History hurts women who weave word, sound and truth to brew story.
Seen as lesser scribes, they fade from light. This ain’t a new story.
The house of Hip Hop belongs to all who live and love in it.
Divine residents build it brick by blessed beat through story.
From Godessa to Lee Kasumba, this black girl magic we
inhabit shatters each glass ceiling into debut story.
What’s a boys club to a god; to us? We birth worlds and verses
and rise to revise the lies and proclaim: this is true story!
Grateful for the glory of creation, Lebohang meets page.
In the beginning was the word. The world awaits. Cue: story.
— A Herstory Ghazal by Lebohang Masango
In “A Herstory Ghazal”, I use the upcoming #HipHopHerstory concert as a prompt to express my feelings on the creative power that most women hold, both biologically and artistically. The landmark event will host a selection of talents from South Africa and the US to celebrate women’s roles and achievements within the culture. While the introductory post to this series demonstrates multiple academic perspectives of women’s involvement in Hip Hop that appeal to my interests as a scholar, I use this week to continue that tradition of documentation in writing creatively, as a poet.
The ghazal honestly needs more flowers (while we can still smell ’em), which is to say, the ghazal is Top Two and I don’t mean number two. This underrated form of Arabic poetry has held me spellbound for a few years now. I find it so sad that I went through an entire high school career’s worth of poetry lessons, without encountering it among the usual classes about sonnets and iambic meter. When I first read Hip Hop Ghazal by Patricia Smith, my absolute fave, I was immediately delighted by the rhythms and its insistence on cleverly crafted repetition. I love how it has been a slow revelation; the more I savoured it, the more I realised how different parts have to exist in very particular ways to make it whole. It is an impressively simple-looking yet demanding piece of writing.
Read over my ghazal once more and see if you can identify the rules that dictate how a ghazal is constructed. Here is a short summary:
- Ghazal must consist of 5 – 15 couplets, that can each stand alone as separate poems.
- First two lines must end in rhyme – using the same word or phrase – this is called a refrain.
- The refrain should end the second line of every couplet that follows.
- Before each refrain, there has to be a word that rhymes consistently throughout the ghazal.
- The first line of the last couplet should contain the poets’s name, or a reference to the poet.
- Each line must contain the same number of syllables.
Do you see why I say it is not easy? It’s such a challenge! At the same time, I cannot explain how good it feels to know that when I apply myself, I too can write in one of my favourite forms. Today, my special contribution to the Hip Hop her story movement, also marks my second ghazal (ever!) and I am so excited that it exists. I love how writing this set a challenge for me to write a big story about the strides that women make each day and express it succinctly. I hope that you’ll be inspired to fall in love with the ghazal and to keep women’s stories well-recognised and alive in your own work, whatever it may be.
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Lebohang Masango 
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