Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa

A Postcolonial Outlook

Walid El Hamamsy, Mounira Soliman, Walid El Hamamsy, Mounira Soliman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136228070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur des Nahen Ostens

This book explores the body and the production process of popular culture in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa, Turkey, and Iran in the first decade of the 21st century, and up to the current historical moment. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and cultural issues in film, cartoons, music, dance, photo-tattoos, graphic novels, fiction, and advertisements. Contributors to the volume span an array of specializations ranging across literary, postcolonial, gender, media, and Middle Eastern studies and contextualize their views within a larger historical and political moment, analyzing the emergence of a popular expression in the Middle East and North Africa region in recent years, and drawing conclusions pertaining to the direction of popular culture within a geopolitical context. The importance of this book lies in presenting a fresh perspective on popular culture, combining media that are not often combined and offering a topical examination of recent popular production, aiming to counter stereotypical representations of Islamophobia and otherness by bringing together the perspectives of scholars from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines. The collection shows that popular culture can effect changes and alter perceptions and stereotypes, constituting an area where people of different ethnicities, genders, and orientations can find common grounds for expression and connection.

Part I

Popular Culture and the Aesthetics of Political Resistance

1 Palestinian Rap

Against the Struggle Paradigm¹

Ted Swedenburg

Since the early aughts, numerous US and European mainstream media outlets, including music magazines, have published sympathetic reports about Palestinian hip-hop.² New York director Jackie Salloum’s documentary about Palestinian rap, Slingshot Hip Hop, screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and aired on the Sundance TV channel, is now available on DVD (2009).³ Rap music has also become a commonplace at Palestine solidarity events in the US, and rappers from Palestine are frequently featured. Arguably, Palestinian rap has received far more attention in the West to date than any other musical genre from Palestine.

Much of this media interest at first seemed prompted by Palestinian rap’s apparent strangeness or novelty. It was strange for Western reporters unfamiliar with the scene to find Palestinians, stereotypically known for terrorism and violence, doing something so familiar, so ‘normal’ as rapping. As journalist Richard Poplak observed, “[H] ip-hop in Palestine seemed, at least on the surface, like a freakish pop-cultural glitch” (207). Political activists for their part appear to have embraced Palestinian rap, at least in part, as a vehicle for bringing the question of Palestine to the US public in an appealing manner. Some scholars seem similarly motivated. Mark Levine, professor of history at University of California-Irvine, observed, for instance, “It’s so hard to get through the reality of Palestinians’ day-to-day life to an American audience. But how you can do it is through the back door. And the easiest back door because of its cultural importance is hip-hop. So if Palestinians can do hip-hop and sound so good at it maybe they are a bit like us. And so maybe we should listen to their story” (“Protest Rap from Gaza”).

Sympathetic academic (as well as some media) accounts of Palestinian rap for their part have been guided, in large part, by what might be called the struggle, or resistance, paradigm, the model that has informed most approaches to popular culture in Palestine/Israel (Stein and Swedenburg). According to this influential line of thinking, the battle for Palestinian rights is so pressing that to devote research energies to something so seemingly irrelevant or frivolous as popular culture would be downright irresponsible. The paradigm dovetails with still-prevalent disciplinary models that regard popular culture as epiphenomenal, as an effect of more fundamental and significant forces—economic, political, military, diplomatic, and so on. Finally, because popular culture is mostly market based, profit oriented, and linked to global economic and cultural forces, Palestine scholars and activists have tended to regard pop cultural manifestations as corrupted, inauthentic, foreign, and even as manifestations of disloyalty to the cause. So the study of Palestinian expressive culture has mostly focused on either high culture or folklore, both considered to be more serious and genuine and uncompromised by commodification and globalization.

It might appear, at first glance, that by paying serious attention to rap, today’s Palestine activists and scholars are, at last, deviating from the resistance paradigm logic. But, on closer inspection, it turns out that is not the case. Only aspects of Palestinian rap that promote the cause of Palestine are deemed worthy of attention and promotion, and therefore sympathetic accounts focus almost exclusively on rap’s role in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. The title of a recent article in The Electronic Intifada about Ramallah rapper boikutt (discussed below) is symptomatic of this tendency: “Music as Resistance Inside the Ramallah Bubble” (Smith).

