Louis Brehony, Palestinian Music in Exile: Voices of Resistance (American University in Cairo Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Louis Brehony (LB): As a musician and someone interested in politics from an early age, I have always been interested in how these two worlds meet, particularly when music dedicates itself to the causes of revolution and liberation. I had witnessed the vibrancy of mass expression visiting socialist Cuba as a young activist and, at home, had some exposure to Irish resistance culture—but meeting Palestinian musicians around the time of the al-Aqsa intifada, something else clicked. As a listener, I became hooked and, by speaking to people like Rim Banna and Reem Talhami, came to understand how musicians’ experiences related to the deeper history of Palestinian oppression, expression, and resistance.
I felt that language had to be a central part of my practice, partly because there have been so many interesting cultural debates and arguments historically and contemporarily among Palestinians and Arab movements that had not been thoroughly addressed in Anglophone writing. These ranged from the arguments of Ghassan Kanafani and his comrades in the period of the Palestinian Revolution after 1967, to the contradictions of the Oslo “peace” process after 1993, or discussions among musicians and listeners surrounding the Arab Idol victory of Mohammed Assaf in 2013. I became interested in the cultural and social critiques of these grassroots and organized forces, framed within narratives of sumud (steadfastness), and which often lead back to the root causes of the Palestinian crisis.
Living in the “belly of the beast” in Britain—the birthplace of Sykes-Picot, the Balfour Declaration, and more than a century of backing for Zionist colonialism, regardless of which party leads in Westminster—I felt a duty to help amplify the voices of those resisting the effects of imperialism and developing alternative modes of collective expression. Going through academia and taking a more “serious” approach to research, I have tried to keep my two foundational interests central, as a committed listener and struggler alongside the Palestinian people. This is the context for a contribution that does away with any pretense at academic impartiality. Linking music to resistance and sumud means taking the side of the oppressed, a task that has never seemed more urgent.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
LB: What I have tried to do in this book is to analyze differing historic locations of Palestinian exile in terms of a key issue, from which other themes emanate. So, the chapter on Kuwait and vocalist Reem Kelani asks questions about concepts of cosmopolitanism; the chapter on musical experiences in Bilad al-Sham is framed towards what I call lahaja musiqiyya, or musical dialect; when I write about Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and Palestinian musicians in Egypt, I look at the concept of repetition, in a Marxist and Saidian sense; and two chapters on Gaza are thematized around rurality and sumud respectively. For each exilic case study, the question of Palestine remains central to the practices of the musicians concerned. Many of the featured musicians from Gaza are still there.
I make the point that Palestinian Marxist analyses are overwhelmingly untapped and unrecognized in the West—the political thought of Kanafani, Habash, and Leila Khaled is avoided in respectable academia. Not only are their contributions politically pertinent and illuminating of the ways that Marxism is applied or developed in the Palestinian anticolonial context—akin to thinkers like Guevara, Cabral, Claudia Jones, and others—but they make points on culture and resistance that retain their relevance. One illustration is the call for “instruments of liberation” after 1967. Kanafani and Khaled were referring to the vanguard organizations led by communists in Vietnam, Cuba, and China, and arguing for their validity in Palestine. I thought it would be interesting to think in musical terms of how instruments of liberation might be wielded. One example is the oud, which has, but which faces a concerted campaign of Zionist appropriation, resisted by Palestinian instrumentalists, as shown in the campaign to boycott the “Israeli” Oud Festival in occupied Jerusalem.
My project also takes as its basis the musical text. This could mean a musical score by a maestro like Ruhi al-Khammash, but Palestinian music is also built around poetry. In the archetypal turathi (heritage) wedding, for example, genres like hida or ataaba provided springboards for the creative and political tenacity of zajjalin, or poet-singers, improvising poetry. These oral literatures provided the basis for many Palestinian contributions to music literature, including the hugely prolific Abdelatif al-Bargouthi, who collected the lyrics of tens of thousands of musical poems based on regional folk forms. Even with the advent of rap and other genres, Palestinian music remains grounded in orality. The book does not analyze the music primarily in technical terms—though there is some discussion on maqam—but in connection to the lyrics and their use and meaning in historical context.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
LB: Palestinian Music in Exile is really a culmination of the work I have been involved in over the last twenty years, which has included a lot of journalistic writing on Palestine and other issues, and essays and articles on Palestinian music. Alongside research for the book, I also directed the film “Kofia: A Revolution Through Music,” about the Palestinian-Swedish band led by George Totari, best known for the song “Leve Palestina.” My recent writing has explored some of the strands referred to relatively briefly in the text, including detailed studies on exile songwriters (Totari, Zeinab Shaath, and George Kirmiz), on musical instrument making and singing in the Zionist jails (based on interviews with Fida’ al-Shaer and Asim al-Ka’abi), and analyses of Assaf and the Arab Idol phenomenon. The book offers an opportunity to place these strands in an overall context, while expanding the geographic limitations of my earlier doctoral study, which took Palestinian musical and sociopolitical experiences in Britain as the objective of study. Through this new publication, the region of near exile is given heightened attention, highlighting rarely heard accounts of Palestinian sociality in the Arab world and Turkey.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
LB: I have said elsewhere that I hope music-lovers will be drawn into learning about the Palestinian cause and that those already recruited to it will be able to draw on a deeper knowledge of Palestinian musical culture. University and college campuses have once again become flashpoints of political struggle and all the lessons that this throws up—not to forget, of course, the vicious Zionist attacks on openly pro-Palestine academics, with the collaboration of their institutions. This generation has so much potential and there is material in Palestinian music and its histories of expression, aesthetic revolution, and organization that can inspire all of us. During ongoing fieldwork, it has been apparent too that Palestinian displacement has created a kind of dislocation of a people from many aspects of their own history. I mention in the text that Umm Fadi, born and raised in al-Bureij camp, expressed anger that she had never heard of Jerusalem-based Sabreen band (p. 92). Others have spent years wondering who or where singer George Kirmiz was. The book can, I hope, address some of these kinds of questions among Palestinian and non-Palestinian readers.
