Arabic

Levantine Indulgence

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Singer and composer Gaida’s debut album Levantine Indulgence is named for Levant, the Fertile Crescent’s desert oasis. Aptly named, this album offers listeners an abundance of vocal and instrumental styles that even the most resistant listeners can find nourishing and enchanting.

The opening track, “Dream,” begins with rhythmic clapping and percussion and a chorus of male voices who share vocals with the lead singer. I should clarify by referring to sharing and “trading.” This distinction is important because the contrast of Gaida’s voice with the male singers makes this short song into a true performance. The vocal banter between Gaida and the men reminded me of a musical where the lead female actor is center stage and the men in the chorus sing to her with the purpose of wooing or impressing her. But in the case of “Dream,” the men sing with Gaida at the end of the song. Unlike a traditional musical from an earlier era, where the woman needs to fend off potential suitors with clever lyrics and a silky voice, in this modern version Gaida works with the men, but the song is still decidedly hers.

“Kaifa Uhibuka” transports the listener to a smoky, jazz club with purple walls and red, plush booths. When I close my eyes and listen to this track, I’m a patron of this club, sipping gin and smoking a clove cigarette, while I lean back into my lush surroundings to enjoy the music. I despise gin and I no longer smoke, but the song evokes feelings of real or imagined indulgence, and yet sadness. I felt that this song represented the overall mood of the album even more than the title track.

Another track that evoked this mood was the beautiful ballad “Ghayeb.” The piano, cello, and flute blend with Gaida’s vocals to create a song that expresses love, longing, and caring. Despite the fact that the lyrics are not in English, my eyes filled with tears as I listened to “Ghayeb.” Without even knowing what Gaida was saying, I could feel the pain and loss in her voice. When you hear a song like this, it can cause you to have a flashback to a situation that may have been painful, or one that caused you to feel a sense of bittersweet regret. Granted, this isn’t exactly a desirable feeling, but if a song can make you feel this way, I think that’s pretty powerful.

Gaida has lived in Germany, Damascus, Detroit, Paris, Kuwait, and New York. Through the incorporation of jazz, bossa nova, ballad, Tarab (ecstasy) songs, Arab folk, and traditional Arabic maqam (modes) and improvisational style in her music, it is easy to see that she has carried pieces of these places with her as she has traveled the globe. Some people would create a scrapbook or a photo album of their diverse living experiences; Gaida has produced an audio diary of her musical and emotional journeys, and the listener can feel her sentiment with beat of the bass, the raining piano notes, and memorable melodies. On the album cover, the artist in fact states that she, “will always sing with tears close to my eyes, beats pounding my fragile heart, and care wrapping the entire world.”

Written by: Rachel Muzika Scheib, May 27th 2010

Bad City

admin — Mon, 03 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Saadi

Paper Garden Records

Saadi is in love with music. It's fun to guess where the loops and tracks come from on their debut album, Bad City. Their influences are far-ranging, and combine '70s dance, '80s synth, choir vocals, and traditional Arabic music.

The title track is a solid dance anthem. The song's companion remix is particularly hot, too. It evokes a busy cityscape inflected with tribal beats.

"Birds" reminds me of Blondie dancing to a slower tempo around her heart of glass. In "Pollen-Seeking Bees," I think the DJ stumbled upon an endearing piano piece and wanted to put it to use somehow. If this album is a dance party, then "Pollen-Seeking Bees" is the book-reading wallflower refusing beer at said party.

The final track is a cover of Bob Dylan's "Daddy You've Been On My Mind." This is not just another sober guest on this album, but a surprisingly somber one as well. This song is filled with choir vocals and heartfelt sentiment. Saadi's vocals seem to be pleading, eulogistic, or possibly both.

It is unclear who "Daddy" is to Saadi. Maybe it's her father, or a nickname for some other (presumably male) person in her life. I'm leaning towards it being her father, because she references to "the language of my father" in the title track. Regardless, Saadi's unique take on this often revisited classic made me feel both moved and empathetic.

Bad City is not a bad album. It's well mixed with interesting sources, floating vocals, and an overall smooth disposition. However, they're difficult to pigeonhole into a particular genre due to the diversity and disparateness of their influences and sound. Sometimes they make me want to dance; at other times, I ruminate with their hymns. I don't think Saadi wants to be limited by category or genre, although they do give the impression that they're still exploring their signature sound.

Written by: Jacquie Piasta, May 2nd 2010

Breaking Poems

admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:44:00 +0000

By Suheir Hammad

Cypher Books

In her third book of poetry, award-winning Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad explores the resilience of women’s bodies across borders in a fluid set of poems entitled Breaking Poems. Hammad embraces life at the border, refusing to translate her identity to fit a bounded-identity construct of what it means to be Palestinian or American. She uses a diasporic language, blending anglicized Palestinian Arabic with English. She fuses cultures, dropping names of inspirational figures like Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin.

