Out of Baghdad!: Negotiating Loss, Longing, and Belonging in Aida Nadeem’s Work of the Iraqi Musical Avant-Garde

 

Leahley Alawi

 

 

 

Abstract

 

In 2005, composer and vocalist Aida Nadeem produced the album Out of Baghdad!, a conglomeration of traditional Iraqi instrumentation, audio collection, and experimental vocalization. Nadeem’s work is often described as rejecting the restrictions of Western ideas of modernity by utilizing traditional elements in a more contemporary framework. Produced in the aftermath of the 2003 United States-led invasion of Iraq, Nadeem’s work is the central focus of this paper. This paper is an intimate ethnography in which the author utilizes interviews with close family members who grew up in Iraq to contextualize and ground Nadeem’s compositions, providing a foundation for analysis of Nadeem’s music within the context of the Iraqi diaspora. This allows for a more fruitful analysis of how Nadeem’s work utilizes symbols central to life in Baghdad, such as date palms and the sounds of a copper market, to mark her work as indisputably Iraqi, turning those symbols on their head to create something which can fit into the designation of talī‘a (الطّليعة), rather than the simplified “Arab avant-garde.” The author begins by outlining the term “Arab avant-garde,” including a discussion of the systematic exclusion of the “Arab” designation in better-known avant-garde circles. The author then succinctly describes the contemporary political history of Iraq to highlight the importance of that which is Iraqi in the avant-garde. This framework provides the basis for Nadeem’s background and, in turn, the analysis of three of Nadeem's compositions from her 2005 album, Out of Baghdad!

 

Keywords: Arab avant-garde, dislocation, Iraqi diaspora, Aida Nadeem, ethnography, electronic music

 

 

 

For many years, I denied myself the possibility that I would ever see Iraq. As a member of its diasporic community, I would often think about Iraq as a sort of fictional place, one which only existed in the memories of those who came before me. While I listened diligently to the stories of my family members who had emigrated from Iraq, it always felt stubbornly intangible to my own existence thousands of miles away. Although we followed many of the same traditions, I could not deny that my “Iraqi-ness”—if you can qualify such a thing—did not seem the same as theirs. Iraq, I had concluded, was not a place I would ever intimately know.

 

Seven years ago, when I first began my undergraduate studies, I started to familiarize myself with diasporic theory and contemporary discourse surrounding the experiences of first-generation Arabs. Scholars like Rachel Beckles Willson, Anne K. Rasmussen, and Edward Said brought these ideas in close conversation with my own experiences, lending definition to a complex internal palaver. This scholarship helped me to confront that which previously felt inaccessible. It was refreshing to see my experience discussed in academic conversations (at least to a degree).

 

Later in college, while researching thesis topics, I was introduced to the work of Aida Nadeem. A so-called “avant-garde” Iraqi musician exiled from her home in 1991, Nadeem’s compositions famously stand out as contemporary marvels in a hotbed of discussion around “authenticity” (Dickinson 2013, 13). Nadeem’s work rejects the restrictions of Western ideas about modernity by utilizing traditional elements in a more contemporary framework (Dickinson 2013, 14). Her music offers an opportunity to step beyond the tired debates of tradition versus modernity, engaging with current themes such as resistance and the representation of minority groups in the diaspora.

 

Academic considerations aside, I connected with Nadeem’s music in an unexpectedly intimate manner. Even as I could not translate her words and access the meaning and language of her compositions, it seemed that there was still a connection I could place, accompanied by the yearning to learn more about myself as an Iraqi-American. This was a yearning that I often suppressed because of my father's grief and his difficulty in recollecting his own sense of loss. In the effort to understand my own sense of self, it seemed I had found what I was looking for in Nadeem’s music—an opportunity to begin exploring the complexity of having a sense of belonging to a place I have never physically known and yet, is essential to who I am: Iraq.

