Their bright white cheches and flowing robes contrast with the light blue sky and tan sand of the backdrop. Caught in a transient moment, their bodies appear in motion while their eyes track the absent camera, as if looking directly at the onlooker. Although captured in a specific moment in time, over 42,000 listeners have viewed the captivating image of Tinariwen, a Tuareg band from Mali, set as the cover of Spotify’s “Sahara” playlist. Described as “the hottest music from the hottest desert,” the playlists’ 50 songs, description, and depiction all contribute to the international imagination of the region.
Although incorporating artists from eleven heterogeneous countries in North and West Africa, many of the songs touch upon connecting themes of exile, loss and mourning– all of which cannot be divorced from larger systems of colonialism, war and displacement. Analyzing two different songs featured in the playlist, “Haiyu” by Mariem Hassan and “Hada Jil” by Aziza Brahim, I will analyze how these composers construct collective identities born from their respective refugee statuses. Building on Alison Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory, I argue that the creation of playlists like Sahara “awaken[s] the potential… for increased social responsibility and political alliance” (Landsberg 24). Going further, I extend that this political alliance also has the possibility of creating inroads for Jewish Arabs from North Africa to also engage in unique forms of collective remembrance. As such, this project will focus on the necessary inclusion of displaced identities just as much as it critiques the absences involved in solidifying a “Saharan” identity.
The proliferation of music on Spotify represents what Alison Landsberg in Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, refers to as “prosthetic memory.” Landsberg defined this term as “memories [that] circulate publicly,” although they “are not ‘natural’ or ‘authentic,’ they organize, they energize the bodies and subjectivities that take them on” (Landsberg 26). In her first chapter, Landsberg analyzed the 1906 film The Thieving Hand. The movie follows an amputee beggar whose prosthetic hand steals from locals against his will, eventually resulting in the man’s imprisonment. The arm eventually returns to its original owner who is now jailed in a cell, a phenomenon Landsberg described as “a part of [his] personal archive of experience, informing [his] subjectivity as well as [his] relationship to the present and future tenses” (Landsberg 26). In other words, regardless of the man’s intentions, his prosthetic arm impacted his life’s trajectory– an example of how memories “that are not naturally–ethnically, racially or biologically [our own]” can still be taken on by others (Landsberg 26).
In her writing, Landsberg also connected this occurrence with a larger capitalist system that allows for an expansive dissemination of knowledge by creating a “mass cultural technology of memory” (Landsberg 28). With 574 million active listeners from 178 countries and a networth of nearly $40 billion, Spotify is a perfect example of the proliferation of transcultural experiences and their interwined relationship to money and profit. Considering its global reach, the playlists and artists showcased are not just influencing musical genres, but the collective identities and memories of the cultural and national groups they inhabit. That is, the decision to include or exclude certain voices will have larger ramifications for how people both inside and outside of the region relate to the area. Songs like Mariem Hassan’s “Haiyu” and Aziza Brahim’s “Hada Jil” thus become prosthetics for a wider audience to understand lived experiences that may or may not relate to their background.
Mariem Hassan’s “Haiyu” begins and ends with an entrancing ululation. Sung in Hassaniyya and accompanied by a lute, the lyrics call out for victory: “O Sahrawi revolutionary people!(x2) / “We are the revolutionaries! (x2) /And the Sahrawi free land is for Shrawis (x2)” (lyricstranslate). Born into a musical family at the banks of the El Gaiz river in Moroccan-controlled Samara, she described the origins of her musical journey with the Sahrawi revolution of the seventies. The liberation struggle, first against Spanish colonialism and then Moroccan and Mauritanian hegemony, was fundamentally impacted by Sahrawi women– with Hassan’s discography acting as an example of how musicians imitated “the sounds made by the wind, the rattling of leaves and the noise made by raindrops” to claim authority over their landscape (Pousada 765). Permanently displaced from her home, Hassan passed away due to bone cancer in 2015 in a refugee camp in Algeria.
