Her roots lie deep in the tradition of West Africa's singer-poets, but Malouma, Mauritania's best-known performer, has long been delighting audiences abroad and shocking many at home with a repetoire that veers toward Western-style gospel and rhythm and blues.
"When I began singing about love, when I was very young, people in traditional society said I was crazy," she said in an interview between performances at the French cultural center here. "They said I was too free and easy and moved around too much on the stage."
Although she was virtually banned from performing in her own country for a decade, she performed all over Africa and further afield, melding western styles to the Moorish music of the Sahara and adding electric guitars to traditional instruments such as the four-stringed, lute-like tidinit.
Malouma Mint Moktar Old Meidah, her full name, was banned from performing at home in 1992. Young people loved her, but her message - she sang about the fight against HIV/AIDS, women's rights, the right to divorce and the right to be free of illiteracy - bothered traditional leaders.
She said she defends her ideas in her music. She does not want to become a political personality.
Last year, the ban was lifted and Malouma returned to the Mauritanian capital this week performing at the first international festival of music by the nomads, which has brought traditional musicians to this northwest African country from north Africa, India, Spain and France.
Malouma comes from a family of story-telling "griots", those masters of music and word in West Africa, of whom her father is noted as one of the greats.
Born in the Mederdra region in the southeast of the country, Malouma received a strong traditional musical education from her father, but turned toward a blues-impregnated style when she was 16.
When she started performing in public, "people came to my father and told him, 'Malouma is going to give our music a bad name. You should stop her'."
Her father went to see her. "I played my music for him, and he cried and asked me if I loved what I was doing. I told him I did. So he said, 'I will teach you our traditional music and you will do what you like with your heart'."
She sings in Hassania, Mauritania's Arabic-derived language, in melodies that evoke memories of the desert, the Senegal river. Dunya, a song written by her father and the title of her latest CD album, tells of the sufferings and joys of life in a very poor country.
But her songs are also militant and modern. "Once in Boston, an African-American woman heard me sing," Malouma said.
"She cried and said she had found her roots. She gave me a recording by Aretha Franklin, and said, 'You will find something of yourself in that'."
Malouma was born sometime in the 1960s - she declines to say when - and is the mother of four children.
Now that she is accepted and famous, she says she still has "many dreams" and many things to do.
"My career is only just beginning," she said. "In life, you always need to have an ambition."
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