 

Upon reflection, I do not find it especially surprising that I was fascinated by Nadeem’s work, given her own positionality in the Iraqi diaspora. The fusion of traditional Iraqi instrumentation and Arab and Western techniques in Nadeem’s compositions made it an undeniable point of entry for analyzing what it means to listen to and in the diaspora. At the time, and through her work, I found what Boym refers to as a “shared longing without belonging” for a place we both know of but cannot access, albeit due to vastly different circumstances (Boym 2001, 252).

 

In 2022, my family and I began making plans to visit the country they had left so many years before. These plans entailed long conversations laden with fearful anticipation of what their return would bring, to the point that my stepmother, Samaher, requested several times that we not move forward. Despite the long conversations—or perhaps because of them—we departed for Iraq in March 2024 as a large group including my father, stepmother, older sister, three younger brothers, a cousin, and myself. The experiences we had in the weeks that followed are critical to defining the second stage of my research of the Iraqi diaspora.

 

Since this trip to Iraq, I feel that my positionality in the diaspora has become richer, enhanced by a renewed desire to understand how loss, longing, and belonging are all connected in the Iraqi diaspora. I am returning to my work in a world that feels monumentally different from the one in which my project was first conceived, now that I have traveled to the place that my family, in all the generations that came before my own, called home.

 

In this essay, I will continue my analysis of the Arab avant-garde, and how destruction has imposed a pre-/post-war relationship separating those who live in diaspora from those who live in Iraq. I expand on my original findings to investigate a new question: how has emergence from destruction complicated the relationships between sound, loss, and memory? And how can a shared nostalgia for imagined community ultimately break down the binary between a pre-/post-war Iraq? These questions are weighty, and certainly ambitious ones to tackle. In what follows, I will begin with outlining the term “Arab avant-garde,” including a discussion of the systematic exclusion of the “Arab” designation in better-known avant-garde circles. I will then succinctly describe the contemporary political history of Iraq to highlight the importance of that which is Iraqi in the avant-garde. This framework will provide the basis for Nadeem’s background and, in turn, the analysis of several of Nadeem's compositions from her 2005 album, Out of Baghdad!

 

 

 

Literature Review

 

In scholarly writings about music in the Arab world, the issue of tradition versus modernity, and the upholding of this binary, continues to be of great importance (Adileh 2011; Racy 2003; Touma 1996). In her introduction to The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity, Kay Dickinson seeks to move past this debate through her examination of the Arab avant-garde. Already groundbreaking in its scope, this book carves out a space for scholars to continue research in these newer explorations of genre and style, proposing alternatives to the dominant narrative of what Arab music is and should be (Currey 2002; Dickinson 2013; El-Shawan 1984; Rasmussen 1996).

 

For Dickinson, the plethora of under-recognized artists, whose works make important strides in dismantling orientalist and colonialist thought within the Arab avant-garde, need to be acknowledged and become part of a larger and more inclusive discussion about what Arab music is (Dickinson 2013; Said 1978). It is within this constellation that the works of Arab musicians and composers in the diaspora should be analyzed. Rachel Beckles Willson (2019), Michael Khoury (2013), and Caroline Rooney (2013) are some of the scholars whose works have centered on Arab artists who have been denied a physical relationship to their home (see Boym 2016). My work on Aida Nadeem—an Iraqi exiled in Europe—seeks to engage with the relatively small body of existent writing on contemporary music produced in the Arab diaspora (Asmar 2013; Burkhalter 2013; Kendall 1997; Peterson 2013; Harbert 2013; Sell 2010; Silverstein 2013).

 

Engaging with works produced by members of the Iraqi diaspora involves a constant reimagining and renegotiation of what is at stake for people in the community, through exploring different notions of memory, migration, and subjectivity (Jones-Gailani 2020). Aida Nadeem’s circumstances of exile call for a particular lens of diasporic understanding. Svetlana Boym’s book The Future of Nostalgia is critical to building foundations for such an examination. Boym discusses the specifics of this diasporic intimacy and its relation to the production of art, arguing that the collective nostalgia includes both a “restoration of the past” and a recognition of ever-present imperfections and misalignments with how those living in diaspora conceive of the world (Boym 2016).