Like Hassan, Aziza Brahim is Saharawi, and grew up in a refugee camp in a region of Algeria called Devil’s Garden. Brahim described her music in a 2018 interview with British magazine Songlines as a “conversation, a discussion between emigrants, refugees and stationaries…between nomads and the sedentary; between Saharan, sub-Saharan, North Saharan, and Saharawis” (songlines). Incorporating electronics with guitars and drums, “Hada Jil ” translated to “This Generation”, encourages the next generation of bright-minded children to lead the fight for Saharawi liberation. She sings: “The youth has declared / With conviction it’s pledged /Not a shred of its land/Will be taken away” (worldlisteningpost). Even if she and her community have been forced to take on diasporic identities due to political repression, Brahim fortified that while now lives in Spain, “it does not make me alien to the situation of my people” (songlines). Although Hassan and Brahim’s songs have reached global audiences and have been incorporated into transnational playlists on Spotify, they speak directly to the Sahrawi people and their condition as an occupied peoples without land and rights. For the two, music and political activism are intertwined. Be it utilizing specific instruments or recalling their poetic traditions, Hassan and Brahim produced music that pushes against historical and contemporary forms of territorial exile to demand a unified sense of sovereignty.
While the musical careers of both Hassan and Brahim have spanned decades, Spotify only launched its services to North Africa and the Middle East in 2018. Even though their operations only extend back to five years, their decision to create a playlist featuring Sahwari artists, whose heritages intertwine Berber, Arab and Black African identity, has had an impact on the imagined geographical rendering of the Sahara. Whether intentional or not, the playlists designation under the Arab genre has characterized the identities of these artists as solely Arab, thereby erasing their Berber and Black components. The rise of Berber consciousness in North Africa might find fault with artists like Aziza Brahim and Mariem Hassan who are of Sahwari background being categorized under an extremely Pan-Arab genre. Therefore, the merging of so many identities that each bring with them a particular relationship with warfare, colonialism and anti-colonialism, naturally opens up an array of important questions– most prominently, who belongs and who doesn’t in these narratives?
The creation and proliferation of the Sahara Playlist represents an example of prosthetic memories– the idea that regardless of a person’s lived experience, one’s identity can become intertwined with another’s. Forging connections across national and ethnic enclaves, however, requires selecting the narratives that will be incorporated into a collective memory. While making spaces that transcend colonial and national borders can be a politically tricky affair, this complexity does not mean that it shouldn’t be attempted at all. Instead, the existence of a Spotify playlist that uplifts the voices of refugees represents the ways in which already existing mechanisms can work towards centering disenfranchised identities. I argue that this opening also allows for the inclusion of another displaced narrative: the stories and identities of Jewish communities exiled from the Middle East and Africa.
The Sahara playlist, as a technological space rather than a physical space, has the potential to give artists the opportunity to write for themselves the meaning of exile, be it from the larger continent of Africa in the case of Brahim, a specific hometown in the case of Hassan or an entire ancestrality in the case of African/Arab Jews. Thus, the subject matters of these songs doesn’t hold as much precedent as the opening itself. Considering the artists would all share the name of the Sahara, they, as well as listeners, would be engaging in “privately-felt public memories” that could display an empathetic and progressive connection between Arab, Jewish and Berber communities (Landsberg 12).
The Sahara playlist’s current lack of North African Jewish representation does not mean a lack of general interest in exploring and uplifting this intersectional identity. Neta Elkayam, a Moroccan Jew born in Israel, is an example of a new wave of musicians paying homage to their North African heritage. Reminiscent of testimonies from Moroccan Jews living in Israel, Elkayam was forced to juggle an Israeli exterior while maintaining Moroccan culture within the liminal space of her home. Unwilling to deny her roots, she has taught herself Arabic and has visited her ancestral country many times. Music has thus opened up the opportunity for her to imagine beyond the boundaries of a nation and to liberate herself from the grief of the past.
As professor of Modern languages and Culture, H. Rosi Song argued in her book Lost in Transition: Constructing Memory in Contemporary Spain, “Historical traumas persist because of the incapacity of a society to officially address the losses of the past” (Song 31). Morocco, Elkayam’s ancestral home, once boasted a population of a quarter million Jews in the early twentieth-century before the establishment of Israel in 1948. While the Moroccan government has recently undergone a process of recognizing the country’s rich Jewish history and presence, uplifting musicians who were and continue to be victims of forced migration has the unique potential to heal expansive regions through collective remembrance. By creating spaces where artists can exchange their respective relationships with exile, displaced communities can begin their long return home– finally freeing the Sahara from its own exile.
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