Episode 12: “Separating Our Culture From Our Trauma” featuring Alsarah
This week we are featuring a conversation with a dear friend of mine named Alsarah.
Alsarah: Hi, my name is Alsarah. I am from Sudan and I live in Brooklyn, New York. I'm a singer songwriter, reluctant ethnomusicologist, but I am one and I like to think of myself as a frustrated traditionalist with a future vision.
Meklit: Ooo! That introduction was so juicy! First I have to ask, why
We recorded that conversation earlier this year, before war broke out in Sudan. In a way though, what’s happening in Sudan has not made what Alsarah and I talked about any less relevant. If anything, Alsarah’s reflections and her work feel more important now than ever. So before we get into what she and I talked about earlier this year, I want to share this personal note from Alsarah about what is happening right now in September, 2023:
Audio memo update from Alsarah: So... While this interview was recorded before the war began in Khartoum, everything about it was almost in anticipation of this happening. I see this moment in history as the beginning of the end of 30 plus years of violence all over the country. From brutal war criminal to the next, over the years everything was stolen, destroyed, and burned, and now the fires have reached the capital, Khartoum.
A city that hasn't seen war for hundreds of years and enjoyed the limited benefits of housing the warring leaders of that nation, e. g. stability and the limited infrastructure we have. And even that is now burned, displacing more than 5 million people in less than 6 months. Current estimates say Sudan has over 7 million people internally displaced, making it the highest number in the world. There is nothing left to burn, so surely the fire will die. Surely this is the beginning of the end. At least that's what I tell myself.
MEMO from Alsarah: Starting with the track Farasha and many more projects, which I think will come out down the road, I have decided to begin the work of separating our culture from our trauma. Both for myself and anyone else that really cares to join me in this journey. So we can begin to heal from a violence that began before many of us were even born. So we can begin the new archive of who we were, are, and will be.
Let's learn our history. Let's face our failures and take accountability. Let's be radically tender in the face of this hurt. This is our time to build a home finally large enough. For our multitude of selves, Sudan is for all of us, not just some of us. And I hope this is the beginning of that.
Coming up, we hear how Alsarah puts all that into practice as a creator, visionary, and a scholar. And we hear how that work culminates in her most recent track, Farasha.
My name is Meklit and this is Movement, music and migration remixed.
Meklit: When I think of you as an artist and a reluctant ethnomusicologist. I think of you as a person who's really thinking about systems. Can you talk about that? Can you talk about what it means to be a person who builds systems?
Alsarah: I mean, I think a person who builds systems is an extension of a person who builds communities. You know, they're all just parts of that same thing.
To me a system is, is a community that can self-sustain and self-feed. And I think I'm really sensitive to that because I was born into a collapsed system.
Meklit: Mmm.
Alsarah: You know, coming, being born in Sudan at the time that I was born. And in watching several governments collapse before the coup even happened in 1989. I, before the coup, I saw two governments collapse.
And then after that, in my lifetime, I saw our economy collapse at least three or four times with three different changes of money. I moved to Yemen and I saw that entire system collapse and then moved here and saw a system that's really being propped up. But on the ground level, it's completely kind of broken.
And so I've been privileged enough to be, I feel like, adopted into communities that were really sensitive to the idea that they have to create their own systems.
Meklit: Mmm.
Alsarah: You know, cuz it's like a lot of times as you're growing up, you're being sold and fed the idea that so much of the bad things happening around you and to you are somehow kind of your.
Meklit: Mm-hmm
Alsarah: Like poverty is poor people's faults. Corruption in Africa is African's faults. It's always about victim blaming.
Meklit: Mm-hmm.
Alsarah: Instead of really looking at the outside systems that are feeding off of your collapse. So, I don't know. I feel like I'm sensitive to it because of my who I am. It's like one, one of the sacred gifts of being a refugee is this deep-rooted, I think, knowledge that you can't exist without the others around you. Because at one point your existence really wasn't guaranteed.
Meklit: Yeah. I really identify with so much of what you just said. And by the way, that was incredibly beautifully put. Like, even if the word refugee is kind of like a funny cape. Or like a funny, like a, or a role. The experience of having seen society collapse or live through that does not ever leave you. What, what's your relationship to the word refugee?