 

 

 

Methodology and Positionality in Relation to the Project

 

I conceive of my research as an intimate ethnography, given my relationship to the subject matter, as well as to the interlocutors who helped me in my research. An intimate ethnography, as defined by Alisse Waterston in “Intimate Ethnography and the Anthropological Imagination,” is a “multifaceted dialectic” that pieces together multiple positionalities in order to engage in a critical inquiry of the world (Waterston 2019, 10). By utilizing interviews with my father, stepmother, and close friends of the family, I intend to “[render] a more complete story of reality than is available in more narrowly focused studies” and present a more “integrated body of knowledge” (Waterston 2019, 8-9). Initially, I believed it would be possible to fruitfully analyze Nadeem’s work on my own, solely relying on the support of prior academic scholarship. From early on, however, it became apparent that the input and assistance of individuals who had spent periods of their life living in Baghdad would bring a much-needed dimension of intimacy and clarity to the buds of ideas I was toying with. Similar to Waterston’s approach in her own intimate ethnography, the majority of those I interviewed are important and close figures in my own life; as such, constructing this project as an intimate ethnography allowed me to bring together the dualities of my positioning as a daughter of an Iraqi and as an ethnomusicologist in the making. Many of the conversations I had during the interview process provided me with access to ideas and concepts which I never would have found on my own, and which enhanced the overarching themes of the project. Now, having been to Iraq, I find my earlier research complicated and augmented by new realities and experiences, a fact which both excites and daunts me.

 

While I have spent the entirety of my life living in the United States, many of my experiences have been defined by my Iraqi heritage. My father, at twenty years old, left Baghdad to study engineering first in England, and then in the United States. In our first interview, my father remarked that, despite having lived in Iraq for less than a third of his life, he still “feel[s] fully, fully Iraqi, living in a Western culture”—a sentence which has stayed with me, especially as I continue to consider the confluence of Iraqi and American values in my own upbringing. I would be remiss not to discuss my own inward-facing motivations for conducting these interviews. While they certainly furthered the development of my project’s argument, they also provided a space for me to grapple with my family’s history, and to consider the generational differences that have informed my outlook on life. In my own way, I was able to utilize music as a vehicle for navigating memory and seeing how place has “shaped what is remembered and why” (Jones-Gailani 2020, 6).

 

After consulting historical scholarship to establish a deeper understanding of Iraq’s social and political history, as well as the development of avant-garde arts in the Middle East, I then conducted a series of interviews with my father, Zaki, my stepmother, Samaher, and a family friend, Ala Faik. These interviews took place over the course of one week at my family’s home in Michigan in March 2022. I found the interviews to be a site for learning and a critical source to draw from in my analysis of Nadeem’s music. Their views complicated and affirmed that which I had learned in academic spaces, and I was forced to confront the dissonance that is inherent to an ethnomusicologist’s work.

 

I was able to interview Aida Nadeem in the final stages of my writing process. Our conversations provided clarifications of my analysis and findings. Nadeem considers herself “an activist, rather than an artist with a career,” explaining that she was happy to discuss how she “express[es her] identity and points of view about situations through music and art.” At that point, it became clear to me that the focus of this work is understanding the response of those in the diaspora to the music of the diaspora. I came to the understanding that Nadeem’s input—though wonderfully informative to the rest of my work—was not the centerpiece of my project but, rather, another way in which to understand my father’s and my own experiences.

