Reem writes: Arab musicologist Elias Sahab encouraged me to listen to recitations of the Quran and Eastern Christian chants alike to learn Arabic melodic modes. Elias also taught me to link every mode with a certain mood, a state of
being. In a similar way, the music of migrant communities in the UK is a manifestation of a state of being.
A trip to St. Sarkis Church in Kensington refreshed my ears with the
haunting modal chants of Armenian music. The sacred took me, as usual, to
the secular, when I joined a group of Armenian mothers in their community
centre in Acton. They sang about the mountains and lullabies of their
homeland. The children at the Sunday school gave me vigorous renditions of
the same songs. For the Armenians the Bible, their historic homeland and their identity have kept them going across generations and amid persecution: My Book, My Mountain, Myself.
Ben Burt, Educational Curator at the British Museum where I give workshops
on Palestinian music, encouraged me to contact a group of women from the
Micronesian islands of Kiribati, who are married to English men and live all
over the UK. "They teach each other and their children traditional song and
dance." This lured me to Fareham near Southampton, where the I-Kiribati
women were meeting to commemorate a family death. As in a traditional
'maneaba' assembly house, the women sang about unrequited love and the sea.
They laughed, cried, danced and welcomed me into this celebration of a life
that was and the life that is. Their islands may be threatened by rising sea
levels, yet they dream of the same sea transporting them back to their
Pacific idyll: Islands Here, Islands There.
When I was a teenager, I heard this ethereal voice singing about 'saudade'.
The singer was Amália Rodrigues, described by the Portuguese as the 'Voice of Portugal's Soul'. She was
singing about longing and yearning. Was it a coincidence that in Arabic, the
word for 'melancholic' is 'saudawi'? The Portuguese people I met in London
have Amália's name and music instilled in their collective memory of
homeland. From the pain of 'saudade' musicians, waiters and professionals
juxtapose their happiness and sadness through their music, as they cope with
life away from Portugal. Sounds fatalistic, but so is their urban musical
style, Fado. Like Amália once sang: A Strange Way of Living.
As for me, I can only think of what Palestinian poet Salma Khadra Jayyusi wrote:
"The Arab soul was annihilated by nostalgia, and revived by memory." But is
this not the story of the music of migrants, and of mankind?
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