Politics and war, love and nerves
Written by Rawan Hasan Al-Zain
Ziad Al-Rahbani, the Lebanese phenomenon, whose music and dialogues we will try to discuss in this article to understand his perspective on life.
“Musical attempts by Ziad Al-Rahbani” is the phrase mentioned in the archives of his early musical recordings. Attempts are the content of this article, and the first attempt is to analyze how Ziad viewed poverty and politics and how he linked them with love. In most of his melodies, we find a reference to romance. Perhaps, in his view, love was a source of life or a pivotal point from which and to which war, corruption, and religiosity intersect.
The Political Reality and the Romantic Dream
The son of the Rahbani family mentions at the beginning of the recording “Murbai Al-Dalal,” the song in which he talked about his experience of marrying Dalal, who was from a wealthy family. In his song, the impact of the war and spatial separation is reflected, as both live in different parts of Beirut (two faces of the war between East and West Beirut). Then the events of the civil war unfolded rapidly and violently. Human relationships during the war and corruption seem like an incomplete dream, an event hard to believe. We find Ziad narrating a basis for this reality that resembles a tragic fantasy: “And it pleases me that this incident occurred, so it is realistic, and thus this melody was composed after this incident occurred, and that was in the year 1975.”
Murbai Al-Dalal
Tell me, what do you have, where is your capital?
I told him, you know, uncle
My love is my capital, and here I am before you
I have neither a gift nor money
And I will tell you straight… my conditions are not tempting
They inherited the broom for me, and I became a garbage collector
Scene One: A Comparison between Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Ziad Al-Rahbani
(Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique)
Berlioz wanted his piece to be a return to life, another attempt at dreaming, with pathways in his melody expressing the impact of religion, romance, and drugs.
“Expressive aspects on the effect of religion, exotic romanticism, and drugs.”
From here, we can hold a debate across time and space. For example, the fourth movement of Berlioz’s piece
“Execution post-revolutionary France”
is the same as Ziad Al-Rahbani’s “Allah Ysa’ed Allah Y’een.” Both musical paths talk about the steering of will and the lows of despair, and in the last minutes of “Allah Ysa’ed Allah Y’een,” there is a sudden slip into religious consolation mixed with some diabolical sarcasm. Similarly, we find Berlioz’s fifth movement “Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath,” a musical deception where the devil’s melody intertwines with the distant sound of church bells. Listen to “Allah Ysa’ed” and then return to “Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath” at the end of Berlioz’s piece, and you will see history narrating the same melody between 19th-century Paris and 21st-century Beirut.
(Diabolical religious rhythm) The mass of the dead… Berlioz’s fourth movement
is the same as:
Allah Ysa’ed Allah Y’een, buyers against sellers All the world is buyers… Ziad Al-Rahbani
A return to life – Retour à la vie…
Opium dreams… the drug piece – Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique
1832 Harriet Smithson as portrayed in Berlioz’s First Night Symphony: ‘‘passionate character… Protestations of love…her nervous system and poetic imagination’’
Greetings to you from the Western area especially for you You have a long boredom digging into you, and that’s why you are used to taking nerve pills these pills no longer help you because they have entered your blood like long boredom
‘Harriet Smithson felt as if she sat in a dream… her nervous system and poetic imagination … ambiguous shuttered remarks and adoration, mingled joy and sadness”…
He then finishes the piece with a “last long sorrowful sleep”…
And similarly in Ziad’s message:
And this persistent boredom will keep eating at you This long boredom No matter how much you stay up, have fun, and get distracted, you will fail
Both left the translation of the ending open to the possibility of the completion of the dream or perhaps maintaining despair.
Scene Two: The Years of War and Sectarianism
Ziad, in one of his radio programs during the war, using his style of employing dark comedy to intensify psychological resistance and dispel the accumulations of national depression and individual psychosis, says:
“You’re talking to me about dirty trash… No, there’s clean and respectable trash… There’s trash that wears ‘cologne’ if you didn’t know. There’s trash that has offices… There’s trash that votes on projects. There’s trash that has henchmen… There’s trash with escorts who stay with it so no one assassinates it. There’s trash with drivers that drop it off wherever it wants… And it usually settles behind its place in the landfill of history.”