 

 

 

The Significance of “Arab” in the Arab Avant-Garde

 

In the article “Resisting the Question, ‘What is an Avant-Garde?,’” Mike Sell, a scholar of the avant-garde, poses the significant question: what are the storylines we use to tell the tale of the avant-garde, to situate its gestures of rebellion and resistance meaningfully across time and place as a methodology for revealing gaps in the existing literature written on the avant-garde? (Sell 2010, 759). As in the case of literature, it is challenging to construct a historical analysis of a musical avant-garde, as the avant-garde has historically been resistant to the academic institution. Perhaps more significant is the Eurocentrism that has dominated the study of the avant-garde (after all, the Orient, as Said has taught us, has always been a “backward” place where not to look forward) and how this dominance has informed our understanding of center and periphery in music and beyond.

 

The writing of Kay Dickinson on the roots of the term “avant-garde” is critical to this project’s argument, particularly her exploration of how the term can be reclaimed and refurbished outside of its current Eurocentric associations. In regions outside of the Western world, modern music has “fundamentally defined itself through an expression of tonality beyond the typical Western scales” (Dickinson 2013, 3). This definition of “modern” rests on the idea that only the West can represent musical progress, and that the exploitation of that which comes from the East can only be considered as an embellishment and be extracted as raw material. Dickinson wades through a body of literature on the avant-garde which briefly mentions but rarely expands on the influences drawn from Arab music. She eventually concludes that the definition of avant-garde (as it pertains to Arab music) has been made more complicated through its relationship to Europe and, in turn, imperialism and colonialism.

 

Drawing from Dickinson, this project utilizes a working definition of avant-garde as (1) formulated by artists working outside of Eurocentric models; (2) anchored in a contemporary analysis of Iraq and its relationship to the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S.; and (3) a designation that also exists outside of the realm of art. Owing to the dearth of scholarship on the Arab avant-garde, Dickinson’s work proves especially useful in this project.

As Dickinson writes, the period from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century may be credited with the “birth of a clearly enunciated avant-garde sensibility about the world;” a sensibility that, in the Arab world, was entangled with the nahda (Renaissance) movement (Dickinson 2013, 6). The nahda, defined by its inextricability from the Arab and Islamic past, utilized select ideas and techniques from the Western world and reconfigured them to “forge a unique anticolonial regionalism” (Dickinson 2013, 7). Dickinson’s argument is critical for illustrating how philosophers, artists, scholars, and others have critically engaged with the proposed Western ideas, rejecting that which perpetuates damaging binaries, and making them work for their own motivations and desires. In the case of Iraq, the choice to work within the label of avant-garde is reflective of a complicated and nuanced relationship existing inside and outside Iraq—a decision which offers an opportunity to reconfigure embedded power dynamics (Dickinson 2013, 7). Caution, however, should be heeded when exploring what is “Arab” in the Arab avant-garde, particularly when “Arab” expresses a cultural and intellectual movement in such a vast and diverse geo-cultural region commonly described as the MENA region (the Middle East and North Africa). Because the focus of this project is an Iraqi artist and the Iraqi diaspora, a look at the contemporary history of Iraq may help to better contextualize Aida Nadeem’s music.

 

 

 

On the Limits of Language

 

In “The Arab Avant-Garde: Experiments in North African Art and Literature,” Andrea Flores Khalil sets out to explore the avant-garde tendencies of North African art and literature. Khalil posits that the historical movements of the European avant-garde—such as surrealism, Dadaism, and futurism—and their associated parameters and goals cannot be used to define the work of modern artistic movements in North Africa. Khalil also argues, however, that the term “avant-garde” is still fitting for the work produced in the region, as it indicates an experimental approach that utilizes the “idioms of the Other to formulate a new representation of their culture of origin” and which ultimately works to “dissipat[e] the identity that had been defined by the ‘East-West’ opposition” (Khalil 2003, xiv, xxi).

