The Algerian singer talks about the inspiration she finds in the golden age of poet-scholar
On a sultry night in Tunis, a youthful crowd leaps to its feet waving lighters and smartphones as Souad Massi sings Arabic lines that take them back to the Jasmine Revolution four years ago.
The words are not those of the Algerian-born singer-songwriter but of Abou el Kacem Chebbi, a Tunisian modernist poet whose face is on the country’s 10 dinar banknote. A Byronic Romantic with a weak heart, he died young in 1934, but his poem “To the Tyrants of the World” was reborn in the chants of the Arab uprisings, which began in Tunis with the overthrow of the dictator Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011. The poem now has another lease of life in Massi’s song “Hadari”.
Decades before Ben Ali, or his predecessor Habib Bourguiba, took power, Chebbi wrote to “the Tyrant”: “Beware. That the springtime doesn’t trick you . . . The torrent of blood [you shed] will soon sweep you away.”
Chebbi’s was a guiding spirit of the Arab Spring, Massi says the morning after her concert, on the terrace of the Hôtel Majestic. “I was proud to sing in Tunis two of his poems about revolution.” Yet the liberation they recall is tinged with grief at all that has followed. The low point was in March this year, when gunmen killed more than 20 people — mainly tourists — at the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, in a terror attack claimed by Islamic State.
Security was high at the open-air concert on May 14. It inaugurated the French Institute’s new home in the Petit Carnot, a renovated 1880s lycée across the street from the Tunis conservatoire. Massi, who has lived in France since 1999, headlined with her band in a whitewashed courtyard that glowed red from a backlit wall of mashrabiya latticework.
Like the makeover of this colonial-era edifice, Massi’s latest songs are a homage to centuries-old Arab culture, and to a tolerant humanism now under siege. They set to her melodic, eclectic pop music the work of great Arabic poets, from the sixth-century, pre-Islamic Zuhaïr Ibn Abi Salma, to Ahmed Matar, an Iraqi exile in London today. These 10 songs form her new album, El Mutakallimûn (Masters of the Word), which she will perform at London’s Barbican on May 31.
Massi, 42, is known for melancholy love songs and folk-rock ballads, sung with her acoustic guitar in the manner of Joan Baez — though her first bands in Algeria played flamenco and Berber hard rock. “I’m called ‘world music’ because I sing in Arabic, even though I make rock music,” she shrugs. In France she added more elements, from the Gnawa music of Maghrebi mystics to west African highlife. “I work with musicians from France, Cameroon, Senegal, Guinea. It’s good to share with people their sound experience. I don’t want to close myself in a prison. For me, music is to be free.”
Source: www.ft.com