Season 2, Episode 11: “A circle moment” ft Emel Mathlouthi

NARRATION: I first met Tunisian vocalist, songwriter, and composer Emel Mathlouthi, aka Emel, in 2015 at an iconic global music festival held every January in New York City, called globalfest. I was there performing with the Nile Project, and she was there as a solo artist that had burst onto the international touring scene in the past few years. Backstage, and fresh off our soundchecks, me and Emel ran into each other by the snack table where one of the festival producers introduced us quickly as they breezed through the room.

Now, there was a major buzz following Emel around. Folks said she had a voice like a bell that could move people to tears and to action in the streets. A voice that could ignite protest and topple dictatorships. She was called “The Voice of the Revolution”, “The Voice of the Arab Spring.” Well I had caught wind of all this, and gotten very curious. I wanted to find out how she handled those massive expectations, those massive labels.

So, there we were, by the water cooler. We said hello, and had just started to connect, but our conversation kept getting interrupted. Backstage was bustling with artists, and sound engineers, and stage managers, too many people for the room. Emel was also not alone, she had her napping baby with her, in a tall black stroller, and after a few minutes, I realized it was just going to happen.

Well, it took nearly a decade, but on an October morning in 2024, I finally got to ask her all the questions I had stored up for her and more.

Meklit: ​I was reading an interview with you from, I don't, it must have been maybe six, seven years ago and I'm gonna read back your words and, you know, please push back at any moment if you'd like to, but you said “screw political. I hate that word” and I was wondering do you embrace being an activist as a musician? Or are there stereotypes about what that word means and what kind of music is associated with it that are challenging for you?

Emel: Yeah, I think, for a long time, indeed, the word political and the word activist really pissed me off and really felt like a denigration.

Meklit: Hmm. Wow.

Emel: Of what I was doing. And I've always been revolutionary since as far as I remember from when I was a child, I always had to rebel against what was offered to me because I was never offered the space that I thought I needed.

NARRATION: I've been called a lot of things, but I cannot imagine what it feels like to be called 'the voice of the Revolution' what the weight of that label and expectation feels like, especially when you’re someone who has spent your whole life resisting labels and resisting the boxes that other people put you in. Today, we follow Emel on that journey. A journey of resistance, of reluctance, and of acceptance.

My name is Meklit and this is Movement: music and migration, remixed.

We will get to the story of the Tunisian Revolution, and the long shadow it has cast over Emel's career. But I want to honor the wholeness of Emel. Emel is the kind of person who asks “why things have been done a certain way” and is fully prepared to imagine and enact other possibilities. Even conventions she’s gone along for years.

And this trait illustrates itself perfectly on her newest album called mra, spelled simply M R A.

Meklit: I was wondering if you could tell us about the album, Mra, and why it was important to create this project entirely with women collaborators.

Emel: So, I started thinking of making a new album and at the time the record label wanted me to work with this guy, that I wasn't really convinced of. And then all of a sudden I had the realization that why does it have to be a guy every time?

Meklit: Right.

Emel: I mean, I love all the guys that I worked with and I just felt angry at myself that I didn't have the same relationship with women.

NARRATION: As that realization unfolded in Emel's mind, it quickly became more than a personal frustration. This went deep.

Emel: We grew up so much with that idea that women, you know, cannot work together. Women are rivals. It's great to be the only girl I was so proud to be the only girl in my own band. When I released my first album, I thought it was really cool. That's how, and I don't want to curse. That's how bad, that's how bad, and this was only 10 years ago.

Meklit: So it was like a lightning flash on that call with your manager where it kind of clicked into place

Emel: Yeah. And I told her you know what? I think the best way out of this is to tell them, well, I want to work with a woman.

NARRATION: Right away, her manager, who is also a woman, had doubts about the idea.

Emel: She kept saying like ,but you're not gonna work with a woman just to work with a woman. And I remember that that sentence also gave me deep discomfort. Because if I hadn't decided that I would work with a woman, I would have given up.

NARRATION: What she means is that the default option in the music business, the easy, one phone call away option, was almost always a guy. That's how it had always been, and that's how it would be unless Emel made the deliberate choice to break that pattern and do it differently.

First Emel connected with a British producer named Hannah Vasanth, who would be a partner on most of the album's tracks. But even then, actually holding to the strict all female concept was hard.

Emel: And the harder it got, the more stubborn I got.

Meklit: How was it hard, like finding them?

Emel: yeah, finding them. So you start by asking people around you and then. The same answer would come back all the time. Like, Oh, wow. I don't know any actually.

