ko bin,They say | the cries of
Disa | raised the hut roof,
v | - v - v | - - v -
Wor?o Diisa | poyyo gule.The fart of Disa | shattered a
gourd.
- v - v | - v v -
In this paper, I will argue for this basic metrical
organization and will offer an account of deviations
from this pattern, both in mismatch of syllable types
and in apparent mismatch of text setting to this basic
pattern.
An unpublished paper that gives a fuller account
and more data than I will be able to present
during the workshop, including cultural
background, can be
downloaded here.