The Tune of Survival

This article is part of a series produced in the Mafaza project – Battels Won and Lost. This project’s research and creation phase was completed with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. You can also read in this series: On the Duality of Survival and Defeat by Waeel Saad al-Din, Examining the Cracks of the Soul by Mosab Alnomire.

Abdul-Wahab Kayyali

Palestinian-Jordanian musician and researcher residing in Montreal, performing, teaching, and composing for the Arabic oud, Abdul-Wahab released his first album, “Juthoor” (Roots), in 2020. He is currently working on several performance projects.

Refugees have utilized all the arts at their disposal to express the conditions of their suffering and displacement and music is no exception. Music and melody have a different role than the image, the word, or the drawing in emotional communication. The melody can be more abstract than all of these and more eloquent. Music brings forward emotions the refugee may try to hide and suppress. It recounts their environment and periods of happiness and sadness. It invites them to reconstruct these times in their exile. Music has an emotional impact that reflects the complex emotions of any human, especially the surviving refugee (or those who think they have survived, for who survives the massacre – the victim or the witness?). It is thus not easy to depict the complications of refuge and survival melodically, neither is it easy for the listener to receive such a melody in exile. The music bears the vulnerabilities and sensitivities of its composer, performer, and listener. It cracks open emotional black boxes that refugees bury to escape the bitter reality of loss and despondency – the reality of normalizing criminality, genocide, and impunity.

Music can play an essential role in confronting the turbulence and collapse that we live through, dissecting it, and putting us in direct contact with it so that we can deal with it and learn from it. Music is a social and individual experience. It reminds us that we are not alone; others feel what we feel and suffer what we suffer, and even those who have not gone through the same experiences can empathize with us and dress our wounds. Music is an opportunity for collective and individual healing, to produce beauty from ugliness, to document our trauma and emotional scars, and it is also an opportunity for us to carve our wounds deep into our individual and collective consciousness so that we never forgive those who harmed us. And should we forgive, we should never forget.

Music outside of its medium

Like all other performances and fine arts, music is impacted by its immediate surroundings – well-being, happiness, affluence, calamity, catastrophe, and destruction. Displacement and refuge confound music and musicians, as music typically belongs to a specific geographic and cultural space and genre (classical, traditional, rock, etc.). When the musician and their music are forcefully displaced, they are forced onto a different environment, audience, and sonic reference. Music must thus adapt to this new environment, the new audience, and the prevalent taste in host communities. Music and the musician must reinvent and redefine themselves in exile. In this regard, it is easy to fall into the trap of nostalgia, the idea that the country from which refugees were expelled was a paradise lost, a promised land robbed from its inhabitants in which life was a sweet rose-scented breeze. Nostalgia is an obstructive emotion, it prevents the refugee from forming a new life, appreciating and adapting to new environments, and from confronting their challenges with a positive outlook.

There are many promising melodic experiments in countries of refuge, but some are cliché and offer stark artistic compromises to achieve recognition and success. It is undoubtedly a difficult equation: what does the exiled musician hold on to, and what do they relinquish to assimilate with the new environment and society? In my opinion, the exiled musician must present their music as worthy of respect and equality. After all, hegemony and colonialism are not merely political or epistemic phenomena, they also apply to music. The challenge lies in the extra effort required to prove oneself as worthy of respect and equality. In this regard, the musician is a professional artist who must hone their craft – in listening and practicing exorbitantly and committing seriously to their work. The world of music absorbs everyone, those who are serious and those who are not, but if the exiled musician is to contribute to a cultural renaissance in their exile, there are no shortcuts or substitutes for perseverance and hard work. Undoubtedly, the refugee musician should work harder than settled, resident peers. Of course, this is unfair and unjust, but such is the creed of refuge, irrespective of field and domain.

What is music tied to? And who (and what) is tied to it?

Music is a reflection of the musician’s sonic sensitivity and of their ability to manipulate melodies and rhythms in order to tell a tale. Music is tied to geography and environment, to the sounds that a musician is raised to hear and be subsumed in, which they eventually reproduce once they store a sufficient amount. 

Music reflects a soundscape. It is affected by any location’s social and civilizational transformations and the impact of these transformations on the taste of its inhabitants. As such, music is affected by all the technology that impacts sound manipulation – amplification, electronic effects, and so on. Naturally, music is also impacted by fashion and social trends. But all these influences and effects do not tell the whole story: musical thought does. 

That thought is often impacted not only by the audible, but also by the visual, the legible, and the sensual. A serious musician cannot witness the calamity that befell our countries in the last twelve years without being affected. An early example of this is Kinan Azmeh’s “A sad morning, every morning,” which he composed in 2012, almost a year after the outbreak of the Syrian revolution and the martyrdom of thousands of people – victims of the regime of genocide, sarin, human slaughterhouses, and captagon.  

Music is thus tied to thought, specifically what can be harnessed sonically to express thought. As to who is tied to music, it is the people who see a description of their emotional state in it. What is tied to music is what is tied to all the arts, humanities, and social sciences – the state of humans and humanity. The existing challenge for the refugee musician is to tell their tale melodically, with eloquence, to capture the attention of those who the image, the figure, and the news may repel. Half a million dead, poisoned children lying dead without blood, a man buried alive while speaking, “My wife, the crown of my head.” Rape and torture, kidnapping and forced disappearance, forced displacement, tents and green busses, relief organizations, inter-state conferences, security agencies, extremist organizations, terrorism and intimidation, and siege warfare on the camp and on the city. Tal Al-Za’atar, Sabra and Chatila, Yarmouk, and Ghouta. Deir Yassin, Kufr Qasim, Tantura, Halabja, Al-Houla, Al-Treimseh, Tadamon. All of these are repulsive, traumatic, and dreary. How do we harness them to tell the tale? To say, “We have on this earth what makes life worth living?” To affirm that “we love life if we can afford to have it?”  What we have seen is heavy. What we have lived, what we have inherited – it is heavy. Let us then tell our tale and compose the melody of refuge. Let us survive through the tune, for we have not survived with much else.