 

Khalil ultimately argues that what defines Arab avant-garde literature is largely centered around language, and its critical use as a tool of opposition to Western cultural hegemony. Because a number of avant-garde authors in North Africa write in French or English, Khalil argues that they “speak like a foreigner in [their] own country, [they incorporate] the outside, the geopolitical Other (Britain, France, the West) into the language of the postcolonial nation (Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco)” (Khalil 2003, xx). In this context, language functions as a tool to break down the “intrusion of [Western] modernity … through reinvention, not a forgetting of the cultural effects brought about by historical conflict and struggle” (Khalil 2003, 133). As such, Khalil’s definition of the Arab avant-garde emphasizes language, the medium used by its artists—that is, Arabic [1](Khalil 2003, xiv).

 

The Arabic term for avant-garde movements is ṭalī‘a (الطّليعة). In the Hans-Wehr Arabic-English dictionary, this term references “front row,” “foremost rank,” “vanguard,” or “avant-garde,” deriving from the verb ṭala-a, which can be translated as “to rise,” or “to ascend.” Exploring the relationship between ṭalī‘a and “avant-garde” reveals some of the problematic nuances one finds when an indigenous term is contextualized in reference to a Eurocentric movement. In “Revolutionary Time: The Vanguard and the Avant-Garde,” Susan Buck-Morss deconstructs the semantic relationship of the terms “vanguard” and “avant-garde” asking “why is it that the two terms have been bottled together over the course of time?” In what follows I ask: why is it that the Hans-Wehr dictionary definition of the Arabic term for new arts movements includes “vanguard” and “avant-garde” as related terminology? How might the term “ṭalī‘a (الطّليعة)” be understood within these parameters?

 

In my research, it was challenging to locate scholarship that focused exclusively on avant-garde music produced in Iraq, and even more so within the diaspora. More general searches geared towards the historical movements of the avant-garde were helpful in revealing how “within the framework of occupation … modern works [cannot] be examined with the context of an art historical tradition attentive to styles and aesthetics” given that “art in Iraq has served periodically (or systematically) as a propaganda apparatus” (Shabout 2006, 4-5). My conversations with family friend Faik, who is quite knowledgeable in Iraqi theater, provided me with a background on contemporary productions. Even so, it seemed there was a great deal to unpack with regards to understanding avant-garde art produced in more recent years. This is likely due to the assumed political nature of contemporary art produced in Iraq or by Iraqis.

 

Given that my own project is focused on music, I found it helpful to take the cues from Kahlil when thinking about the Iraqi vernacular. In The Spoken Arabic of Baghdad, Joseph Richard McCarthy and Faraj Raffouli create a “systematic exposition of the morphology and syntax of the spoken Arabic of Baghdad accompanied by copious exercises” (xxix). McCarthy and Faraj expound on the particulars of Iraqi Arabic, emphasizing the nuances of how Baghdadis speak the language. Of course, it should be acknowledged that the book was written in 1964, and as such likely features outdated information; however, the authors take great care to emphasize that “the spoken Arabic of Baghdad has been, and is, a living and changing language” (McCarthy and Raffouli 1964, xxvii).

 

To better understand the sonorous implications of the Iraqi vernacular, I turned to conversations with native Baghdadis. In my interviews with my father, Zaki, and my stepmother, Samaher, I was able to ask questions about the specifics of language, spurred by their repeated claims of Nadeem’s music as sounding “unmistakably Iraqi.” These conversations were challenging, as it was difficult to find appropriate terminology to describe the sounds I was hearing but not comprehending. When I asked for clarification on how the shaping of the words informed the specificity of the sound (based on my reading of McCarthy and Raffouli I theorized that the vocalization of vowels were the central identifiers of the Iraqi dialect), Zaki described the different accents of the country. When asked for a deeper explanation of why he identified Nadeem’s accent to sound just so, he responded, somewhat pointedly, “sometimes I only hear one word and know that this guy is Iraqi. One word. I don’t know why it’s so dominant.” At one point, Samaher mused that the sound of the vowel was much clearer than that of Egyptian, Jordanian, or Syrian Arabic, and sounded out a few examples which allowed me to discern the differences between these vernaculars.

