Break My Shame – Arabs Do It Better
This article was originally published in German. The English version is an automatic translation and may contain errors. The German original is authoritative.
Arabs Do It Better; Kellerperle, 13.05.23
Not many performers touch me in such raw places. I know this almost only from literature; words that in their reference to reality, their interweaving and context create emergence and then stir me up at previously unknown places within myself, unsettle me, enrich me. The ground trembles then and precisely this dimension of the previously unconscious is set in motion, inevitably, and then question marks and answers inscribe themselves in me. The ground in the Kellerperle too, it trembles from the bass, just as the people who include themselves in unity with movement; shine, sparkle in clothing, eyes, facial features in all the dancing. Not many people showed up for the evening of the closing celebration of Würzburg's Week Against Racism, but the set by Marwan and David set so much weight in motion for me.
The Break
Arabic wedding music interwoven with my normal: to hear that; parts of this music that I otherwise only know from Turkish weddings from childhood, where so much shame comes along, so much vulnerability in the sense of being exposed as foreign. But on this evening I let myself fall, my ears open, my eyes I close and jump into synchronicity with that which I feared for years. The connection to something I classify as Western takes away my fear. The context, my university friend with whom I am there; the academic value (hybrid identities, the role of observing a cultural phenomenon) make it possible for me all of a sudden.
At four we head home, sweated through more than ever, then a walk with the dog by the Main, reflections of years of demarcation, feeling observed, being spoken badly of. It is so quiet for the city that I hear the birds chirping and how my stone of shame plummets out of me onto the ground. It hits my foot, it pulls for a breath, the dog licks over the sore spot in the gap of the Birkenstock. We walk on and the pain drifts away with the air into the distance. A blackbird sounds away to itself and I, I feel completely light. There is something in me that lifts itself with the music, the Dabke elements, the Halay cloth flowing with the music into something indeterminate.
It is not a return to my roots, not a recollection of what I actually am. It takes away my abnormality. And at the same time also the normality of being discovered as non-German, of having no claim to validity or only a lesser one. To prove my Germanness means making hate out of memories and perceptions. It is the fear of being valued the way I judge my own kind in my head, those I unjustifiably look down upon.
The New – The Space In Between
It is not a "sense of home" that was awakened in me. This attribution does not come close to what happened in me. I never had a relationship to the non-German from my surroundings that I allowed. I knew that if I allowed it, then that meant retaliation, misunderstanding. As a child I hated this kind of music from the 'Arabic' (meaning: non-European) so much that I sat at a wedding and held my ears shut. Later someone brought me headphones and I listened to Bach's violin sonatas. On this evening listening to Marwan and David, that creates acceptance for the unrecognised things I know, towards the music that gives me a feeling of belonging with its loud drums and ornate flutes.
Marwan and David make 'Arabic' classical music accessible for a new global space-time, reimagine community, construct a place where belonging does not have to be singular, where it is not about belonging per se, but about an outstretched hand, feeling connected with people for a couple of hours. And it is precisely this kind of connection that Arabs Do It Better have already established in Tel Aviv, they have brought Arabs and Jews together and through the music created a space that constitutes connection, that did not allow anything else because they reflect the music history of that space and connect it with elements of the global and popular. The existence of the music alone stands against cultural essentialism, black and white, one or the other and unacceptance towards myself, but equally towards one-dimensionally conceived cultures.
And that is why, thank you to you, Marwan and David, for the brilliant set that touches my heart at its deepest point, grabs it and hesitantly pulls at you and opens for your music. You have found a chasm in me and it still echoes there. The valley of the chasm is the self I am ashamed of. You touch it in deepest depth and the resonance of the music lets a few stones tumble down the steep slope. In this way you make my life a little lighter.
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