REEM KELANI: UNOFFICIAL CULTURAL AMBASSADRESS TO THE UK

“You want to know what the biggest form of resistance is?” Reem Kelani asks me as she gets up from her chair and marches into the kitchen.

I am sitting in her living room, slightly nervous, waiting to see what she is going to  come back with. She returns to the living room holding one jar of zeyt[olive oil] and one jar of za’tar [a seasoned thyme dip typical of Arab breakfast tables].

“This!” she exclaims. “Eating zeyt wa za’tar for breakfast is the biggest form of resistance, to say ‘I exist.’”

This simple assertion is at the heart of Kelani’s approach to music, and in a broader sense, her approach to life as a Palestinian artists of the diaspora community. Kelani’s role is a complicated one. In its simplest form, she is a singer, fluent in Jazz, blues and Arabic styles. “I see no distinction between them,” she maintains.

But the political is never far from the artistic, and along the way she has become, as BBC Radio 3 dubbed her, “Palestine’s unofficial cultural ambassadress in the UK.”

There are two compulsions that Kelani continually balances and dances between. One is the compulsion that drives her to use music as a voice, that made her cry her heart out at the death of renowned Egyptian musician Abdel-Halim Hafiz when she was only 14 years old, and that now sees her as a highly respected and hard-working musician.

There is also the compulsion that drives her to defend the simple continuity of a Palestinian identity, to say in so many ways both beautiful and aggressive “I exist,” and to quit a lucrative musical partnership because it compromises her integrity. One thing that becomes very clear, very quickly about Kelani is that she does not compromise.

“As far as I remember I’ve always been singing, and Palestine has always been at the heart of it.” Kelani has trouble explaining why she first got involved in music, considering the controversy it was to cause in her family. The Kelani name is that of an influential Islamic scholar, and for some, the idea of her becoming a professional singer was abhorrent.

You know what it’s like,” she tells me “I have some quite religious members of the family saying ‘you have to change your name, you can’t be a singer with the name Kelani.’” In spite of this, she persevered, and would later encounter still more opposition from her fellow musicians, and worse, fellow Palestinians.

An early collaboration with an Israeli musician went sour once Kelani realised she was being employed as a novelty, what she calls an “aboriginal pygmy.” She was expected to just keep her mouth shut and give the appearance of  liberalism and cooperation without any real substance. Even now, she explains, “The music industry in this country is only interested in me if I work with Israelis. I tried it, my fingers were burned.”

After finding herself repeatedly exploited, insulted and silenced, Reem decided it was better to give up than to carry on such a one-sided partnership.

“Sometimes quitting is more courageous than staying put,” she explains “Sometimes, to maintain what’s left of my dignity, I have to quit.”

That split was the beginning of a new approach for Kelani, an event both devastating, depressing and surprisingly liberating.  “I lost everything two years ago…And then I realised ‘stuff it, I will do what I want.’ So it was quite empowering.”

Surprisingly, it is not only from Israeli musicians that she encounters hostility. A number of Palestinians and Palestinian musicians have repeatedly snubbed her and failed to offer their support.

“Some Palestinians…view me as less Palestinian,” she laments, “because I didn’t grow up under occupation, because I was born and grew up in the disapora.” She has been criticised by Islamist groups for being too secular, and by secular groups for not being political enough.

In conversation, she returns continually to a line of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry “Wa ‘an dafa’i, oudafa’ - I defend my right to defend my right.” It is written on the inside sleeve of her upcoming album and is infused in every lyric she writes and every note she sings.

Political circumstances of late have put artists like Kelani in an awkward position. On the one hand, there is more interest than ever in what the Muslim world can offer- calendars are replete with events promoting multi-ethnicity and cross-cultural cooperation.

On the other hand, there is a danger in trying to accommodate too many people at once. “I have more in common with a Palestinian Christian than I do with an Asian Muslim,” she says, explaining her less-than enthusiastic reaction to the sudden interest in British Muslim culture.

Somewhere along the way, she regrets, the Palestinian cause has been left behind in the government’s move to open a dialogue with Britain’s Muslim population.

“The Palestinian struggle is about colonialism, not religion…Now when you see a Palestinian march on t.v., you see more [Hamas] flags than Palestinian flags.” The political has been- pardon the expression- hijacked by the religious.

The alternative, she maintains, is for Palestinians to focus on defending their national identity through cultural preservation. She has an ongoing project recording the oral traditions of Palestinian folk songs in refugee camps. These recordings are not only valuable in their own right, they are also the inspiration behind many of Reem’s original compositions. Similarly, the sleeve notes of her album include the background, translation and location of each original recording.

Her mind is a library of classical Arabic and Jazz musical references, continually comparing artists that would otherwise seem to have little in common. Her performances, too, are what she calls “giggy workshops, or workshoppy gigs” involving fervent audience participation and a brief history of every song.

This  is yet another of her compulsions: to bring to her listeners not only an appreciation of Palestinian folk music, but an understanding of the culture and history that contributed to that song. It is all part of what she calls the “collective DNA” of the Palestinian people, an identity that she believes is under constant threat not only from political propaganda, but from Arab complicity and misrepresentation.

“We are also being indoctrinated, without us realising, to believe our raison d’etre is nothing but ‘We will rise up!’  …And I’m not pooh poohing ‘We will rise up”, but I’m saying you can’t have one without the other.”

It is a very delicate balance that Kelani herself struggled to achieve. There was a time,  not surprisingly, when she was carried along by the wave of Palestinian resistance music and believed, as many still do, that it was the best way to get the message across: in your face, unrelenting and highly politicised.

She has since matured to a far more subtle approach, one that combines the political with the humanist, but never loses sight of the fact that she is, above all, an artist. “I don’t want politics to obscure my artistic message,” she poignantly declared in an interview with This Week in Palestine, a Palestinian events website.

In 2003, Kelani’s appreciation for musical traditions led her to work with BBC Radio 4 in recording Distant Chords, a programme examining the folk songs of immigrant communities in London.

“Most of the people I interviewed were women around their kitchen table,” she reveals, “They weren’t even professional musicians.” This personal approach is one that resonates strongly throughout her own music, and is both sublimely simple and oddly controversial.

She can distil her entire message, her declaration of the Palestinian people, to three words: “We are human.” This is why she includes a traditional Palestinian lullaby and a wedding celebration song in her performances and on her album, as a very straightforward way of saying that Palestinians have a human voice - an everyday voice - not merely the voice of suffering, protest and resistance.

It is this perspective - humanist, local and personal, that keeps Kelani close to the soul of the Palestinians in her music and her politics. She has forged for herself the unique role of being both part of the Palestinian cause, and in a position to criticise it, without contradiction.

That she has not yet enjoyed the fame of the World Music scene is down only to the fact that she plans every move with extreme consideration and caution. She wants to play by her own rules, even down to recording, producing and releasing the album on her own, because she is tired of compromising.

Producers, publishers and labels will undoubtedly take notice when her album is released later this year, but they should know what they’re in for: “I have reached the end of my tether with this  lot, I really have. I’ve had enough of them…and no more mister nice guy.”

© Saeed Taji Farouky 2006

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