Despite such passion, this woman rejected him. A little later, he wrote a qasïda called "Al-zanjiya al-husna" (The Beautiful Negro), in which he turned the alienation people felt about the color of his skin into a celebration of Sudanese women. Instead of using the word `abd here to mean slaves, he uses common names for black slaves to situate this love

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 801