Scene Three: 1975 with the Outbreak of the Civil War
“C’est un pays qu’il se suicide. Pendant qu’on l’assassine”
The country commits suicide while they assassinate it – Lebanese poet Nadia Tueni
Brain tumor of Lebanon… A virus journey throughout the sensory territory
Lebanon is afflicted with a brain virus, a rapid and emotional random division of corrupt cells, and this corruption divides and multiplies, diversifying its types and varying its aspects. Corruption in religion, politics, society, and the colors of sects. Ziad deceives this tumor by loosening and tightening between the pace of attack and defense, and between this and that, intervals of sarcasm and irony, using laughter to dismantle pain and strip suffering of its negative power, making it just another station in Ziad’s construction.
“Get up, go to sleep, and start dreaming that our country became a country.”
There were the years of war, the musical formation of Ziad, religion, and the city…
1977 Weapons and assassinations
Ziad introduces Majida El Roumi with a supplication piece
Kyrie Eleison… Blessed are the seekers
“Give me music… Give me bread”
Another Scene: The Symphony of the Factory
Listen to the symphony of the factory, in the symphony the sound of workers’ movements in the background and hums rising and falling, so I see and feel that daily scene from my life.
“An individual passing through working hours, stray thoughts… The individual passes and the building continues, and the picture… the picture of this life… my life is completed, note by note. Sometimes its path is long and loud and sometimes its roar is sad and wandering, but the melody continues, in fact, both melodies continue, and the building and the tune go on… the factory is the sound of this story, the story of an individual’s life… my story…” Ziad’s music is not linearly growing and is not susceptible to tracking and scaling, his music grows in a complex manner. If Lebanon had brain tumors where pressure accumulates, Ziad’s music is a sensory translation of the resistance movement taking place in Lebanon’s brain.
Ziad’s music is the movement of excavation and holding onto the forces of the component (sensory interpretation), it is the abstraction of resistance through memory and language, and renewal is the state of the music, and the capacity for revolution and salvation is among its strongest features.
The cells of the brain tumor are highly capable of improvement and change, and Ziad’s music is full of hope and visions of improvement. Music is the treatment for nerve wars, for doubt and agitation and carelessness, and in Ziad’s music, the reality is captured and language expressions of the flow of nature and behavioral differences.
Symphony of Damage and Harm
Listen to the beginning of this symphony; the melody explodes with power at first. Through damage and harm, I see the memory of every flaw that grew in my brain, announcing its beginnings with disasters and scattered security. However, events crystallize, passing through pauses for processing and comprehension. Gradually, the melody calms, the harm subsides, and that madness, portrayed by anxiety as a fixed state and deadly permanence, diminishes and fades. It even flows into some joy and laughter. Perhaps this is what Ziad wanted to reflect: that every damage and harm can be addressed, modified, and refined. Every damage and harm is pain, dream, and growth.
I see that every melody by Ziad carries layers of problems and wishes, aspirations, and psychological complexities that intersect with Lebanon’s social fabric. From this, a constitution and methodology for musical expression of psychological damages and the eruptions of madness emerge, connected to events in human political history. Ziad’s music was critiqued and constructed through history with revolutionary jazz and the dignity of musical heritage from East and West.
Layers of aspirations and psychological connotations with the social fabric of Lebanon, his music constituted a framework for musical expression of mental health damages, and historical and political arguments through revolutionary jazz combined with a heritage of Arabic symphonies.
His music was:
Two dreams, one for the country and one for love.
“I’m thinking of staying with you, look why you’re doing this, and I’m thinking of your love, where are you, look like this… like this, you do this.”
The improvement of the country is a dream we are capable of realizing. As for the war, it must have an end and a peace truce. Through the history of place and time, we have solutions and releases for all nerve conditions, and sometimes coexistence. But when it comes to love, I do not know a clear path for stability or for giving up and nationalizing feelings to repel harm.
Here I ask Ziad’s question:
“Oh emotions, stop twisting, life is hard like this.”
Writting by: Rawan Hasan Al-Zain
About the writer:
Born in 1998 in Khartoum, a social researcher with a background in human geography and environmental ethics, working in community development since 2014, interested in resolving the shortcomings of cultural disinhibition through her writing. With extensive practical experience in civic advancement and gender issues, she is an art enthusiast who in 2019 documented a memoir about museums and the neurocultural impact of art across museums in Europe, Kenya, and Sudan.
She is now working on documenting patterns of social behavior in local communities from a female perspective.
The musical melodies included in the video were composed by Ashraf Ibrahim, a Sudanese musician who works to add modern touches to classic Arabic songs with a Sudanese touch.
References:
The leftist, the liberal, and the space in between, Ziad Rahbani and everyday ideology by Sune Haugbolle
Ziad and the liberal subject by Sune Haugbolle
Harvard scholar on Berlioz’s third movement