Exploring the theme that wars are fought on women’s bodies, Hammad writes, “in gaza still flesh is ashed/wa smoked wa denied/a women’s chest caves in/smoke escapes legs.” (Wa means "and" in Arabic). In fact, the violence in Gaza is a constant topic in her poetry, summoning us to act and react as she evokes images of exploded bodies, rubble in place of homes, and empty stomachs. She connects the experiences of women in New Orleans to Gaza, capturing the resilience of women’s bodies as they encounter multiple forms of violence.

Breaking poems is also about breaking with old identity constructs. Hammad undergoes a personal transformation as she finds it impossible to fit into fixed and bounded notions of identity. Instead, she embraces border identities that are contradictory, fluid, and multi-sited. She refers to herself as “translinear me” and allows herself to exist simultaneously across time and space as a young girl in Deheisha to a woman in Beirut to a refugee in Brooklyn. “We lived there once my parents sisters and me,” she writes about Beirut. “I left my skin there still boiling.” Beginning to find home in change, Hammad writes:

sometimes I leave my body wa I leave my country wa my religion sometimes leaving is my religion.

Hammad also offers up the poem as the space for home, writing, “Poem is my body my language my country.” By exploring transnational and border identities, Hammad joins the ranks of women like Gloria Anzaldúa, Uma Narayan, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ella Shohat, and Nadine Naber.

Hammad’s poetry is never conventional; she plucks words that evoke the sensations of sight, smell, and touch. She induces feeling and meaning by convincing the reader that her words describe their memories. Nuanced and complex, breaking poems explores a new space in twenty-first century poetry.

Written by: Arwa Ibrahim, March 29th 2009

I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody

admin — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 13:18:00 +0000

By Sinan Antoon

City Lights Books

Sinan Antoon’s novel I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody brilliantly portrays the complex impacts of political repression on humanity. It takes the form of a fictionalized compilation of interpreted handwritten prose of an Iraqi college student as he is held and tortured in a prison during the reign of the Ba’th regime in the 1980s. In the introduction of the novel, the reader is told that the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad came across a handwritten “un-dotted” manuscript that an individual has "clarified" by dotting and inserting diacritics. Antoon points out that half of the twenty-eight letters in the Arabic alphabet are pairs or triplets with the same skeleton. They indicate different sounds by the varying number and location of “dots” above or below the letter. The word “I’jaam,” found in the title, literally means the “dotting” of Arabic script, but has come to signify something that produces a “clarifying” effect. And, thus, Antoon sets up the prose as "found text" written by a prisoner that government personnel have interpreted and made available to the public.

Antoon’s introduction is remarkable in its ability to blur fact and fiction and encourage the reader to become conscious of the politics of memory, story and interpretation. The reader wonders throughout: What meanings have disappeared or changed because of the “dotting” of the script and the political motivations of the interpreter? Which of these prisoner’s memories are true, and which are hallucinations of an under-fed and tortured captive? Most importantly, Antoon propels the reader to question their own need to distinguish between fact and fiction. He illustrates that life under a repressive political regime often means the inability to differentiate between reality, fiction, time and space.

Antoon writes with an illustrious and brash poetic style that moves the reader in profound ways. We not only understand, but feel the fear, frustration and helplessness that come to claim every inch of an oppressed person’s existence. “To live here means to piss away three quarters of your life waiting,” he writes, “Waiting for things that rarely come…waiting so long that you drown in time, because time itself is a fugitive citizen, trembling with fear and stumbling on the sidewalk, only to be pissed and spat upon by a merciless History.” It is not difficult to read passages like this, which were written in the context of the Ba’th regime, and apply them to the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. The passing of time has only increased the relevancy of this text to current political crises.

The real brilliance of this novel comes from Antoon’s ability to illustrate the tense relationship between culture, history and oppression with subtlety and potency. The narrator struggles to keep his passion for poetry and literature alive as the government attempts to regulate which forms of expression are acceptable and which are not. His obsession with the banned Iraqi poets al-Jawarihi and Muzaffar al-Nawwab illustrates oppressive regimes’ ability to deaden the humanity of the people. Ba’th party slogans and sayings of Saddam Hussein are interwoven with personal experiences and demonstrate the discrepancy between the rhetoric of the regime and the reality of life in Iraq. Ultimately, Antoon’s poetic expression of this dichotomy is his greatest strength as he powerfully unearths the deadening impact of oppression.

Written by: Arwa Ibrahim, June 8th 2007