Mustapha

ABOUT MUSTAPHA

Mustapha Dakhloul is a Palestinian born in Burj El-Shemali refugee camp, which is located in Tyre, Lebanon. In his teenage years, he was a member of the Sumud Guirab, a bagpipe troupe of about 35 players that performs regularly at t festivals, concerts, weddings, and other celebrations. He currently works multiple jobs in Tyre, including as an ER nurse, but is hoping to find a way to move out of Lebanon due to the current economic crisis. Mustapha's biggest dream is to return to his homeland, Palestine.

“The Musical art form...has morphed from its colonial roots to become a piece of Palestinian Tradition” (Sewell)

Mustapha plays the Palestinian folk song “Wayn a Ramallah” (transliterated in a number of ways into English) on the Electronic chanter. "Wayn a Ramallah" is a heartbreaking song about saying goodbye forever to a lover. For Mustapha and many other Palestinian refugees, however, the song takes on a new, potentially even more painful meaning: the narrator's heart is stolen and on its way to Ramallah, Palestine, which underscores Mustapha's own inability to travel to Ramallah as a refugee. Mustapha is in exile, but his heart is in his homeland.

Lebanon is one of the primary countries affected by the Palestinian refugee crisis. There are currently twelve multi-generational refugee camps in Lebanon, dating back to the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) when the State of Israel was declared and in the process forced more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, with some of these Palestinian refugees fleeing to Lebanon. Since then, there have been more recent waves of Palestinians fleeing due to subsequent wars and violence in occupied Palestine (notably following the 1967 Six-Day War). Many of the refugees living in Burj El-Shemali—including most members of the Sumud Guirab—were born in the camp, though these younger residents still staunchly maintain a sense of “Palestinian-ness.” The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has funded Burj El-Shemali since 1955. The very definition of a Palestinian refugee is contested due to a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Palestinian refugees have spent multiple generations in exile and that the founding of UNRWA essentially defined the right of return for descendents of first generation refugees as an international right.

Today, Palestinian refugees are defined by UNRWA as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict,” including the descendants of Palestinian males (UNRWA.org). More recently, the new arrivals of refugees from Syria has put a strain on camp infrastructure and facilities. The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and the 2006 July War (also called the Hezbollah-Israeli War) played a huge role in shaping the living conditions of Palestinian refugees in the Lebanon. Besson argues that the Civil War resulted “in thousands of [refugees] being displaced inside the country, while a large population which had left the camps before 1975 returned to live in already congested conditions” (Besson 338).

Though the first wave of refugees to Lebanon essentially came with the 1948 Nakba, European nations had been negotiating control of the land for decades prior, which set the stage for a Scottish military presence on Palestinian land. The United Kingdom first asserted claim to Palestinian land in 1916 with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret contract signed with France which divided control in Southwestern Asia. The 1917 Balfour Declaration issued by the British during World War I gave official support to the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and marked the beginning of British military occupation. Between 1920 and 1923, the British mandate was established by the League of Nations with the stated goal of putting the Balfour Declaration into effect and giving the United Nations administrative power. Because of this, Palestinian land was occupied by British soldiers from about 1917 until 1948.

It is extremely difficult and almost impossible for Palestinian refugees to gain Lebanese citizenship.

To my knowledge, there is currently no published scholarly work in English about piping in Palestinian communities.

Founded in 1983, the Sumud Guirab is a mixed-gender bagpipe troupe located Burj Shemali camp. The troupe highlights the complexities of musical repertoire and instrument circulation that result from colonial military presence and indigenous adaptations. There are myriad folk stories that make claims about the origin of the bagpipe in the region, but it is commonly accepted that the Highland bagpipe gained traction in Palestinian communities as a result of Scottish military presence during the era of the British Mandate from 1923–1948 and subsequently remained popular in Palestinian communities in exile. The Sumud Guirab highlights a paradoxical power dynamic: though the Scottish were part of the British occupying force in Palestine in the 1920s through the early 1940s, performers in the troupe express solidarity with contemporary Scottish resistance against the British occupation of Scottish land.

