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Voices of protest from refugee camps spill out across borders
by Melinda Newman
beirut — Rising out of a Pales- tinian refugee camp located in the shadow of the airport here in the Lebanese capital, a politically charged rap movement is taking shape. Led by a cluster of acts includ-
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ing Katibe 5, I-Voice and MC Ta- marrod, the rappers are tackling an array of social issues as well as day-to-day life in Burj el-Baraj- neh, the one-square-kilometer camp that is home to 16,000 Pal- estinian refugees. Although these acts are still largely under- ground, their message is spread- ing beyond the camp’s confines to other Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, and, increasing- ly, to Europe and, they hope, America as well. Katibe 5, a quintet, plays throughout Lebanon, while the two members of I-Voice (Invinci- ble Voice) performed in Spain and Italy in recent months, with Greece and Norway on the up- coming concert calendar. In May, I-Voice traveled to Brussels as one of the three winning bands in a competition co-sponsored by the World Bank Institute. An in- vitation to this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin was thwarted when the group couldn’t obtain a visa in time. For these Lebanese-based Pal- estinian rappers, their political fight is two-pronged: In addition to their rage over being displaced during the establishment of Is- rael in 1948, they are vitriolic about their treatment at the hands of the Lebanese. In their song “Greetings,” I-Voice raps: “I sent my greetings to the Arabs, my flesh and blood, who stab us in the back.” “They’re spokespersons for their community,” says Angie Nassar, a contributing reporter to popular Web site Now Leba- non, who is writing her master’s thesis at American University of Beirut on Arabic hip-hop. “It’s a very powerful thing when you don’t have a voice in this country to say, ‘No, we do live here. We may live in the margins, but we do exist.’ ”
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Roughly 400,000 Palestinians live in 12 official refugee camps throughout Lebanon. Many of the camps have been the site of violence involving the Lebanese, including the 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps, as well as the 2007 conflict between the Lebanese army and the mil- itant group Fatah al-Islam in Nahr al-Bared, a refugee camp near Tripoli, that left more than 20,000 Palestinians homeless. The fact that Palestinians can- not own property in Lebanon, are barred from 70 professions —
Brahms: Ein deutsches Requiem performed at The Music Center
The rhymes amid the rubble
says through the interpreter. “I have a lot of friends that are Leb- anese, but there is some discrimi- nation.” Performing outside of the camps in Lebanon can be bracing at first, says Katibe 5’s co-founder Osloob. “Most of the people, the first thing they say is, ‘Oh, Pales- tinian people; they’re dangerous. They look angry. Maybe they will kill us,’ ” Osloob says with a pained laugh. “And now, we’re producing two Lebanese bands. That makes us closer, a little bit, to the Lebanese community.” An uneasy tension remains,
2007 PHOTO BY EMILIO MORENATTI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOLDING ON:The clash between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared camp left more than 20,000 homeless.
including law, medicine and en- gineering — and have no access to social services is the source of anger and frustration for many of the rappers. “We’re just human beings, just
like everyone else,” says I-Voice’s Mohammad Turk, a.k.a. TNT, in an interview this summer in his cramped and dilapidated studio. The 21-year-old rapper returned home an hour earlier from his day job as a laborer at an alumi- num factory in Beirut. As he talks, the electricity goes out — again. His studio is thrust back into darkness and stifling heat. The studio is on the ground
level of one of the seemingly end- less, claustrophobic catacombs that make up the camp. Five- foot-wide alleys separate the run- on maze of squalid concrete housing. Dusty exterior beige walls are covered with faded, torn posters of dead Hamas lead- ers, here considered martyrs for the cause. Images of deceased PLO leader Yasser Arafat are ev- erywhere, as are stencils of Che Guevara. Webs of low-slung black power and water cables stretch from one apartment win- dow to the next. TNT’s partner in I-Voice, 22- year-old Yasin Qasem, has been studying music industry arts at Fanshawe College in Ontario since May. Qasem was born in the United
