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In new album, Rafeef Ziadah teaches life and resistance

March 8, 2016 at 6:03 pm

Palestinian poet and activist Rafeef Ziadah recently launched her new album, ‘We Teach Life’, with an event at Rich Mix in London. The evening was co-organised by anti-poverty charity War on Want, who had a stall for those attending to get campaign materials and resources – but as a review of the launch published by EastLondonLines put it, the night “was not about pity.”

Ziadah is a poet, spoken word artist, member of the Palestinians’ Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee, and a postdoctoral research fellow at SOAS University of London. She has many hats, and she wears them well.

Ziadah’s debut album ‘Hadeel’ combined poetry and music, in an intense, 12-track journey of beauty and anger. Her new album, released last November and supported by a crowdfunding campaign, sees Ziadah combine her words with original compositions by singer/songwriter Phil Monsour.

The title of the new album is taken from one of Ziadah’s most famous poems, written during Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip in December 2008-January 2009. A video of Ziadah performing ‘We Teach Life’ from November 2011 currently has more than 900,000 views on YouTube.

As in her previous work, the ‘personal’ and ‘political’ are not distinct categories in Ziadah’s new album, an approach that is first and foremost a reflection of her own experiences. Ziadah was born in Beirut, a third generation refugee whose family was ethnically cleansed in 1948. She has lived in the Middle East, Canada, and the UK, and been involved in various forms of activism and organising.

The poetry’s themes of exile, diaspora identify, and dispossession, thus resonate with an authenticity that – especially when being performed – give the listener, or viewer, goose bumps. Ziadah also voices the frustrations she has felt in her activism, and her experiences of Orientalism, privilege, and the marginalisation of Palestinian voices.

But it is not just about Ziadah’s biography; it is also about a more profound rejection of the very idea that art and culture can be separate from, or ‘above’, the political. As such, her poems can challenge cultural workers and artists to consider the politics of their own work – even, or perhaps especially those who do not consider their own art to be ‘political’.

As Artists for Palestine UK have put it, in their booklet ‘The Case for a Cultural Boycott of Israel’, it is precisely “because of art’s power to move and to influence people” that “those who work in the cultural field have a particular responsibility to speak out when art and platforms for cultural exchange are used to mask injustice.”

I think that there is something instructive in the fact that ‘Shades of Anger’ and ‘We Teach Life’ are Ziadah’s most well-known poems. Together, they embody – vibrate, scream, sing – both the anger of the colonised and displaced, as well as a life-celebrating, defiant humanity. In ‘We Teach Life’, Ziadah writes:

But today, my body was a TV’d massacre made to fit into sound-bites and word limits.

And just give us a story, a human story.

These lines reminded me of something I read in Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s ‘I Saw Ramallah’, an account of his return to Palestine after an enforced thirty year absence. He wrote: “The Palestinian has his joys too. He has his pleasures alongside his sorrows. He has the amazing contradictions of life, because he is a living creature before being the son of the eight o’clock news.”

It is to Ziadah’s credit that her work, her poetry, her spoken word performances and recordings, combine all these ‘contradictions of life’, as well as the struggle for liberation, into an authentic, powerful, and quite unique, whole.

For more information on Rafeef Ziadah’s work, visit her website here. ‘We Teach Life’ can be purchased on CDBaby here.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.