NARRATION: She needed engineers, designers, rappers, singers, instrumentalists, collaborators of all kinds. But as the album came together, one song in particular was proving hard to finish, to get just right.

Emel: The more we worked on the song, we, more we felt like it has this like really universal call, you know, to all like hold on to our power and create light. And that's where we started wanting to have horns and, you know, like more layers of strings. And that's where we got stuck.

NARRATION: More strings, more horns, more layers, meaning: more players.

Emel: And I remember towards the end of the process I was working with Hannah and you know, we needed someone, someone to do it fast and every now and then she kept saying like you sure we can't cheat, you know because I know a guy that can do this, you know in no time.

Meklit: Wow

Emel: And this happened a few times and I would sit back and reflect but I didn't think it was okay that we didn't have at least one woman. Each one of us in our circle that, you know. So it's, it's that complicated. I mean, it's not complicated, but it's that complicated to find women, you know, to work with.

NARRATION: Every time that happened, Emel insisted that they find a woman either that, or she got creative and found a way to create the sound herself.

Emel: I did some whistling and I did some guitars.

Meklit: You were like, we need more layers. And you were able to fill it in.

Emel: Yes, exactly. Yeah.

NARRATION: The finished album features thirty different women. Emel doesn't know of another album like it of this scale, where every aspect of the creation was female.

Emel told me that creativity is genderless. That music does not sound one way or another just because it was created by women. But there was a quality to the process itself that she had not experienced before, and that process almost certainly changed the final sound of the record.

Emel: I really loved the way my creation and my ideas were taken and then implemented. I really felt really uplifted all the way. In ways I haven't felt before, for sure. And I kept telling myself, wow, I really feel the real meaning of sisterhood.

NARRATION: After we'd been talking for almost an hour, we arrived at the question thats been bubbling inside me for almost a decade. I wanted to ask her about this one moment in 2011.

So in January of 2011 a protest movement erupted in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, where Emel is from. This was the very beginning of the Arab Spring, before people were even calling it that. Emel was actually in France at the time, because the dictatorship in Tunisia had banned her songs from the radio. But she returned to Tunis during those protests, then found herself at the center of them.

Meklit: Are you tired of it? Are you tired of being asked for the moment where you became the, you know, the voice of the Tunisian revolution?

Emel: Well, you know, you

Meklit: Tell me the truth.

Emel: Now you're getting me at my good moment. And I, and I think it's very smart of you as an interviewer to bring it at this point because I think that's what it's all about. And I'm going to tell you an anecdote. So I got an interview on NPR, all things considered. And this is the first time that I'm going to talk about this because for so many years, I wanted like, Oh, I'm gonna, you know, say this and say that. And then I was like, no, don't just, people were like, no, just don't say anything.

And so it's such a huge interview, right? It's such an important like milestone and the label was, you know, over the moon. Everybody was so excited. And it was a very sensitive time for me, and, you know, the moment, that you mentioned. And then the interview comes. And the first question is like, the question that you were asking right now, like, do you remember that moment when you sang in the street? And I was so pissed. I was like, no, I don't remember.

Meklit: Wow! You said that?

Emel: I don't think I said it exactly like that. But I was like, oh, it was such a long time ago. I don't remember exactly. Like, you know, like how? You know, how can you remember how you felt like eight years or seven years later, you know? And of course this is a question that was asked so many times since that moment, obviously right? But I never, I never designed, a selling story for that. It was always up to how I felt.

So that's how I, of course, they didn't run the interview. I mean, of course, not of course, they decided not to run the interview. And I was very frustrated and pissed that they didn't because I felt that it was unfair. I felt that the person that interviewed me should have tried to know me better first. Before trying to get me, you know, on the therapy chair.

So long story short, when the revolution happened, I was, I mean, of course, I was excited like everybody else, but I was like, duh, kinda. So there was like this like big, you know, group of people. And one of my friends was an activist and a lawyer. She grabbed my hand and she's like, we need you to sing “Kelmti Horra” right now for us, not, not in France. Not like in a festival, not in a concert right here, right now. We need it right now.

NARRATION: Kelmti Horra was a song Emel had written a few years earlier. The title means "my word is free." And already in the early days of the protests it had become a kind of anthem, but she hadn't been there to perform it herself.

Emel: I'm not a huge fan of, you know, singing at any kind of event. Like I'm not that person, you know, like I feel like I can't impose, you know? It's not about me.

Meklit: But you were asked, you were requested.

Emel: So I was, yeah, almost, almost instructed. So I was like, all right, I have to do it. And then I started singing words and melodies flow, you know, from my voice.

