Diffusion of the song “Soufounan Banaha Nouh” (“Ships Built by Noah”) recorded in 1920’s Jerusalem, to help us remember that: history didn’t start in October 2023, that there was a time before the Nakba. And that there will be a time after it.

Overview

Friend of Counterflows Sam Salem is one of the curators of Another Sky festival of South West Asia & North Africa experimental music. Sam introduced one of their festivals by playing this piece, in what we would call a claim to music’s capacity to exist in anti-colonial time. Colonial regimes orient themselves towards a permanent present, as a means to foreclose both the possibility of reparations for past crimes and the desire to bring about alternative futures. By listening to this “Soufounan Banaha Nouh” we reveal the presence of the past in the present; we bring a time before the Nakba into our own, so as to project a time beyond it.

We were moved by this gesture. With Sam and Counterflows we’ve arranged to repeat it; to start the music programme at Episode 12 with this rejection of the permanence, linearity or normalisation of the Nakba.

Here’s how Sam introduced the song at Another Sky:

Our first piece is a short work, sung by Thuraya Kaddoura, which was provided to us by the AMAR Foundation for Arab Music Archiving and Research in Lebanon . We wrote to AMAR as we wanted to open the festival with a recording from Palestine before the Nakba.

Little is known of Thuraya – she is mentioned in Wasif Jahariyyeh’s “The Storyteller of Jerusalem”. AMAR and NAWA, the Palestinian Institute for Cultural Development, believe that Thuraya lived in Jerusalem and moved to Egypt in the mid-1920s. This recording is from either 1925 or 1926 and was released by Baidaphon.

Thuraya is almost lost to history – we don’t currently know who she was or where she ended up – or even if she was Palestinian. But by listening to this recording, we are connected to her – her voice echoes through the ages, reaching us tonight after almost a century.

This isn’t an experimental work, but forms an important part of our ritual tonight. We wanted to begin this festival by remembering that there was a time before the Nakba. And that there will be a time after.