Thus, men and women live in two separate worlds, normally do not share their thoughts or their lives, and function fairly independently of each other in their different spheres. Even husbands and wives do not normally socialize together or with each other; in order to show respect in the home, they do not eat together, seldom interact and avoid addressing each other by name. [Callaway, 1987: 44]
As a result of this sexual segregation, Callaway argues, 'The experience of romantic love is not normally part of an Islamic marriage'; '"Love" and "Romance" are Western concepts and have little real meaning in this [Hausa] culture' (1987: 36, 40). Callaway's comments caricature and devalue the complex emotions of Muslim marriages,(15) but she does represent problems that many Hausa experience. Many soyayya authors discussed the issue with me as they talked of the massive changes in the way young men and women interact with each other in contemporary Hausa society. Ideally, both women and men in Hausa society are expected to exhibit kunya, a sense of modesty and shame. Adamu Mohammed,(16) author of the novel Garnak'ak'i ('Uncompromising') explained what this meant in terms of sexual interaction. Traditionally, he said, all meetings between boys and girls would be chaperoned by older relatives. Frequently the couple involved might be too embarrassed even to speak to each other, and women, especially, would communicate reluctantly, if at all. Another author, 'Dan Azumi 'Yan Gurasa,(17) confirmed this. 'When I was young,' he said, 'and came across the girl I loved I couldn't face her and tell her. Instead I would send someone who could talk to her about it.' Nowadays, both authors agreed, this sense of shyness has been transformed, and both men and women act in a manner that would have been unacceptable twenty years previously.
In their plots, soyayya authors examine some of the issues made contentious by the shift in gender interaction. The common narrative conflict between youth wishing to marry for love and parents who wish to organise marriage partners reveals how romance narratives allow a form of moral enquiry for Hausa youth. The fantasy encoded in fictional narratives succeeds, as Beidelman points out, 'by presenting a version of experience and things that is both less and more than what we ordinarily encounter', allowing, in part, 'a luxuriation of qualities and possibilities not encountered in reality' (1993: 5). For over thirty years Indian films provided a dominant forum for the creation of an imaginary space where real social tensions over love and responsibility, individual desire and social control, appeared and various resolutions of these tensions were considered. Indian films could do this successfully only by engaging with issues that were meaningful to Hausa viewers yet at the same time providing enough of a difference for alternative resolutions to be possible. This engagement with the conflict of love and courtship in contemporary society is what has defined the plots of soyayya books for both their admirers and their critics. Examining these stories reveals the intertextual presence of Indian films and its appropriation within Hausa popular culture
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