Amani Alsheikh

A Syrian writer and journalist currently residing in Canada, Amani Alsheikh has written for several Arab websites, including Raseef 22, focusing on gender and social justice issues.

“I’m a student in this life. Every learner is carrying their coffin.” 

Collective trauma has always been a dominant theme in the songs of Syrian rapper Bu Kolthoum. His work has often grappled with the experiences of war, uprooting and forced displacement, including how they have led to a series of new beginnings for so many people around the world.

Even though Bu Kolthoum is among those who left Syria, he clearly has not forgotten those who stayed behind, who are still living the nightmare everyday. He speaks to them in his poetry, through personal, artistic verse that expresses the experience of the individual as well as the collective. 

 On Talib, the new album released Friday August 20th, Bu Kolthoum has reached a turning point. As a holistic expression of collective experience, he has packed his mind, his heart, and his healing journey into an hour and a quarter of music. The album is the end of one road in our healing journey, but the beginning of another; it is a philosophical and psychological sermon in which he evolves from one kind of poet to another.

In the past, many of Bu Kolthoum’s songs were filled with pain and anger. In “Al Nayzak song” he wishes for the fall of a meteor, and repeatedly mentions the monsters inside and around us. But a new, brighter light shines from Talib. Bu Kolthoum is showing us this time that he is on the path toward healing, changing, achieving, and creating a new identity only because he has accepted that he will always need to continue learning.

“The only stable thing is I am a learner,” he says on the album. “I will spend my life learning, even from the youngest of you.” 

Bu Kolthoum insists in the stories he shares on social media platforms as well as in his few interviews that his songs are personal and about his own journey. He continues this with Talib.

Despite this, my own experiences with his songs have only grown in intimacy and understanding, as if he knew me well just like I know him. I see similarities in the things that we feel, and I count the disappointments we share. Bu Kolthoum knows what it means to revel in nostalgia; he knows what it is to gather your soul in a suitcase and leave.

“On my lap I put my possessions, and I’m satisfied with my wandering,” he says in “Terhaal.”

Bu Kolthoum knows what it is to grapple with rage, depression and internal strife. In “Walle,” he recognizes how a person who is in pain can wish to “set it all on fire.” He knows what it means to be forced from your home into a new society with entirely different lifestyles, beliefs and social structures.

Today, Bu Kolthoum also knows what the rest of us must realize: that these pains will never go away by themselves. Furthermore, if we do not learn about them so that we understand them and so that we can face them, we will pass them along to our children.

A long, dark night 

There is significant overlap in how the human brain expresses both physical and mental pain. Just as someone can have a concussion after a fall without knowing it, so they cannot process trauma while trying to survive it.

The asylum experience of leaving one’s country and piecing together a life in a new one is weighted down with this kind of trauma. And this experience causes a person to look back at all of the pain and suffering that has befallen them and their loved ones. Even this kind of reflection has sent so many hearts into pits of despair.

Bu Kolthoum says in his song “Shmaal” that “thinking closely is a privilege.” And yet, even without this luxury, those of us affected by trauma still have to restart our lives from the beginning, like kindergarteners in our 30s. Haunted even by this experience, so many of us find ourselves refusing to change and rejecting learning to the point of giving up. Oppressed by our own feelings, we shut ourselves away and we bear the weight of our sorrows alone. We insist on living with our monsters, sealing them in boxes in the backs of our minds, plastered with a million “do not open” stickers, doing everything we can to leave them dormant.

The healthier—but more difficult—choice, as recommended by professionals, is to undergo therapy. In asylum, so many close themselves off and wallow in the depths of their traumas. Instead of facing their monsters and learning how to grow, so many of us remain stuck in our ways, not building skills and competencies to help ourselves advance.   

This necessary mental transition is one of the most difficult experiences one can go through. I arrived in Canada in 2015 after a series of dramatic and devastating years. Like so many Syrians I survived, only to start down a new road of mental conflict and a thousand unknowns.

My head spun with questions about fairness, worthiness, and injustice: What did we do to deserve all this? Why am I in Canada? How can one’s reality shift so fundamentally? Should I have stayed in Syria, where the spectre of death loomed over me everyday? Did I really see dead body parts all around me, or was that just an illusion? 

I love rap. I have memorized so many verses by Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian rappers from the same artistic scene. I was very fortunate, however, to get to know Bu Kolthoum’s songs only after coming to Canada. It was as if life was giving me a small gift.

“There is a musician and a poet who has experienced so much of what you did,” a friend said to me after listening to the new album. “Here are his songs to brighten your darkest nights. Bu Kolthoum will lift up your mind.” 

Light and Resilience 

Every time we fall down we get up, we dust ourselves off, and we continue on our way. Six years have passed since I arrived in Canada. I did what I could to nurse my own wounds and with time I got used to the new land. I met and I learned from so many people from so many different cultures. There are oppressed people here who are just like us. Injustice has been around for as long as humanity can recall, filling the world with survivors by name only.

All of this has changed who I am. Today, I am a mixture of my experiences: I am still Middle Eastern, but this identity has changed, first by the experience of seeking asylum and then by immersing myself and learning about Canadian culture. From communicating and reacting, to thinking and problem solving, this new identity has affected every facet of my new life.

I see this experience mirrored in Talib., as if Bu Kolthoum was spun in the same cultural blender as myself. I see it in how he uses both Arabic and English in his songs. 

The character that Bu Kolthoum embodies in his music expresses all the confusion and all the mental pain that makes up our collective trauma. And his character has matured on Talib, where he expresses himself in sounds that go beyond hip hop, skating on the lines between musical genres. 

In this, Bu Kolthoum invites us to create our own learning spaces. He seems to believe that being humbled is a prerequisite to moving forward. We do not know everything about ourselves or others, but this learning process will always open our eyes to new solutions and methods to heal. 

Tracks like “Grown Man Talk,” ”Taleb Ilm,” “Shiva,” “Taghayyart” and others condense these ideas into a fulfilling experience. This album speaks to a real, shared experience and invites us to closely think about how we consider our futures. Through this we can reflect on learning in this life and truly realize if we are making the best of the options we have.