 

 

 

A Sketch of the Contemporary History of Iraq

 

In his book Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam, Geoff Simons provides a survey on the history of the country, with a focus on British and U.S. involvement, and how that has affected the region socially, politically, and geographically. Simons outlines several reasons for British interest, but ultimately most significant is Simons’ argument on oil, the presence of which “would give the lands of the region scope for independence but also advertise to the Europeans—and later the Americans—their need to retain control of the region” (Simons 2004, 150). Consequently, the “predatory designs of powerful Western nations in a shrinking and energy-hungry world” have defined, and continue to define, much of Iraq’s recent history (ibid., 150).

 

The importance of relations with Britain and the United States cannot be overemphasized, as they are key to the indoctrination of the beliefs of the former Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. Hussein formally came into power in 1979 and over the years, primarily as a result of the Iran-Iraq War and the later invasion of Kuwait, Hussein’s regime left the country in a position of weakness. The American response was nothing short of devastating (Simons 2004, 243). In 1990, four days into the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, the United Nations Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. To this day, debate surrounds the ethics of these sanctions, as “what they were meant to accomplish is unclear” and the consequences are multitudinous (Clawson 1993, 2). The following year, Operation Desert Storm was put into action, in which an international allied force of thirty-two nations launched an air war with Iraq’s military and civil infrastructure. The six-week campaign ultimately culminated in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait by the end of the following February, leaving behind massive destruction in its wake (Alnasrawi 2001, 209). In the years that followed, post-war studies brought to light the fact that “in addition to purely military targets, the bombing revealed that … some targets were attacked to destroy or damage valuable facilities which Iraqi could not replace or repair without foreign assistance … targets were selected to do great harm to Iraq’s ability to support itself as an industrial society” (Alnasrawi 2001, 210). In essence, the damage imposed on Iraq by the United States “threaten[ed] to send the country back to the Stone Age” (Hassan 2022, 1).

 

Over the course of the next decade, Iraqis felt the burden of the sanctions with increasing severity. In March 2003, President Bush sent United States military forces to attack Baghdad, under the specious pretense that Saddam Hussein was either in possession of or in the process of building weapons of mass destruction. Despite the devastating impact of the United States’ actions, the “immediate reward of a massive oil grab, of a scale not witnessed since the days of colonialism” led the United States government to justify the assault of unparalleled aggression (Research Unit for Political Economy 15). In 2005, Hussein was located and arrested, and later executed in December 2006. Although troops were eventually withdrawn from the region in 2011, thus declaring an end to the war nearly a decade after it began, the country and its people continue to suffer and bear the brunt of a deliberate policy of cultural annihilation (Baker and Ismael in Hassan 2022).

 

 

 

Aida Nadeem: Background

 

Having briefly sketched a contemporary history of Iraq and of the term avant-garde, I now turn to the work of Aida Nadeem, starting with her relationship to recent Iraqi history. Nadeem was exiled to Denmark in 1991, directly coinciding with the Kuwait invasion led by Saddam Hussein. During this time, economic sanctions were imposed on Iraq by the UN Security Council, rendering it a place virtually unbearable to live in. In recent years, a growing body of criticism has surfaced in response to the tactics of the economic sanctions; almost ten years after they began, council members spoke out against the ethics of such tactics (Kondoch 2022, 2). At the beginning of the UN sanctions regime, affluent Iraqis began to leave the region in large numbers. These are the people who make up most of the diaspora, though Iraqis of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds left because of their own political reasons. At this time, in fact, large numbers of young Iraqis had begun to revolt against the regime, placing themselves in positions of considerable danger. In my interview with Aida Nadeem, she clarified that her reasons for leaving were politically motivated.

 

Before her exile to Denmark,[2] Nadeem spent her entire life in Baghdad. Born in 1965, she became active in music and dance at a young age. She later studied at the Baghdad Academy of Music and Ballet, where she specialized in bassoon. In our interview, Nadeem recalled her years there as incredibly formative, allowing her to “enrich [her] intellectuality.” After concluding her studies, Nadeem joined the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in 1986, and began making a name for herself (Aida Nadeem, personal interview, May 5, 2022).