The Sumud Guirab was formed as part of a scout program to build nationalist youth, and adopted an explicitly non-violent and non-political approach. At the same time, the “scouting” nature of the troupe certainly marks it as working to build militant and explicitly anti-colonialist young people. Scouting, along with the bagpipes, was adapted from the British—it was British Army officer Robert Baden-Powell who developed the developed the worldwide Boy Scout Movement. We can understand scouting, then, like the bagpipe, as a way that this Palestinian refugee population curates a tool of Western hegemony. In her chapter “The Double Concept of Subject and Citizen at the Heart of Guiding,” Sophie Wittemans analyzes the differences between girls’ “guiding” programs and boys’ “scouting” programs, arguing that their “common wish is to build citizens who will be informed, critical and responsible” (Wittemans in Block and Proctor 69). The scouting program associated with the Sumud Guirab is mixed-gender, and my interlocutors certainly preach a similar goal.

Journalist John Davison notes the irony that both scouting and bagpipes were “brought to Palestine essentially by an occupying power—the British” but argues that “scouts have turned their music, and their activities, into a distinctly Palestinian, and nationalist, venture” (Davison 2014).

In her article about the Sumud Guirab, Abby Sewell quotes the founder of the scout program Mahmoud al-Joumaa, who commented that “starting the troupe in Burj al-Shemali was a way to teach the youth discipline and support them in the face of crowded and impoverished living conditions” (Sewell).

The interesting paradox of occupation is that it simultaneously energizes rupture and continuity. This is the hinge on which instruments are indigenized and traditions are invented.

The bagpipes make sense in Palestinian music practices, even though the Highland bagpipe was introduced by the British Military. In fact, a number of my Palestinian friends told me in conversation that they believed that Palestinians had their own version of the bagpipe centuries before Scottish soldiers were stationed in Palestine—my friend Ali said to me, for example, "I think there's a special kind of guirab (Arabic for bagpipe)—they call it the Palestinian guirab or something like that. I think its smaller, smaller than the guirab they use in the Sumud Guirab."

Lisa Urkevich argues that bagpipes were invented in Persia, dating back to 900 AD, but that if you “look at Oman and Jordan you see that their bagpipes came from the British fairly recently” (Gedeon 2016). Additionally, she claims that Scottish pipes were adopted so easily into Persia and the Gulf states because “people were so used to that sound from Persia.”

We can thus understand the bagpipe as an incorporation of something new, born out of a moment of rupture, but at the same time, maintaining a sentiment of continuity.

As I mentioned, Mustapha used to be a member of the Sumud Guirab as a teenager, until he got older and needed to work three jobs to make ends meet for his family. Now that he’s not in the troupe he doesn’t have access to a Highland bagpipe to make his own music. With the help of a GoFundMe, he raised enough money to buy an electronic chanter— when I reached out to him, he assured me that it has the same hole spacing as Highland bagpipes, but is substantially cheaper. Just as Palestinian musicians in the 20th century adapted to make space for the Highland pipes in their liberation music, Mustapha too had to adapt.

This is a reminder that material realities necessarily shift our decolonial apparati.

The refugee camp that Mustapha lives in is small—approximately 1 square kilometer—and in recent years as the population has been increasing (due to growing families, and new waves of refugees, many coming from Syria), it has been difficult to accommodate the entire population. In efforts to do so, the camp has been growing up—floors are added to existing structures—and the camp has become denser and denser. The Sumud Guirab rehearses on a roof, or in small rehearsal rooms, as they lack access to large expanses of space. However, the bagpipe is a purposefully mobile instrument, built to be played while marching, and performers of the instrument are meant to move through, and occupy, both physical and sonic space.The loud piercing sound of the bagpipe is traveling, even as its emplacement in the camp is a reminder of a relative lack of movement.

Mustapha is deeply attached to a mobile instrument in a place of extreme restricted movement. I would argue that he has developed a romantic affiliation with this mobile instrument as a sonic point of articulation. Given the cramped physical realities of music making in his refugee camp, it is not surprising that he is drawn to a musical emblem of mobility.

Mustapha shows us that we may need a shift from an “emphasis [on the] content of music (e.g., pitches, harmonic structures, rhythms)" to the "infrastructures of musical performance and the ways in which people and musical information either move or do not move” (Steingo 116).

“The constrained mobility of sound and the constrained mobility of movements...speak to one another” (Tausig 2018, 30).

Mustapha occupies sonic space as a way of asserting agency because his homeland is occupied, but his music is also a way of occupying the time that he spends waiting in liminality.

He necessarily makes strategic claims of indigeneity because his very existence is denied by military, economic, political, and social forces organized under the powerful administration of Zionism.