Alsarah: Ooh, it is a tense one and in progress. So glad you asked me,
Meklit: Yeah?
Alsarah: Yeah, I really am because I had a really tense relationship with this word. Cuz at first I thought of it as a paperwork status that you just kind of get to tick off and move on to the next paperwork, until I realized that people didn't look at me like that. People started to look at that experience of mine as, I don't know how to explain it. Almost like, almost the way that people would look at your ethnicity. Like it's who I am.
Meklit: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. .
Alsarah: I am only that. So I stopped telling people for a long time that I had gone through that experience because I didn't want the pity party that went with it. And the assumption was that if you were a refugee at any one point, it had to happen in this one specific way that they see in all of those ads that they see from UNHCR that you lived in a tent and your goat got shot up with you holding it or something and you're crying and you're not sure if you have your kidneys still and then you showed up here
Meklit: And there's flies on your eyes.
Alsarah: Exactly all the time and like, and that that's the only way you become a refugee and that you never stop once it happens to you like that. It's just this is your permanent place of being. So for a while I became ashamed of the word. I didn't wanna say it out loud. I felt real shame around it. But now I've reached a place where I'm just, I feel like it's really important for me to bring it up.
And to bring it up on my own terms and to define it in my own way. To really show people what a temporary space it is. To really show people we're not a minority. We're not exceptional. The majority of the world is going through displacement. The majority of the world, we are the future normal. And so, I am now embracing it from that different space of really wanting to make sure that not only do I own it and honor it, but I don't allow other people to define it for me or for others.
Meklit: Yes. I just wanna say that because I feel so much of there's, I identify with so much of what you said, and I also struggled with the word refugee. And also came to my own space of strength around it. But I think one of the things that I struggled with the most was there, the sha, like I always felt, you know, earlier in my life, I felt like the word refugee had a kind of partner or it had a binary partner.
And the binary partner was the invisible white savior who had saved you, you know what I mean? Like white savior, refugee, and like kind of went together, you know what I mean? And, but nobody would use that word. But then it would be like, what would really annoy me was like, if I would say that word, white people who would really believe in America would feel really proud of themselves. We saved you. We saved you.
Alsarah: Exactly. And they expected gratitude. You're supposed to somehow carry in your heart for this nation. And I was like. And I'm like, if it wasn't for the bullshit of this nation and your ancestors, I wouldn't be here in the first place.
Meklit: I'm laughing so that I don't cry. You know, like it's
Alsarah: It's just like I don't owe you shit.
Meklit: Right. Right.
Alsarah: For you to expect me to walk around with a sense of gratitude that you allowed me to live. I was like, what are you telling me? That living, being alive is a privilege? Is that what it is? And only exceptional brown and black people get to have it.
Meklit: We should write a song about this
Alsarah: I wanna call it. I Didn't Come All The Way From Africa To Be Disrespected.
Meklit: We should talk about music.
Alsarah: Oh yeah, we should talk about music.
Meklit: So you, when you, when you introduced yourself, you gave, well, several things. But you did, you said a reluctant ethnomusicologist and then you said something about retro futurist. Like what is that? Tell me about that.
Alsarah: I refer to myself as a frustrated traditionalist with a futurist.
Meklit: That's what it was.
Alsarah: Outlook.
Meklit: That's what it was.
Alsarah: Here's the thing, time is not linear. Let's start there. Traditional things are Pop. That's just old pop. And I'm a traditionalist because I firmly believe in learning from the past. Of like of those who came before you. There is no reason for me to reinvent the wheel if somebody already did.
You know? Taking from your roots is just simply as that. Like, oh, now you know, somebody already invented the wheel. How about you just make handlebars for it instead of making the wheel again? Cuz the wheel's there. You know? That's how I think of tradition.
I'm a frustrated traditionalist because I feel like I'm constantly dealing with so called traditionalists that are absolutely not of the same mindset as me.I like to think of them as I refer to them as the folk Nazis. And those are the people that are obsessed with this idea of purity and this idea of making sure things are authentic.
