I Go My Way with Pride

Wallāda bint al-Mustakfī was the daughter of a short-lived Umayyad caliph and a long-lived problem for anyone who wanted women in Córdoba to write only in the margins. She held a salon. She took lovers. Later compilers say she wore her own verses on her clothes, pride on one border, the mouth’s freedom on the other. Whether the embroidery is anecdote or fact, the poems exist in her name. She is not a muse. She is a poet with a door.

Ibn Zaydūn was the other door. A noble, a poet of the city, a man who could make absence into a nūniyya that later Arabic would memorize. For a time they were a public pair: verses sent, verses returned, the city as audience. Love, at that pitch, is not a secret. It is a reputation.

Then the rupture. The tradition places Ibn ʿAbdūs, a vizier, in the gap, rivalry, jealousy, a turning. Ibn Zaydūn was imprisoned. From confinement and after it he wrote the wound: the nights that had been, the morning that was separation. Wallāda wrote pride and wrote injury. Invective, in this literature, is not a failure of love. It is one of love’s dialects when a city is listening.

To tell this as a man ruined by a fickle princess is to take his genre and call it history. To tell it as a woman liberated into modern feminism is to take ours. What the poems will stand is more particular: an Umayyad daughter who would not be silent, a poet who made a career of her loss, and a Córdoba in which both could be famous and both could be hurt.

She lived long. He died in 1071, having gone on to Seville and other patrons. The affair is an episode with an afterlife in anthologies. Two voices, in this layout, because the archive will not let one of them finish the other’s sentences.