Comparing the Incomparable? - On the Poetic Use of Language in Swahili Hip-Hop and 'Classical' Swahili Poetry

• Main Author: Vierke, Clarissa
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: African languages; African literature; Culture; Hip hop culture; Language; Language contact; Language history; Lexicon; Linguistics; Morphology; Poetry; Poets; Rap music; Semantics; Swahili language; Traditions
• ISSN: 0932-9714; 1875-7421

This comparative essay on classical Swahili poetry and Swahili hip-hop explores a contact zone in contemporary Swahili culture and challenges habitual distinctions between 'traditional' and 'modern' poetry. Detailed contrastive readings of selected hip-hop texts by both Kenyan and Tanzanian artists and classical poems from the northern Swahili coast in Kenya focus on a wide variety of contact phenomena such as semantically, phonetically, and morphologically manipulated lexical items, metres, and rhymes, and show that contact phenomena, which have been considered a mark of East African hiphop practices adapted from American and global hip-hop patterns, are also a hallmark of 'classical' poetry that has a long history of linguistic hybridity. Contemporary hip-hop lyrics are neither shaped exclusively by global hip-hop culture nor constitute a total break with 'traditional' practices of Swahili poetry, but re-inscribe themselves in a long history of linguistic and cultural contact that has generated a powerful legacy of hybrid poetic forms. Contemporary hip-hop can thus be considered as re-exploring aspects of African poetic traditions.