And while I have a lot of respect for preservation, preservation is not an action you need like thousands and millions of people for. You just kind of need, like, a computer and, like, a bunch of hard drives at this point.
Like, but you need for people to do is what they've always done. Like traditions are invented, culture is made up. We make it up. And it changes with every breath you take, it changes with every interaction you have with the culture itself. And that's what makes traditions alive. There is traditions in chat rooms, whatever new thing you have. Like Snapchat has a culture now, you know, like in a hundred years, I promise you Rihanna's going to be traditional, I promise. Like. Just let enough time pass.
Meklit: I love to tell the story, so forgive me if you've heard me say it before, but the listeners haven't. The, I once saw Ngugi Wa Thiong'o speak. It was probably about 2009, and he was say, he was like, you know, some British photographer went to South Africa in 1910 and took a snapshot of a Zulu warrior and said, this is what Zulu warriors wear. And then that photo was in the British Museum saying, Zulu Warrior.
And he said, how do you know that was not just the latest fashion? Or that it was the neighborhoods? Or whatever it was. And his, the he, he titled his talk, There's No Such Thing as the Anthropological African. And I just loved that. And I always, I just love that. But I would love to hear from you. Like in your music, how do you work with tradition?
Alsarah: In my music, I work with tradition by treating it as the same as I treat any of the current pop music. To me, it's just, it's excellent pop music that I like. I don't like all of it. I see nothing sacred about, or need, like I have no desire to like all of it, even in myself. And so for me, I pick and choose what I like from it.
Meklit: Mm-hmm.
Alsarah: You know, I take the little bits that I like, and I learn it. And I try to learn it in a way that honors the process of learning. You know, like, learn something for real, for real. Like, I always, I like, I like to say this often, so forgive me if you've heard it a lot, but the listeners haven't. The difference between, for me, the difference between appropriation and appreciation is knowledge. So self-awareness is really key to me.
Meklit: Mm-hmm
Alsarah: Which is why I'm very much the first to be like, I'm not a traditional artist.
Meklit: Right
Alsarah: Because this isn't how, that's not my practice. That's not what I do. I am a pop artist who loves traditional music. It's voices from the past coming to tell you that you're not alone in this experience. You know? And that's a gift. That's a gift from your ancestors. Remember, our ancestors didn't just give us trauma. They also gave us lessons. Like, so for me it's traditions are just, it's, I don't know. It's my joy.
Meklit: Mm-hmm.
Alsarah: It's my roots, but it is not the only outfit I wear.
Meklit: Right.
Alsarah: I think of songwriting as more like song listening. I really think of myself as tuning in to a frequency. And you're just trying to, like, you're playing with the dial, you know? I don't know if you remember those old school radios, you know, you're playing around with the dial. I like, I tune in and there's usually one word that comes, and that one word unlocks everything for me.
Meklit: Can you give us, can you give us an example, like what was the last unlocking word that came to you or one that you want to talk about or feel comfortable talking about?
Alsarah: This last year, I released a small independent project called Mesafa, where I really needed to write softly.
Meklit: Mm-hmm.
Alsarah: I don't know, like I felt a need to express a softness in me that I had kept locked up for a really long time. And it cracked open for me with this one sentence. This thing, it smells like, it smells like wet grass. That's what the sa, this feeling is, and the feeling is the smell of wet grass. How do I make that happen outside of me?
Meklit: Mm-hmm.
Alsarah: And for me it was, I was listening to this old traditional song. This old traditional Sydney song from the wedding Cannon. Called Fera3 AlRayhan. Goes like this, Min fera3 alban en tena.
Fera3 Alban is this bendy thing, and there's another song called Fare Al Rayhan that's also about this idea of a loose and bendy beautiful creature.
Meklit: Mm-hmm.
Alsarah: And as the, the idea of the rayhan, which is the Arabic word for basil, kept coming in my mind. I realized that this, this soft, wet grass that I wanted to express was, how would it, how would basil, and wet grass, and bendiness, and softness sound in Brooklyn? And then I started writing the song Sway.
Sway ended up being this, to me, a continuation of that thought. And it continued in Arabic and English together. And it was the first time I was writing seamlessly between the two languages. One in and out of the, because it took me a while to learn to sing in English, to be honest.