NARRATION: There is a video of this moment that went viral. Emel is in a red coat with a red scarf and a red clip in her hair. At first Emel glances around at the crowd, then she reaches for a candle that almost turns the scene into a vigil. It's a small moment, really just between Emel and the people right around her, but it's being captured, and will spread much farther than she could possibly know.

Emel: And I don't know, like it was such a fast and strange and intense moment. And I just like sang from my heart and then I left.

NARRATION: Just hours later, the president of Tunisia fled the country. A dam had broken, and Emel's voice would be part of the soundtrack for everything that followed. But it's good to remember how it felt in that moment. It did not feel historic, the seconds didn't stretch into hours. Emel sang, then it was over.

Emel: You know, so basically my feelings were, you know, what is going to happen? Is somebody, you know, gonna, hit me or like, you know, it was fear actually. It was a lot of fear. And it's so funny, but I don't think I've ever talked about it this way. I don't think I've ever really narrowed it down to fear. Yeah. I was, I was scared, but at the same time, I can see how people look at it and see like, wow, that's, that was so empowering. And so. You know, you seemed like very confident and that's where music is powerful because it gives you those invisible wings, you know? No matter what the circumstance. You know, you have your invisible armor.

Meklit: It's so interesting. I just, I just want to connect it a little bit to what you were saying before, because what I'm feeling is like that message of justice, that message of what should this world be, That spirit is in every, it's, it just is in the entire arc of your work. I get that people want to bring you back to this moment and thank you for speaking to it so beautifully and in this way that you haven't before. But you know, I just want you to know that I don't want to reduce you. And it's just, to me, it seems like it's just who you are and it's in the entire arc of every time you sing.

Emel: Thank you. Wow. Thank you so much.

NARRATION: Emel told me that it's just in the last few years that she has made peace with the fact that she is an activist, and an artist. That even after being put in that box again and again and feeling the need to break out of it, she also realized how incredible it was to have a voice that can act in the world and move people to action. It's always been who she is, but she's not resisting it anymore. She is actively putting herself and her music in spaces where people want to take action and are seeking inspiration.

Last year Emel took a trip to Palestine, to the occupied West Bank. And immediately she felt a connection with the people there.

Emel: Like I don't want to speak, you know, like in a cliche mode, but I truly felt that every moment was a celebration, you know? Of togetherness, of culture, of life, you know, like nothing felt, nothing felt trivial.

Meklit: And did you perform there? Did you sing?

Emel: So I performed in Bethlehem, I performed in Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, and I performed in Ramallah.

Meklit: Mmm.

Emel: And then when I went in and I started rehearsing for the show, I realized how many of my songs were actually inspired by the Palestinian struggle and by the Palestinian, you know, quest for freedom. I think it's inter, intertwined with my own quest for freedom, my country's quest for freedom. And I realized like how much of an extra meaning every song of mine took once I performed there

Meklit: Wow

Emel: and how much meaningful it was for the audience to witness that. And I, I got a lot of like, you know, you gave us joy and hope for years and years to come.

Meklit: Wow. What a circle.

Emel: Yeah. Yeah. It was really a circle, a circle moment for me, for sure.

NARRATION: Emel's new album is called MRA, you can find it wherever you listen.

After our conversation, I could not stop thinking about that story Emel told of singing in the streets of Tunis during the revolution. I decided to go back and watch the video of that moment again. When she first started to sing, she looked so hesitant, unsure, her eyes darting around. A crowd of protesters was chanting rhythmically in the distance, but the people around her were crouched, stretching to listen. Emel delivered a serenade like no other.

Then I ask myself, after everything Emel has told me, why can’t I stop thinking about this? Somehow I still come back to that January day in 2011. This episode does that too. Am I doing to her what pretty much every journalist has done to her? Am I putting her in a box? Mm it is uncomfortable to sit with that thought, so to process it, I throw on MRA and I listen again. Top to bottom. Headphones on, I dance, I shout, I sing along. I’m on the journey of the record.

And I think it’s hard to let the people that we admire be more than one thing. To let them change and grow. But I also feel absolutely sure that we have to resist that urge. I have to resist it.

As for Emel, it’s clear to me that she has made peace with the fact that she’s forever bound up in that moment in Tunis. She knows she’s on a lifelong artistic path so she refuses to be reduced to any one moment, no matter how powerful that moment was.

Movement is produced by Ian Coss and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our editor is Megan Tan. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World. We are supported by the Mellon Foundation and distributed by PRX.

If you enjoyed this story, consider sending it to a friend, or leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. Believe me, this stuff really does help people find the show. If you happen to be curious about my albums, or performances, you can learn more at meklitmusic.com. Movement will be back with new episodes every other Tuesday through the fall.