I want to tell you what I know, or what I think I know.
I am not an expert in anything, but I am a musician enmeshed in music since childhood. And over the years I tried to transfer on records and cassettes some of my vision.
With each new work I start from zero, on a white page, as if I am completely ignorant: another leap in the dark, another leap off a high rock.
Music is like oxygen, it moves around us. And it is the ear’s eye when we cannot design music’s meaning with words. Music’s only meaning resides in itself.
I travel to countries whose languages I do not speak well, but music rescues me, because it is a language easily understood between nations and peoples, and is in no need of translation. Perhaps music is the higher language of human knowledge, or the universal language of mankind.
My friends, tonight I feel a real distress of becoming one of those who talk too much. I think musicians should not speak. A musician should embrace his instrument to enact love and utter his obsession and madness. But today, your tender tribute has tripped me into the trap of words, even though I have no enmity with words. Words have always been part and parcel of my artistic project. And I am a lover who does not cease from luring the words to dance on the strings. Yet I will not overlook the anxiety of confronting creativity’s questions, and the angst of a reality with which we collide.
I don’t say I am right about what I think. No one can be right without being wrong. I also don’t claim I add anything new.
Thousands of light years separate me from an adolescence packed with dreams in that beautiful costal village in Mount Lebanon, where I was part of that nature and that bright pastoral sun, where in my youth I used to hum melodies of folk memories and transform them unto poems I read in school books.
I take memory back to that distant childhood when I brought that bamboo chair and tied nylon threads to it, tuned it to the major scale and thrummed it with ten fingers. That’s how I discovered my first guitar. I turned an old bamboo chair from a rest of the body to a spiritual respite. The chair that had been forgotten in a corner in the attic of the house. As soon as I found it on one forlorn night, melody streamed. Did the neglected bamboo chair possess all this sorrow?
After a while the oud entered our little house and replaced my instruments of tables, bamboo chair, pots, and empty milk cans. I used to see the oud in photos and listen to it on the radio, but to be with it in one house, and mine?
The day that Syrian oud arrived was a real festival. And I immediately abandoned my home-made instruments and started strumming the oud, without knowing how to tune it. With a falcon’s plume I’d pick on the strings whichever way my hand swayed over the taut or loose strings.
The lunatic oud did not isolate me as much as smite and annihilate me. To devour that sleeping, smooth string, like a woman’s body after making love, to devour it with the tip of the sharpened plume that mediates the meeting between strings and fingers. And the plume delves deeper. Strings of reed and silk rage with the depth. I’d pick the sol mode and sound would expand, followed by echo, as the oud, fragile and pouncing, advances.
A ring that melts in a pick that exits the interior of one person to enter other countless interiors. And the oud, the burning lover, absorbs the boundaries of the plume’s pick that mingle with the boundaries of melody.
I used to wonder: How did all these forests manage to sprout all these trees that become seductive creatures like the oud? It was my beautiful magnificent mother who provided me with the opportunity to determine me future and join the National Conservatory of Music during high school. She encouraged me to study music, even though my kindhearted father had other plans for me, away from music.
Shortly thereafter I was stunned with the outbreak of civil war that uprooted me from my village, distanced me from those hands that loved me, snatch me away from my bed and my family’s embrace. I was still green then. I carried my oud and migrated.
And it was Paris and its moods. And my project in singing and composing the contemporary poetic text, and the Promises from the Storm, my first collection.
And through Rita’s eyes, and my mother’s bread, I searched for my passport that bears no photo, no rhythm, no phrase, and no poem, no instruments or concepts. I had no desire in learning the future with the clarity of the metal with which the conservatives armed themselves. It’s a clarity that rivals merciless chains. And they were right, those conservatives, to call all this music of mine: destruction and ruin. I liked that, and no one could sway or prevent me from my act.
These were mysterious beginnings that tell of a more mysterious future that does not claim constancy or seek it. I had repressed dreams and imagination. And Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was revealed for me and written for me. His mother’s bread was like my mother’s bread. And so were his Rita’s eyes, and his Joseph’s pain from the betrayal of his brothers, his passport that bears my own face, his olive grove, his sand, his sparrows and chains, his stations and trains, his cowboys and native Americans, all of them, all were residents of my depths.
There were enough dreams along with Darwish’s poetry to awaken the world. It was a bridge of love in this desolate universe.
One year later I returned to Beirut an enthusiastic, idealistic, and foolish young man. I returned from my coerced first exile to change the world through music and song. Back then Beirut was boiling with dreams and ideas, book fairs, exhibits, and cafes.
And the years started to pass in Beirut. A city that was filled with mystery, a city that constituted for me and many others like me, a safe haven amid an internal storm. It was a charged time combined with creative paucity.
And I stuck to and by Beirut and tried to grasp what was sudden and exceptional. Then I started with my ensemble, al-Mayadine, to play concerts in all the city’s quarters. Our first performance gathered 400 people, and soon our concerts filled stadiums with 40,000 people.
The years kept on passing after 1976, as did the tours from the sun’s east to its west. Artistic tours of an entirely new kind, whether in their purpose or their arrangement. We were clear in declaring war on the chains and manacles placed on the Arab. The chains of political and cultural oppression. We toured cities inhabited with thousands who resembled us, immigrants who wanted to make a living, earn their dispossessed bread. Arabs who came from their countries for various reasons. We met them in those tours, lived together and shared bread with them. We discussed deep national concerns. And our concerts were only a crowning of that profound bond that reflected the details of a mutual existence. Countless immigrants who love their countries, but the harsh exile and estrangement took them away.
But time passes and longing returns, in longing, and they spend year after year, like those immigrants who preceded them in the previous century, waiting to return. The years grow distant with time, and the image of home or country grows distant and becomes a song or a photo album where glimpses of the original beautiful land are scattered: here’s one with Palestine, another with Syria or Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt side by side with his loved one, or an image with Iraq or North Africa etc etc. Images and photos that fade with the years as the faces fade and the language fractures in an accent that mixes with another language. Even language was lost as the years were lost in estrangement.
We turned the cities like pages, one after another. We would stand in line like the lyrics of an anthem, in airports where passports were stacked in front of the customs officer who asks: Do you come from the East? And he’d stare into the face and features, into the passport and the entry visa, and check his computer. Everything is clear: the sun that has tanned the skin a bit, the black eyes, and the language. We’d line up like an anthem on a white page. We’d enter one by one, to the computer’s desire. That’s fine. We’d flip the pages of cities and line up like an anthem on the music sheet and head to our next task, despite the difficulties and the similarities in expressions among the cities.
And thousands would return. They would return to their spontaneity, in their villages in Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan and North Africa. They’d return to each Arab village and city, they’d return without boundaries.
And we continue to flip the cities page by page. Cross all the borders in search of real countries. Countries where the Human lives, without sects or tribes.