My concern here is to highlight what might be overlooked or occluded by this narrow approach to Palestinian rap that is especially endemic among progressive scholars and activists, who tend to regard the Palestinian as synonymous with the counter-hegemonic (Stein 99). The Palestinian rap artists I discuss below certainly do write rhymes that comment on the extraordinary and difficult conditions under which they live. When asked to comment on what their music is about, moreover, these artists take care to insist that their aims are political. But they also have other purposes and aspirations that tend to be ignored or downplayed in the rush to promote the issue of Palestine. They desire to be appreciated as artists, and in particular, as rap artists who participate in a global cultural movement. In order to convey their messages effectively, moreover, it is incumbent upon them to do so in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and sensible to listeners. Mark Levine (cited above) argues that, in order to convey the on-the-ground reality to foreign listeners, Palestinian rap must sound “good.” By this logic, then, for Palestinian hip-hop to be politically effective, it cannot only be about ‘the message’. Rap simply cannot be appealing if it only involves chanting slogans whose meanings are transparent. In order to win over audiences, both local and foreign, Palestinian rappers must necessarily be concerned with aesthetics, with the production of ‘good art’.

Besides attending to such questions, I also want to complicate the rap-equals-struggle approach in other ways. I argue for going beyond a single-minded focus on rap lyrics, typically understood as conveyors of self-evident meanings, and in favor of considering the possibility that the words of Palestinian rap songs might have polyvalent meanings. I suggest that the audiences for this music are heterogeneous, including Palestinians of many varieties, international sympathizers, open-minded as well as potentially empathetic Israeli Jews, and so on. I approach Palestinian hip-hop therefore as relatively autonomous of the resistance struggle rather than as derivative of or subordinate to political movements or economic trajectories. By widening the analysis of Palestinian hip-hop beyond politics, narrowly construed, we might expand our understandings and appreciation of what Palestinian rap is all about, as well as our conceptions of resistance itself. My approach here is meant to be suggestive and not definitive. I do not attempt to survey Palestinian rap, but opt instead to focus on three rap groups, whose work I, and other fans, consider to be ‘good’.

DAM: Not One Revolver against a Plate of Beans

I start with DAM, the best-known Palestinian rap ensemble, who hail from the ‘mixed’ (Jewish-Arab) city of Lod in Israel and are often regarded as the quintessential Palestinian resistance band. (The ‘first’ Palestinian rap group was MWR, a group from the ‘mixed’ Israeli city of Acre, which has since disbanded.) The more well-known DAM has become, particularly in solidarity circles, the more hegemonic and insistent have become claims about the group’s political significance. The band’s very name, however, suggests something more. In Arabic, DAM (dām) stands for “enduring” or “everlasting.” But by the band’s own account, DAM also stands for “blood” in Hebrew (dam, םאד) and for “Da Arabian MC’s” in English. That is, the band’s denomination reflects its origins in a country where Hebrew is the hegemonic language, as well as its goal of communicating with Hebrew speakers and not merely speakers of Arabic. The English name, moreover, positions DAM within a global hip-hop network.

DAM, furthermore, did not emerge fully formed as a ‘Palestinian’ band that ‘represents’ the crime- and drug-ridden Arab neighborhoods of Lod (El-Asmar) and Palestinian citizens of Israel more generally. Its origins, in fact, are in the Jewish-Israeli rap scene. DAM’s leader Tamer Nafar began his rap career in 1998, performing as a protégé of well-known Jewish-Israeli rapper Subliminal (Ya’akov “Kobi” Shimoni), who is of middle-class Tunisian-Iranian background (Korat). Nafar formed his own group DAM with his brother Suheil and their friend Muhammad Jrere in 1999, but as late as 2000 the trio still performed in concerts with Subliminal and other Jewish-Israeli rappers, typically as guests invited onstage toward the end of a show to perform a few songs, mostly in Hebrew. DAM released several of its own songs online, starting with numbers in Hebrew and English and, somewhat later, in Arabic, and put out a self-produced, limited edition CD, called Stop Selling Drugs (Allen 113). DAM’s early raps focused on issues like the narcotics and the dealers infesting their community, and not on ‘politics’. According to Tamer, the group stressed such local issues because he wanted to succeed in the Israeli scene (Forrest 73). This avoidance of ‘politics’ may also have been connected to the group’s close ties to Subliminal and his posse. A scene in the documentary Channels of Rage, which examines the tearing apart of Tamer and Subliminal’s relationship, is revelatory in this regard. Tamer is shown on stage supporting Subliminal in spring 2000, rapping alongside his patron as the latter declaims right-wing, nationalist rhymes that express disdain for the ‘peace process’ and include the following: “[T]he country’s still dangling like a cigarette in Arafat’s mouth.”

