El siguiente texto se compone de dos fragmentos de un artículo de próxima aparición en una revista académica. Reflexiones sobre las implicaciones del mismo al leer las jarchas asignadas.

Nowhere is this bitextuality and bisexuality more evident than in the poems known as the muwassahat, which are composed in classical Arabic as panegyrics or as erotic verse. A poetic form that greatly resembles the muwassaha is the zajal, although the zajal differs from the muwassaha in its composition in vernacular Arabic, and in its occasional structural differences (Corriente 1998: 23-24). The muwassahat and zajales incorporate a final stanza called the jarcha, which is either written in a possible Christian vernacular called romance andalusi, or in a mixture of vernacular romance and classical Arabic. Most muwassahat and zajales were written by men, or by anonymous poets, and many of the erotic, love-related ones are directed to both women and men as the receivers of the poets' affections.8

What is most striking about the bilingual, erotic muwassaha/zajal and jarcha is the fact that they frequently employ narrators of different genders, often with a man's voice in the muwassaha or zajal, and a woman's voice in the jarcha. Not only are these hybrid, multicultural poems bitextual in the different languages in which they are composed, but also in the changing gender of their narrators. Critics have generally claimed that these multilingual poems represent an early Hispano Arabic literary convention, and many believe that the jarchas are written from a woman's point of view, even when the gender of the poetic voice is not explicit.

In a twelfth-century example from a zajal by Ibn Quzmán, the poet declares two forms of desire. First, he asks one of his benefactors, Abu al-Hasan 'Alí al-Baiyaní, to provide for his house since the holidays are approaching. And second, the male narrator exhibits erotic desire for al-Baiyaní in the zajal. Finally, a woman narrator relates her desire for a man in the final stanza of the jarcha. The poet asks for assistance in his lament at the end of the zajal:

Dame a aquél cuyo poder es aceptado / y reúneme con él:

/ rubio, hermoso, por él pasan mis cuidados. (Solá-Solé 1990: 191)

[Give me over to him whose power I accept, and unite me

with him: fair, handsome, because of him I am so tormented.)

Then the narration changes to that of a young woman whose song the poet recounts:

Movióme a que hiciera versos / en este ritmo, / una

muchacha bonita, dulce, que cantaba / un canto bello. (Solá-Solé 1990: 191-92)

[A young woman, pretty and sweet, who was singing a

lovely song moved me to write verses in this rhythm.]

The young woman's jarcha then ends the poem:

"Locamente enamorada estoy, ay madre, yo de este vecino

mío / Alí, el morenazo." (Solá-Solé 1990: 192)

["Crazy in love, oh mother, am I with my neighbor, Alí,

the big brown man."]

While this change in the narrator's gender may be viewed as a purely rhetorical device dependent on the differing conventions of the muwassaha/zajal and the jarcha, the shift in gender that accompanies the move between genres, and between linguistic or social codes, has further repercussions for the poem's interpretation. The two separate voices suggest a mutual compatibility, as the woman's anguished, desiring voice in the jarcha prompts the man's voice in the zajal to comment on or imitate it.

[. . .]

[Conclusion:]

In fact, it is known that homoerotic relations between women existed in medieval Arabic society. One twelfth-century male writer, Sharif al-Idrisi, confirmed erotic relationships between women, calling these individuals "more intelligent" than other women, and claimed they could be found in circles such as those of "educated and elegant women, . . . scribes, Koran readers, and female scholars" (Walther 1981: 118). Yet even this account of homoerotic relations between women from medieval Arabic society is insufficient in explaining the bitextual and bisexual qualities of much of women's poetry. Hispano-Arabic poetry by and about women, from the jarchas to Hamda Banãt Ziyãd's homoerotic poem to a nude woman by a river, to Wallãda's verse, to Ibn Shuhayd's ode to a transvestite, suggests a parallel relation between gender and sexual categories that surpasses the contrast of simple binaries. It is not that contemporary critics may easily render these poets and their poetry as either "gay," "straight," or "bisexual," but that the textual and sexual variations that seemingly confound these facile divisions indeed reflect important cultural values about the compatibility and interdependence of contrasts in al-Andalus.

Poetry by and about Hispano-Arabic women further indicates an analogous relation between the textual and the sexual that is ultimately based on correspondence rather than on divergence. The contrasting codes contained in the muwassahat/zajal and jarcha poems, for instance, represent more than the linguistic production of two cultures in contact, the Christian and the Islamic. They also demonstrate the compatibility of two opposing erotic codes, the hetero and the homo, and the elasticity of gender categories of the female and the male. Much of this poetry approaches gender and sexuality in very familiar ways for the postmodern reader. Its demonstration of gender, sexual, and linguistic difference is not founded on a gap that divides their variation, but on an agreement between them. The compatibility of difference within the same subject and on the same page suggests a rendering of gender, eroticism, and sexuality that is based on the coexistence of contrasts, rather than on their incongruity.