Arab Emirates but moved to Burj el-Barajneh with his mother when he was 4. “My mom is so proud of my
music,” he writes in an e-mail from Canada. “When I started, people didn’t support us since they don’t know much about hip- hop and they think that it’s what’s on TV: girls, cars, drugs. [At] first, my mom asked me to show her my lyrics, then she was like, ‘No problem. What you’re saying is right about our situa- tion.’ ” The first song TNT and Qasem wrote, “My Daily Life,” detailed their experiences in the camp. Lyrics included “I shaved my head and I got used to being a prisoner.” I-Voice coined the term
“T-rap” to describe its sound: a blend of rap and Tarab, tradition- al Arab music that uses the stringed oud and dorbaki hand drum. As a form of protest, Palestin-
ian rap didn’t exist until a few years ago when Dam, a pioneer- ing trio based in an Israeli ghetto in Lod — a dozen miles outside Jerusalem — switched from a party band to a band of rap revo- lutionaries. Public Enemy’s incendiary 1990 album “Fear of a Black Plan- et” and the second intifada, which started in 2000, fueled the group’s anthem, 2001’s “Min Ir- habi (Who’s the Terrorist?).” The song, whose lyrics ask “How am I the terrorist when you’ve taken my land,” became a Palestinian rallying cry and has been down- loaded more than 1 million times. Even though he was only 12 when he heard “Who’s the Ter- rorist?,” the tune changed his life, says TNT. “I was listening to pop music, love songs,” he says through an interpreter. “When I heard this song, I said, ‘I should get this message out.’ I was living in the camp and suffering from these conditions. I have to ex- press myself also.” Qasem turned TNT on to 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. as well. Qasem started “wearing baggy clothes and was asking me ‘What’s up, brother?’ ” TNT says with a laugh. “2Pac’s music is about racism and about how they consider black people slaves,” TNT says. “It’s close to the reality that we are living.” The duo began attracting fans of its own, including MC Tamar- rod. Tamarrod fled to Burj el- Barajneh following the 2007 Nahr al-Bared raid. “I’m carrying worries from inside a destroyed camp,” he raps in one song. “I was forced to live in a barrack / Checkpoints all around us / Tie our hands to our legs.” Tamarrod means “rebellion” in
Arabic. “I’m rebelling not just against the Lebanese govern- ment, but against everything that is not right,” the 22-year old
however, especially when Pales- tinians gather in large numbers in Lebanon. Nassar attended a recent Katibe 5 show at a stadi- um in Beirut. As the collective, which models its live show after Wu-Tang Clan’s frenetic, high-en- ergy, flag-waving concerts, took the stage, “all of a sudden you see all these people coming down from the bleachers. You could tell the Lebanese security was just freaking out, building a wall with their arms, like something was going to happen,” she says. “No one wants to see the Palestinians speaking in that way and being aggressive in that way.” And yet, individually, the Pal- estinians often find support among the Lebanese: A Beirut la- bel put out Katibe 5’s first album, and the Lebanese music commu- nity participated in two benefits to fund Qasem’s trip to Canada. No such detente exists in the
Palestinians’ relationship with Israel.
Despite their youthful, almost puppylike exuberance, the rap- pers speak militantly and with a unified blitz of talking points when conversation turns to how to achieve Palestinian independ- ence. “We can take Palestine back by blood, not by politics, not by ne- gotiations, not by anything else,” TNT says flatly. Their music falls largely on deaf ears in Israel, says Jerusa- lem-based Yael Shalem, a peace activist with Machsom Watch, an organization of Israeli women against the Israeli occupation. “Most of the Israelis are totally separated from any Palestinian cultural activities unless it is serving an anti-Palestine policy,” she says. Shalem feels the rheto- ric in the music from such groups as I-Voice and Katibe 5 does more harm than good: “This kind of communication does not con- tribute for dialogue between the people.”
But for the rappers, musical dissent is their only way to speak with a unified message that clearly states what they desire. “The same problem is in all the camps,” Osloob says. “We have one pain. . . . We have one thing: We have to go back to Palestine. . . . That’s what we want to say.”
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Newman is a freelance writer. REESE ERLICH SPEAKING UP:TNT, left, and MC Tamarrod (whose name means “rebellion” in Arabic) are among rappers addressing camp life. B B
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