What is "ghinnawa"

Ghinnawas (literally "little songs") are short, two line emotional lyric poems written by the Bedouins of Egypt, in a fashion similar to haikus, but similar in content to the American blues. Ghinnawas typically talk of deep, personal feelings and are often an outlet for personal emotions which might not be otherwise expressible in Bedouin society. Ghinnawas may also be sung. Lila Abu Lughod - the Arab American anthropologist, who studied the Awlad Ali Bedouins in Northern Egypt in the late 1970s, and collected over 450 ghinnawas, has published the most comprehensive work on ghinnawas to date.

Ghinnawa is a form of folk poetry, in the sense that anyone in Awlad Ali society could author a ghinnawa. In a broader context, ghinnawas may be looked upon as non-standard discourse which are a means of coping with social reality, similar to other discourse forms in the Arab world like the Hikaya folktales of Tunisia, or the Gussa allegories of the Bedouin of the Sinai.