The genocide in Gaza necessitates a reflection and reordering of priorities. This requires us to agree on the importance of confronting the systematic strategies of erasure practiced by the Zionist, settler-colonial project and its allies. These strategies target not only lives but also infrastructure, heritage, identity, language, and arts.
One of the many challenges the genocide has posed is a cultural one. Confronting strategies of genocidal erasure must be a collective effort in which art must play a role.
The ever-nagging question is whether words have the power to reflect reality? A genocidal reality in our case, one in which the artists themselves are involved. I, personally, spent the first two months of the genocide in Gaza witnessing THE HORROR.
I lived in the Tel El-Hawa/Southern Remal suburb. I know every single street there, and most of the faces of its people are very familiar. When I left it on the third day of the genocide, holding my ID card and wearing a dirty T-shirt and slippers, I never thought I wouldn’t be allowed to go back. I never imagined that the genocidaires would destroy my Tel El-Hawa, my bakers, my Kunafa shop, my University, my Kids’ school, my streets, and kill many of the people I loved so much!
Ehab Lotayef, my Canadian-Egyptian friend who once visited Tel El-Hawa was devastated upon hearing about its destruction. Like any other poet, he used his talent to fight back! He wrote a poem and Whatsapped it to me. It ignited a flame in my guts! I shared it with another Gazan, Reziq Juju. He had lost his home and managed to move to Oman. Reziq is a talented musician and poet. He immediately asked me if I wanted to sing it because “it is the kind that is suitable for your voice.” He volunteered to work on the melody. Ehab loved the idea.
Lyrics written in Canada, by an extremely talented Canadian-Egyptian poet who manages to capture the quintessential existential questions raised by the Palestinians of Gaza, and residents of Tel El-Hawa; the melody by the gifted Palestinian musician who was born and raised in Gaza but forced to leave for Muscat after losing his home and studio. The song itself was recorded in Johannesburg, the site of horrific crimes against humanity, but also of resilience and resistance
My new song, Tel El-Hawa, is a meditation about what it means to be a Gazan in a world ruled by genocidaires؛ it is an expression of our distrust of universalized narratives of "human rights” and liberal "humanism"; a cry for justice in an unjust world.
PS: Unlike any other song, my voice broke more than once while practicing the second couplet/ stanza
Link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnwLgpzem9M
Haidar Eid is a Palestinian academic. Music is a hobby and after several months he has, along with his friends equally impacted, come out with a new song.