Music in Exile Mohammad Abu Hajar “IT’S NOT ONLY PEOPLE STANDING IN SOLIDARITY WITH MUSLIMS. WE ARE STANDING IN SOLIDARITY WITH EACH OTHER.” what Mohammad describes as an “oriental rap” sound that “tries to break the contradictions between eastern and western music.” “It’s a road that we can all walk together,” he says. This new direction is the subject of the album the band is currently recording, entitled Third Way. Mazzaj Raboratory play their first show in front of a packed audience at Kreuzberg’s Köpi squat. The heavy beats, overlaid with hand percussion (darbuka) and driving oud and violin solos, somehow evoke the flames of the Arab Spring that these Syrian exiles still nurture, and which fuel MC Abu Hajar’s pointed political rhymes. Meanwhile, images of people enduring detention and torture flash across the back wall, along with song lyrics in English. The band is playing ‘We Fed Up’, a track “dedicated to all the political detainees and their mothers,” the lyrics of which Mohammad also recited at the anti-Trump rally. The many Syrians in the audience thrust their fists in the air in response to the chorus: “You want freedom. Yes, and we want all the detainees!” It is impossible not to be swept up in such a cathartic public outpouring of emotion that has been so long repressed. The band comes back to perform two encores. On May Day 2017, Mazzaj Raboratory perform on a bill entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised at Yaam, on an outdoor stage directly on the Spree. Mohammad introduces ‘People Well’, a song about a time when young Syrians dreamed that the Arab Spring would spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Syria. “Two weeks later it came,” he says. The beat kicks in. “From Tunisia, from Egypt, tomorrow a victory will arrive, and people who have been martyred will dislocate the gates of the palace,” he raps, in Arabic. The words and the music have an added tension as police vans line up across the bridge spanning the Spree and beyond. The audience, including a man draped in a Syrian revolution flag, dance and chant, urging political action as Kreuzberg threatens to explode at the May Day witching hour. These Syrian exiles not only depict what life was like under Assad, but their attempt to regain their dignity as they are persistently stereotyped as part of a migrant horde that broke down the gates into Europe. “Who will give housing to a refugee?” Mohammad asked us last year after a spate of terrorist attacks in France and Belgium that fuelled the xenophobic rhetoric of Trump, Le Pen, and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland party. “On every application I write: ‘I’m Mohammad, I’m not a terrorist.’” Although many refugees like himself do not follow Islam, they suffer the consequences of extremism. “I even feel humiliated by the pity of some people who are pro-refugees,” Mohammad adds. “Pity will always show me that I’m not equal.” On the upcoming single ‘Uncertain State’, also the title of a concert the band performed at the Akademie der Künste last October, Mohammad expresses the anxiety that derives from his rootlessness in Europe. “I am trying to stand on my feet but the soil below is so fragile,” he sings. “I’m trying to say I belong … but the tribe’s mentality rejects me.” This uncertainty is amplified by the fact that these exiles do not have the choice to go home. In ‘Homeland’, a video and music collaboration with the Turkish artist Halil Altindere that was exhibited at last year’s Berlin Biennale, Mohammad leaps over a border wall and leaves Syria behind, forever: “The home is lost, the home died, the home is behind me now. And everything finished, it’s over.” Speaking to Mohammad on Pariser Platz as the anti-Trump protesters form a cordon and begin marching down Unter den Linden, we discuss the album he and the band have been recording. Inevitably, we talk about Syria. A lot has changed in the weeks prior. With the help of a Russian air bombing campaign, Assad has taken back Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, from the rebels. Mohammad says it has been a difficult time. The dictator having consolidated his power and the revolution now unlikely to succeed, this young man is contemplating the very real possibility that he will never be able to return home. As we walk, Mohammad explains that it might only be possible to go back if he renounces his opposition and commits fealty to the regime. As a relatively wellknown activist, this might be seen as a coup for Assad, and might save Mohammad from ending up in prison. “But I will never do this,” he says. “I won’t accept going back to Syria as a humiliated person,” he tells us. “I would only go back as a free person.” The revolution continues. Mazzaj Raboratory released the single, ‘Uncertain State’, in May and the forthcoming album, Third Way, is due out in the summer. Follow them at facebook.com/mazzajrap 36 <strong>Issue</strong> <strong>Four</strong>
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