 

There are strong Iraqi and Western foundations in her work, which also includes computer-programmed elements and the utilization of Indian and Persian instrumentation (Dickinson 2013, 13). Nadeem’s solo work achieved global recognition after her relocation to Denmark. It was there that she began studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. With a discography comprising five complete albums,[3] Nadeem has played an important role in the contemporary Arab music scene.

 

 

 

Analysis of Out of Baghdad!

 

When I first analyzed Out of Baghdad!, I did my best to scour every resource I could imagine in an unsuccessful attempt to locate translations or transcriptions of Nadeem’s music. Finding nothing, I asked Zaki if he would be willing to provide a rough translation of the lyrics for several of Nadeem’s compositions, so that I could begin making headway in my own analysis. Having grown up in Baghdad himself, and as a native speaker of the Iraqi vernacular, I trusted him to provide an accurate transcription of the Arabic lyrics and their English translations. He and Samaher (another native speaker) listened to a few songs from the album. However, when they called me to discuss their findings, I felt a certain disappointment in their voices. Zaki, speaking as if he were breaking extremely upsetting news, confessed that they had not been able to translate much more than a few words! My initial response, as Zaki had assumed it would be, was one of distress. Quickly, however, my panic morphed into confusion; how could a native speaker of the Iraqi vernacular understand nearly nothing of what Aida Nadeem had sung?

 

After listening closely to the songs “Khadri (خبري )” and “Baghdad (بغداد ),” Zaki concluded that Nadeem was vocalizing words in a way that “intentionally would not let you guess what she’s saying.” When I pressed him to expand on this, he mused on how “she intentionally twist[s] and deform[s] the words for her artistic purposes. It is not common to this degree … but typically it’s well understood, because when [singers] do this, it is only for a few words of the song.” This technique my father described was something that he was familiar with, noting its presence in the works of several Arab musicians he grew up listening to, such as Salima Murad and Nazem al Ghazali. As a non-Arabic speaker, I had not been able to pick this up.

 

Thus, while I had hoped to conduct a lyrical analysis of Nadeem’s songs, now I had something much more abstract to work with: the absence of that which is understood, that which is comprehensible, and, at least to a certain degree, the meaning of the words and the message of a song.

 

A few days later, however, Zaki surprised me with a new development: after sitting down with four other native speakers of the Iraqi vernacular, they were able to discern more than a few full sentences from two songs: “Khadri” and “Baghdad.” He shared with me that the work had been painstaking, and that by no means did they feel that the interpretations of her lyrics could be done in a casual listening setting. He was also careful to emphasize that there were likely errors present in the translations the group had been able to produce. This development complicated things somewhat, but I was optimistic about my argument: with the peculiarity of her vocal technique and poetic message, I now had a wealth of material to work with. This is to say, the absence of that which is comprehensible turned into presence; the deformation of words created multiple listening possibilities.

 

“Baghdad,” the first song from Out of Baghdad!, serves as the first entry point of analysis for this project. In this song, Nadeem carves a new sound space for herself by accompanying her sung lyrics with violin, Indian and Persian drumming, and computer-generated beats.

 

Who has the right to dislocate me

Who has the right to dislocate them

Don’t sell the people, dislocating them,
dislocating me

Let the cities flow in them

Flow in me

And the people pass, flow in them, flow in me

In a land where peace dies

And the palms

In every memory

We die each moment

They decided your verdict

O’Baghdad

A land of ash smell

O’Baghdad

تغريبي اي هي هي هي 

لا تبيع الناس تغري بكم تغري بي

خلي المداين تحري بكم

تجري بي

وتمر الناس تجري بكم تجري بي

الى بلد مات فيها السلام