Verbalising the body: sexual tropes in Hausa girls’ game songs

Abstract

Scholars have conducted research on the games that young girls play, on the sensual elements in their performances, and on the connection between girls’ game songs and songs sung and sold by male hip hop artists but the songs sung by Hausa girls while they play, have been overlooked. In the 1980s, preteen Hausa girls in northern Nigeria sang songs as they played their games; songs that seemed funny and exciting but which were in fact, full of metaphors, synecdoches, metonyms, similes, puns and sexual allusions. Using the medium of these songs, the girls expressed their identities, and attempted to make sense of their environment in relation to their illusions about sex, courtship, and marriage. This study examines the verbalisation of eroticism in the song texts of these girls using Alan Dunde’s concept of Texture, Text and Context. It analyses the erotic expressions and gestures conveyed in tropes against the circumstances surrounding their performance as well as the erotic gestures which accompany them. By focusing on the verbalised male and female bodies expressed in the tropes and performative gestures, this study opens up an arena of preteen Hausa girls’ game songs in Nigeria that has been obscured by modernity.