In terms of its impact, I write at the end of the introductory chapter that, “While not overstating my own role, I hope this book contributes in even the smallest way to the musicians and music finding a wider audience.” Beyond this, I hope this work succeeds in bolstering the influence of activist intellectuals that I think stand out for their refusal to see ideas of resistance, sumud, and revolution as having somehow lost their relevance. We might mention Palestinian writers like Tahrir Hamdi, Lena Meari, Ramzy Baroud, Khaled Barakat, or Rabab Abdulhadi, who really reject the kinds of compromised analyses or blatant opportunism presented by some in the wake of 7 October resistance operations. There are also political prisoners analyzing the situation critically through culture, including Kamil Abu Hneish, whose works have been smuggled out and published in al-Hadaf. The drive to go further than what is respectable and acceptable to pro-Zionist ruling ideologies is present in the music itself. Discussed in the concluding chapter, for example, the young band Darbet Shams sing playful lullabies identifying imperialism as the root cause:
Fly high, oh doves, over all of Bilad al-Sham
Wipe Sykes-Picot off the map
Before Bissan grows up
J: What other projects are you working on now?
LB: Readers will sense that I have a longstanding interest in Ghassan Kanafani, whose political works and fictional writings (which are also, of course, political) are quoted frequently in the book. I am not at liberty to give full details yet, but Tahrir Hamdi and I have led a project which has come to fruition in the last couple of years, involving over twenty-five other writers and translators, to make Kanafani’s political studies, journalistic articles, essays, pamphlets, interviews, and so on, more widely available. This work addresses Kanafani’s conspicuous, almost conspiratorial absence from any mention of Arab Marxism or international anti-colonial theory.
In terms of musical projects, it may be surprising to hear that Naji al-Ali and his character Handala are the subject of an essay I am working on currently, tracing themes of music and audience through the caricatures. Palestinian music remains a key area of my research, including both historic, pre-Nakba interests and ongoing engagement with contemporary musicians. I have also been steadily developing a related area of performance research around the Syrian buzuq and recently recorded with Gazzawi oud player Reem Anbar (featured in Chapter 6) under the banner of Gazelleband. We will be touring Europe together for concerts, festivals, and book launches in the coming months.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 3: Village Dreams in Urban Gaza, pp. 98-101)
“Ana Mish Gazzawiyya”: Al-Qubeiba Village and a Journey to the Intifada
Sometimes I have a conflict within myself between Gaza and al-Qubeiba. When I talk with my friend from the West Bank, he tries to say to me “you’re a Gazzawiyya!” [Gazan]. . . . I love Gaza, I feel that it is my place, my country. . . . But no, I’m not Gazzawiyya. My village is al-Qubeiba.
Umm Ali’s early childhood was shaped by learning that the refugee camp in Gaza was not her family’s original home, and in the mid-1980s she took part in an emotional family trip to al-Qubeiba, south of Yafa. During the uprising itself, stories and songs of historic Palestine would be central to her own involvement, as older relatives took to the streets in revolt. Umm Ali’s relationship with the village offers detail on the social activities of second-and third-generation “Gazans”; in particular it shows the role of music in shaping Palestinian consciousness in the pre-intifada years.
“It was paradise really. A dream actually,” Umm Ali says, emphasizing the natural abundance of the village compared to Gaza. As in a dream, the event came once and never happened again:
My dad and our relatives arranged a trip to our village. I think I was about seven. . . . It was easy for us to move before the intifada; it was not Israel, it was Palestine. At lunchtime, my family started to sing and my father also sang very old songs during the journey. I still like to remember that. It was a really nice time, really touching. I’d heard a lot about my village.
We still don’t know exactly what happened in 1948. My grandfather heard what happened in the other villages, the killing, abuse of women. . . . They left thinking they would return after a week. . . . I don’t know how my dad and our relatives could look at their house and see it in someone else’s hands, not for them. And smell the oranges and lemons. . . . I don’t know how they left it without having a heart attack, wallahi.
