Poétesses en marge

International audience Starting with an ethnographic case - a Tuareg poetry contest in a festival in Northern Niger – this paper discusses the relationship between public and religious spheres, and between gender and disputed norms of speech, before the Tuareg rebellion of 2007-2009. The exclusion of women from a poetry competition aroused different reactions on behalf of the interested women. The younger she-poets, famous authors during the rebellion of the 1990s, were marginalized in light of the political content of their production. Only a senior poetess, T., who derived legitimacy from her birthright, supported in this by some of the audience and some poets, allowed herself to sabotage the competition by intervening on frequent occasions, stealing the microphone to recite her tišiway (poems). This article presents a "critical poem" that is recited by T. during the competition. The paper focuses briefly on the semantic field of laughter in Tuareg society, and examples of female satirical productions contextualize T.'s poem within a literary Tuareg genre, the abayak (literally "critical" satire or invective). In the following year, women were admitted to the competition after negotiations with tourists. Then A., a woman, won first prize. Two of A.’s praise poems (temmal) are compared with T.’s veiled but abrasive critique.