Cultural Preservation as Resistance
A tribute concert for the late Lebanese artist Ziad Rahbani celebrates SWANA creativity and liberation.
Yasmin Zacaria Mikhaiel
Bejeweled in blue and gold, a Lebanese musician struts across stage, weaving her hands into the air, hips leading with ease, belly dancing with an ensemble of five other musicians. A largely keffiyeh-clad audience, of almost 200, sways along, some called to get up and move hips of their own.
The event, at the Chop Shop in Chicago on October 13, was a rare moment for cultural SWANA (short for Southwest Asian and North African) music and dance in the region.
As a cultural organizer, growing frustrated with the lack of space and resources dedicated to preservation of our arts in the diaspora is what led me to found BIYA BIYA Productions, a platform to facilitate cultural preservation and exchange. We produced the October 13 concert in this spirit, featuring TAYF—a queer-fronted maqam music ensemble — to celebrate its first full year of existence.
The TAYF ensemble’s performance, titled From Ash to Bloom, was also a tribute to the late Ziad Rahbani, a Lebanese composer, playwright and political commentator, who passed away in July at the age of 69.
Born to singer Fairuz and composer Assi, Rahbani was an innovator of Arabic popular music. His impact extended beyond art as a fearless social critic who gave voice to the frustrations of everyday Lebanese people during and after the civil war. As TAYF multi-instrumentalist and dancer Phaedra Darwish explains, he was known for “his heavy use of what we could call ‘Western’ styles, like jazz and disco.”
TAYF cellist Aliah Ajamoughli has distinct memories of Rahbani’s music as a point of expansion of Arab repertoire and commitments to liberation. She appreciates how Rahbani’s “melodies embody the boundarilessness of our music” and how he saw “our liberation as multiple, holding the uniqueness of Lebanon beyond the monolith.”
Ajamoughli adds, “From his very first composition, Ziad Rahbani showcased the spirit of teenage rebellion as he pushed his family’s legacy to the far left of liberatory ideologies. Yet, even up to his last breath, that teenage rebellion never lost steam.”
TAYF — founded by audio engineer and bassist C Mikhail — merges the traditions of maqam (a melodic framework of SWANA music) with the contemporary. The group centers women, nonbinary and queer voices, and it has become an incubator of emerging maqam musicians from the margins as well as a SWANA community staple, headlining benefit concerts like Fields of Palestine, which raised more than $16,000 for the Palestine Children Relief Fund.
In Arabic, the word “tayf” evades a singular definition: queer, light, ephemeral, spectrum. In their life and music, TAYF musicians defy binaries across gender, ethnicity and artistic disciplines. For myself and a majority of TAYF musicians, the Middle East Music Ensemble provides a soft launching pad to immerse ourselves in our SWANA roots.
As Ajamoughli asserts, “TAYF not only showcases the multiplicity that is being SWANA American, but we also embrace our difference as the jumpstart of our creativity.”
Despite the presence of SWANA music in our childhood homes, most musicians in the diaspora are trained in Western styles. My own life radically altered almost four years ago when, through word of mouth, I stumbled upon the Middle East Music Ensemble, a community orchestra at the University of Chicago. Sliding into their Instagram DMs landed me an invitation to join the 45-piece orchestra with my saxophone, providing me with a catalyst for cultural reconnection and newfound friendships.
Now boasting 70 musicians, the Middle East Music Ensemble continues to hold regular auditions and still welcomes intergenerational musicians from across Chicago. The orchestra typically performs three times a year, featuring Turkish, Arab and Persian concerts, a split across our SWANA region. In the previous season, Wanees Zarour — the Palestinian composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, and our director — decided to mix our repertoire and curate concerts beyond these self-imposed borders. Despite another supposed cease-fire, the genocide against Palestinians continues, and building solidarity while holding grief looked to us like uniting our musical traditions.
As our city, our country, the world, fall further into the throes of fascism, where individualism is touted as a means of survival, the power of gathering remains steadfast. To gather on the frontlines of resistance and to gather as reprieve remain paramount to the movement’s sustainability. We are living, and we have due diligence to live, as fully as we can — and to be loud about our ancestors who have paved the paths before us.
Calling to mind Ziad Rahbani’s message against fascism, colonialism and dictatorship, Ajamoughli emphasizes the connection and power present in music as resistance, which “teaches us that we are not isolated, even as Americans. We must not fight for just our freedom, but the freedom of Sudan, of Congo, of Palestine and of all oppressed peoples. These melodies are not just pleasurable reprieves from the chaos, but they are cries for action.”
Yasmin Zacaria Mikhaiel (she/they) is a Chicago-based dramaturg, journalist and oral historian. Their multi-disciplinary work as a queer, fat, Iranian-American femme endeavors to amplify and archive stories that go lost, stolen and forgotten. Follow them @yasminzacaria.
