A rawness cut from the free world
(*artwork by Incé Husain)
What if cramped crowds, darkness, flashing lights, blaring music, strips of skin and teeth and their stuffy silhouetted heat didn’t have to be oppressive anymore? What if they did not hijack and disappear my body?
What if the cramped crowds became irrelevant, the darkness a sanctuary, the flashing lights a sporadic glorification, the music a calling of my blood?
What if I destroyed the language of my dissociation? What if I decided it has run its course, once and for all? What if I insisted that new life breathe here?
What if my fear became festivity? What if my rage became laughter? What if my dissociation became transcendance? What if I didn’t have to fight for existence because I was too busy embodying it? What if the venom foaming in my mouth became song?
Here, now, at Lee’s Palace in Toronto, I watch, I am whole, I exist in a warmth, in the darkness, in the flashing lights, in the cramped crowds, and my heart is not in my throat silently screaming itself to safety, my heart reverberates to the pounding music, blood unfrozen and raw, keffiyeh a cloak around me. And I can’t believe my newness. I question it - is it real? Has DAM broken my curse with a single concert?
If I dissociate, let it not be a vanishing. When I feel the prickling on my skin and the shut down of my body, let me not vanish into the ceiling, into the clouds, leave a weak body to rot in dizziness. If I dissociate, let it be a flight of agency. Let it be a gift - see how I can fly away, scale this loud sweating room, to anyone, to anywhere? Let it be an intimacy. Let it take me to this outrageously beautiful woman with the wild mane and the voice that is like silver and also like a growl. Let me watch the violet lights form a halo around her curls. How does she see this stage? What does it feel like to embody and command it? Let me become her zarghouta. When she trills, let my bones collapse to fuse with her voice and let her deliver me, with fortification, into the Toronto air.
DAM are from Al-Lyd, “the center of Palestine”, a city mixed with Palestinians and Jews. X saw them perform in the West Bank, in Ramallah. They are the first Palestinian hip hop band, among the first to rap in Arabic, formed in the late 2000s after the first Intifada. They are introduced as being banned by Ben Gvir. Their name - DAM - means “eternity” in Arabic and “blood” in Hebrew - “so it’s eternal blood,” said rapper Tamer Nafar, “like, we will stay here forever”. They are touring - Oslo yesterday, Toronto today for the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, Montréal tomorrow.
They say: “We are jet-lagged. Inshallah, we will see all of you jet-lagged, soon, in Palestine.”
They say: “If life gives you lemons, the Israelis will take them.”
They rap and sing and banter in Arabic in flashes of green, red, gold, and violet that slash the darkness, seizing the microphone draped in a keffiyeh. The crowd, too, a crammed 500 people, is draped in keffiyehs. Some scream, sing, dance, stuffed together; some sway attentively; some perch on the seats at the edges, absorbing everything with a wild stillness and vicarious inner worlds; at the back of the concert stage, a booth full of merch - shirts printed with the names of refugee camps, baseball caps printed with Rajieen ya Falasteen (راجعين يا فلسطين; We will return, Palestine), a poetry book “Reeds: the ideal gathering of the unwell” from local artist Zico that reads, on the first page, “for the diaspora kids.”
There is a warmth, a sense of life, a festivity and a yearning colliding into a wild, self-aware, loud elevating rush. It is not a shallow rampage. It is a sincere embodied glee, untamed and sensitive. It does not have permission to disappear me at all, not when Zico is reciting poetry on stage about bombs and the incessant routines of mundane life in the West:
9AM and the world is burning
my manager wants me to organize some files
looking at emails, sheets, and docs
visions of bodies being burned reflected in my eyes
…
3PM and the world is burning
We are marching the streets
There’s real love here
You can tell from the grief
Not when Zico reads a poem, to the sound of a plucking oud, that is an imagined note from the future:
Journal entry
December 6th, 2073.
It has been 35 years since Palestine has been free…
And the audience erupts into chants of “Free Palestine”. The space is beyond an embodied protest; it is an embodied imagined liberation, a rawness cut from the free world.
DAM talks about a song they wrote during the 2021 siege inspired from an Instagram correspondence with then-13 year old MC Abdul from Gaza, a music collaboration that could never come to fruition in person “because, you know, apartheid”. And so the music - The Beat Never Goes Off - rose without their meeting, a piece from MC Abdul edited into and flanked by DAM’s vocals.
DAM says: “When you hear MC Abdul, I want you all to go nuts, I want you to shut this club down.”
And the uproar this breeds does not hunt me. It peels me open and welcomes me, screaming as if Gaza can hear us. And when DAM dances and sings and works the crowd with an ease, a love, a steely, undiminishing coordination, I fuse with them like there is no other way for me to exist, and it is a tidal wave that feels unearthly.
They sing:
That was a tank attack
that was a gas attack
Never a heart attack
because the beat never goes off
“I get why Israel banned them,” said X. “Look how they rally crowds and raise the energy. Toronto’s energy was not even a quarter of what the crowds were like in Ramallah.”
The colonization of my heart is done. Cramped crowds, darkness, flashing lights, blaring music and all the rest will never be a colonial shallow wasteland ever again. The answer to my question what is the difference between reclaiming space and diving into danger that will leave you in tatters? is this: who will meet you at the other end when you reclaim it? Is it DAM? Is it resistance poetry?
The error began with me, with my assumption that it could only be oppression, and so I confused reclaiming space for celebration with conquering space for self-redemption.
The feat of reverting this is not trivial; it is a point of no return. I don’t know what to do with this newness. I don’t know how much more newness awaits. I am noticing how filled I am with locks; I am noticing how quickly I blast through them.
I decide, forever: If I am to fail, at anything, let my failure not be a crippled imagination. To seize what I want of life I must define it first, and let my definitions be precise and not be choked by anything; let me imagine a blank page.
And if I forget this, I’ll listen loudly to #Who_You_R , which the crowds sang in part with DAM, to Maysa Daw’s instruction: “I’ll teach you some Arabic. Min anti (من أنت) means “who are you”, but I want you to sing it with a bit of attitude - like, who the f- are you?”
I’ll listen to Min Imhabi (Who is a terrorist?):
Who's a terrorist? I'm a terrorist?
How am I a terrorist while I live in my country
Who's a terrorist? You're a terrorist!
You've taken everything I own while I'm living in my homeland
And I’ll remember the enmeshment, the disservice of calling songs like this “political” when this label is used to isolate them from ordinariness:
“As Palestinians, we often want to make music not about politics,” Daw said in 2024. “Palestinians don’t wake up and decide to be activists. We document our lives, which – in every field: our work, our homes, our love – is dictated by politics. There’s no way around it.”
I’ll listen to their opening song, EMTA NJAWZAK YAMMA - ايمتى نجوزك يما (When will you get married?), over and over, the opening song that was the first act of my newness and suddenly permitted, in my mind, all I want. I don’t know what about this performance - in Arabic I don’t understand - did this.
I recognize my own enmneshments, how I should stop calling my split lives my split lives because they all exist in one bound body. There is no need for a dissection of self in the name of order.
On Friday morning, I had no plans for Friday evening; on Friday afternoon, X texted “Wanna come to the DAM concert in Toronto tonight?” and I said yes, because it was X and I thought if the curse is to break it will be now, and the mad rush to Toronto and back was not a rupture in routine, was not a chaos, it felt like some adherence to a deeper order that could not exist if I saw myself as a series of split lives. ♦