Meklit: Hmm. What is, what, say more about that.
Alsarah: Well, you know, every language has a melody, right?
Meklit: Yes.
Alsarah: And we, and that melody of the language is, you can hear it clearly in the melodies that come around that language. That come out of that language, out of those cultures. And I learned English when I was 12. So for me it was, it was the alien sound in my mouth.
And even though I became fluent in it really quickly in terms of vocabulary, grammar, understanding. I didn't understand the melody of it for a long time. Really like understand the feeling of it. And also for a long time there is this pressure to sing in English on me. There was a lot of pressure on me. If I wanna make it in America, you need to sing in English, you need to do this, you can.
And I really didn't want that. And I didn't think that there was any issue with what's wrong with singing in Arabic in a bar in Brooklyn. I didn't.
Meklit: Right.
Alsarah: I was like, I go listen to people singing every language in a bar in Brooklyn. Why can't we do that? And as time moved on though, I realized I had pigeoned myself.
Meklit: Hmm
Alsarah: I had pigeonholed myself in, into thinking I shouldn't be singing in English. I can only sing in Arabic. And so I've kind of been slowly coming out of that. And for me, that was like the, you know, a big step of really pushing myself, for me to also encompass all the parts of me, for me to be the mosaic of all that I am. It was the natural next step to show the rest of who I am.
For her latest project, Farasha, that process of experimenting with tradition, took a very different path, and a very different form. It began about ten years ago, when Alsarah was in Sudan making field recordings for a documentary film.
Alsarah: And I was the resident ethnomusicologist in the project, and I went on the ground in Maban and the Yusuf Battel Refugee Camp in the Nuba Mountains to kind of conduct interviews and kind of gather stories and sounds.
In this case, the latest cases of a fighting that were happening really brought a whole bunch of groups of people back to their traditions after they were losing them. There was a lot of people that didn't even speak their tribal languages until they came to the camps together because they were living in big urban centers, speaking Arabic to one another.
Meklit: Mm-hmm
Alsarah: So the war actually revived. Traditions in this sense.
Meklit: Wow
Alsarah: And it brought back a lot of traditions because people were all of a sudden gathered in these one places. It also gave birth to new traditions in the camps. So it was honestly, it was the most lit place I've ever been music wise.
Meklit: Wow
Alsarah: So, there was always music exploding and music is a very social activity, and so there would be big crowds that would gather and everyone would sing together in the backing up chorus. So you had the singer, who would lead the songs, but everyone was an active participant in keeping the song going.
So I had a bunch of these kinds of songs and I would write little notes about where I gathered them, who was in the middle of the circle, what were they doing, that kind of stuff. And for me, it became really As I was gathering all these sounds, I was just like, how do we, how do we take this cultural property, which to me, like a big part of the dilemma of being an ethnographer, or recording, or gathering field recordings especially, is the idea of ownership. Who gets to own this.
So for me, it was really all about finding a way to take these recordings and bringing them back home. How do we use our own cultural property to feed our own culture to create new movements in it? And so I hit up a friend of mine who is Sudanese also, who's a music producer and electronic hip hop music producer. And I gave him one of the samples to create a track out of. And I just, I was just like, do your thing. There's no boundaries. There's nothing do your thing.
And he sent it back to me and I was like, love this. Now I'm going to write to it. So what I want you to do is take this part out, that part out and this part out.
And then we were like, you know, it's missing somebody else, another voice. And he suggested Flipter, who is a prolific Sudanese rapper and is kind of established his own Sudanese rap sound. He raps only in Arabic and in Sudanese dialect of Arabic and in a very Daddy G way. And he invented a sound called Dugar.
And the idea is to show in a direct example, how you take something very traditional and you create something new format that's undoubtedly an unmistakably an extension of it, recreation from tradition.
That is Alsarah performing the track Farasha. You can find the incredible music video for that song on YouTube. It’s spelled F A R A S H A.
If you enjoyed this story, then consider sending it to a friend, or leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. Folks, that stuff really does help people find the show. Movement is produced by Ian Coss and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World. We are supported by The Mellon Foundation, by The National Geographic Society and distributed by PRX.