The journey was a story in itself: a small convoy of family cars, with Umm Ali’s father, Abdel Salim, playing the role of the narrator. In her telling of the story, the village is mirage-like, holy, and it is clear that Abdel Salim had already initiated the children into viewing the land he had left in 1948, at the age of five, as their own. In the car, he led singing of “Biktub ismik ya biladi” (I write your name, my country), by Lebanese songwriter Elie Shwery, and Palestinian rebel song “ ‘Al-raba‘iyyeh.” The group continued to sing during a picnic on village land, in between eating slices of watermelon, surrounded by olive, pomegranate, and orange trees. While Umm Ali caught a bittersweet taste of an experience colored by childlike wonder, a contrasting scene is recounted by Leila Khaled, told by her mother on their arrival in Lebanon, that she must not eat the oranges: “Ours are in Haifa.” Both experiences led the young girls to challenge the loss of their land.
“Biktub ismik” extols the beauty of an unnamed country under a never-setting sun and pledges to defend its honor. It visualizes the land, home, greenery, and bridges. While Umm Ali does not mention crossing a bridge to arrive at the village, bridges are thematic to Palestinian narratives, and she would later use the metaphor to imagine her childhood involvement on the streets. The homeland is placed “above the highest bridge, the knights that enter it, and the swords are raised high.” In the context of al-Qubeiba, evacuated in 1948 by Zionist paramilitaries, the lyrics elevate the land above its conquerors and their weapons. Its final verse appears almost prophetic of the journey taken by Umm Ali in adult life:
I will wander and search the world
And cross the seven seas
And recall your days, my country
To return light to the earth.
Though the song was composed by Shwery during his time away from Lebanon in 1973, and was made a hit by singer Joseph Azhar, Umm Ali remembers learning its lyrics from Syrian actor Duraid Lahham on a tiny black and white television.
The Israelis occupied the Golan and South Lebanon, the Sheba‘a areas, so many in the Sham countries were with Palestine. We liked that people were talking about the things happening in their own countries, as well as about Palestine, about the revolution. At that time, we were all refugees with no power. We liked that there was sympathy for us. We didn’t have a voice.
The presence of non-Palestinian singers is typical of Umm Ali’s pre-intifada reportage and of a broader post-Nakba period when Arab musicians released prominent solidarity pieces. The artists encompassed tarab, cosmopolitan Lebanese pop, and traditional references to Bilad al-Sham. Umm Ali reports a growing hunger to find local musicians later on, although she also developed an affinity for Julia Boutros and Marcel Khalife (referring to both with first-name familiarity), along with Ahmad Kaabour, Fairuz, and Umm Kulthum:
We thought many of those people had Palestinian roots because they were singing to Palestine as their country.
“‘Al-raba‘iyyeh” had been recorded by revolutionary bands, but Umm Ali had not yet discovered their cassettes, and learned the song orally from family members. At her flat in Manchester, the sisters continued this tradition in front of their children, taking it in turns to initiate verses, with a unison refrain resembling maqam bayat. The music is credited to Iraqi actor and musician Kan‘an Wadfi, with lyrics composed in colloquial Arabic by Palestinian poet and leading PLO member Said Khalil al-Muzayin (also known as Fata al-Thawra, “the boy of the revolution”), who lived in Gaza after the Nakba:
’Al-raba‘iyyeh, ‘al-raba‘iyyeh
We do not sleep when we are oppressed
The road is long for those who honor it
Oh branch-like rifle, soaked in sacrifice.
This widely circulated version was recorded in 1969 in an ensemble featuring qanun and traditional instrumental backing for a unison male chorus, and was the recording most likely to be known by Umm Ali’s parents and older siblings. “‘Al-raba‘iyyeh” had entered folkloric practices and existed in differing forms. Umm Ali and Umm Fadi remember two sets of lyrics; the first is also known by the shabab in South Lebanon (see chapter 2). The second contains anonymously composed lyrics:
We hold our Palestinian heads up high
My country, my country, we call out your name.
Other Gaza-based Palestinians recalled its ancient qualities and revolutionary certainty. Oud player Reem Anbar associated “‘Al-raba‘iyyeh” with steadfast ‘awajiz (elderly people), while, for teacher Duaa Ahmed, it symbolized “victory.”.” Umm Ali reveals that she found positivity and optimism in the spirit of the song after her ordeal under the British Home Office:
‘Al-raba‘iyyeh is a nice song when you get out of jail.
Carried by its repeated chorus, the song enabled group participation, and Umm Ali remembers the family clapping hands and joining in together when they arrived at al-Qubeiba. Likewise, the “la la la” refrain of “Biktub ismik” supported its use as an anthem at Palestinian rallies in the ghurba. In Umm Ali’s case, both songs were brought into new contexts and phases of Palestinian struggle. “‘Al-raba‘iyyeh,” sung by unison choruses at a time of rising armed struggle now entered a period and collective experience where sumud had become a central tactic, while imagery of the fida’i and rifle were interwoven with the olive branch. “Biktub ismik” was broadcast to the household via Lahham satirizing inept Arab leaders in “Kasak ya Watan” (Cheers to the country). Such leaders had already sidelined the claims of Palestinian refugees to the land but, singing songs that also carried revolutionary optimism, even after the scenes of PLO defeat in Lebanon, Umm Ali’s experience illuminated what was at stake in a shifting struggle for Palestine.