One of the things that fascinated me most about the Middle East was the very idea of localized hiphop. They were words that just didn’t seem to go with each other in a sentence. Middle Eastern… hip… hop? Wasn’t this region supposed to be one where music was seen as a Western evil? Wasn’t Arabic that inscrutable language, not particularly well-suited to… rapping? Well, as most travellers in the Middle East quickly learn, everything you were told about the Middle East is probably wrong. Years of slanted media coverage does that for sure, and the only way to really get this region is to come here, and be among the wonderful people who call this troubled region home.

Hiphop is more sophisticated here than you’d think; they even made a brilliant film about it. Slingshot Hiphop may just be the first — and most important — documentary on this subject. Through featuring the daily struggles of Palestinian hiphop artistes like Dam, Abeer, Arapeyat and others, the film really drove home the point that no matter hiphop had become in America (bling-bling, sex, pointless lyrics and all that), hiphop lived on in the most unexpected place in the world: the Middle East. Not just in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the idea of being neither here nor there reverberated also through the music of other hiphop artistes in the region. Whether it was The Narcicyst, Dubai-based Iraqi rapper (whose work speaks of ‘the rebirth of a nationless mind’), or the influential DAM (the successful Palestinian group currently on tour in the United States), the messages in the music were hauntingly clear.

And hauntingly beyond my comprehension, as someone who comes from a place with virtually no political drama, far from war or other disaster. I wanted to say I knew what this was like, or that I felt solidarity; but I really could not, so far from my realm of understanding all this was.

Which set me thinking. The work of my friend the spoken word poet Hiba Rasheed was, somehow, connected to all this. She, better than anyone else I knew, understood the idea of being neither here nor there. Sudanese by heritage, she’d been brought up in the United Arab Emirates in Dubai and Sharjah, and felt constantly at home in both and in neither at the same time. Her beautiful poetry, which she sometimes performs in conjunction with her brother’s hiphop group Diligent Thought, had a spiritual and political element which I appreciated.

I took her to Dubai’s historic Bastakiyah conservation area, thinking it might be fitting, and persuaded her into an impromptu performance of her poetry, hoping her words might help me bridge the gap and push me closer towards understanding the larger messages and concerns of the people I have had the luck to share my life with, in my short time in the Middle East.

Many of my opinions and world views were shaped profoundly by my time in this part of the world. One of the things I am taking away with me, and keeping close to my heart, is the friendship of people like Hiba Rasheed, and all my friends in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, the UAE, who unselfishly let me into their world, and who shared some wonderful moments with me.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Thanks
Hiba Rasheed
Fresh Booza Productions

Credits
Jackie Reem Salloum’s Slingshot Hiphop
The Narcicyst feat. Shadia Mansour — “Hamdulilah (Gaza Remix)”
Diligent Thought feat. Miss Lyrikal Nuisance — MBS

other flavours:

• youtube
• quicktime