DAM’s relation to ‘politics’ shifted dramatically after the second intifada erupted in the Occupied Territories on September 28, 2000. On October 1, large numbers of Palestinian citizens of Israel went out to demonstrate in support of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and were met by fierce Israeli police repression, which resulted in the deaths of thirteen protesters. DAM’s raps became more militant and nationalistic. Shortly after the events, DAM released “Mīn Irhābī?” (Who’s a terrorist?) on the Internet. It remains their most celebrated song, a crowd-pleasing anthem whose call-and-response chorus invites enthusiastic audience participation: “Mīn irhābī? Inta al-irhābī! Ma’kalnī wa ‘ānā ‘ayish fī bilādī” (Who’s a terrorist? You’re the terrorist! You’ve taken all I own while I’m living in my homeland). The song deploys powerfully condensed and angry lyrics to flip the charges of terrorism, so typically aimed at Palestinians, back in the face of the Israeli state. The song’s form of address is also significant, however, although not usually remarked upon. DAM does not describe the actions and ideology of the Israeli state in the third person but addresses Zionists directly, in the second person: “[Y]ou are the terrorists.” As second-class citizens of the Jewish state, the band’s members are positioned in dialogue with it, and so their raps typically work to subvert hegemonic Zionist logic from within, even as they have increasingly also located themselves within the framework of the Palestinian national struggle.

Subliminal’s response to the second intifada, meanwhile, was to move further to the right, and so the once amicable relations between DAM and their Jewish-Israeli rap colleagues deteriorated. But the transformation, as detailed in Channels of Rage, was gradual rather than immediate, as the group continued to record songs in Hebrew and to play for Jewish-Israeli audiences. DAM played, for instance, at Hishguzim Night, an Israeli hip-hop festival, in summer 2001, shortly after the Palestinian terror attack at the Dolphinarium disco in Tel Aviv in June that killed twenty-one Jewish teenagers. Performing before a mostly Jewish audience, the group opted not to do “Mīn Irhābī?” or their new Hebrew song, “Posha’im Chafim M’pesha” (Innocent criminals). They did release the latter on the Internet in fall 2002. Progressive Jewish-Israeli rock star Aviv Geffen came across it, and it so moved him that he penned another verse and put up the money for the production of a high-quality video clip of “Innocent Criminals” in which he and DAM appeared. “Innocent Criminals” protested against depictions of Palestinian-Israelis in mainstream Israeli discourse in the wake of the October 2000 events, appealed for better understanding, and urged Israelis to see Palestinian-Israelis as if they were inside their shoes:

You say we are criminals and barbarians, we aren’t

But just in case we are, this is what the government has done to us

(McDonald 331–32)

The video clip was broadcast on prime-time Israeli television, and the new version of the song was heavily downloaded (Avidan). “Innocent Criminals” therefore gained DAM much publicity and notoriety in Israel, but it received no radio airplay and earned them no recording contract. Relations with Geffen cooled after Tamer Nafar made appearance alongside the rock star on Israeli TV and stated that he could understand the motivations of Palestinian suicide bombers even though he did not justify their actions, and also asserted that there was no difference between an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian suicide bomber because both killed indiscriminately (McDonald 335; Halachmi). McDonald observes that, at a time when suicide bombings (“martyrdom operations” in the Palestinian lexicon) were at their apex and when political positions had hardened on both sides, circumstances pushed DAM to now focus on Arab audiences (330–36). But DAM still were active in Israel’s cultural-political scene and continued to engage with Israeli-Jewish audiences. Their song “Nghayyer Bukra,” or “Change Tomorrow,” from the album I...