[This article originally appeared here, in cooperation with Ma3azef. Translated from the Arabic by Anny Gaul.]
On Sunday, 1 May, 2005, on the eve of Sham al-Nessim, five decidedly non-mainstream musical groups celebrated the age-old Egyptian holiday before an audience of nearly five hundred people. Most of the audience members were from the cities along the Suez Canal and Cairo. State media was conspicuously absent; there was no one covering the event except us – and a photographer from a local Port Said newspaper. Like a religious sect celebrating long-forsaken rites, or the remaining members of an ethnic minority gathering to evoke the souls of their ancestors, the concert’s participants had abandoned the nearby annual folk festival (which took place during the day in the streets of Port Said) for a nighttime performance at Negma Café in Port Fuad, on the other side of the Canal.
This particular festival took place for the first time in 1994, when it was called the first Suez Folk Festival for Simsimiyya Music. It was held on Abu al-Hassan al-Shahir street, in Hayy al-Arab – the traditional stronghold of damma, an artistic genre that has been suppressed by the state in recent years. The festival, along with the celebration of Eid al-Nasr (23 December), were officially cancelled in 2000 – on the pretext of preventing fires from breaking out as a result of the festivities’ ritual burning of an effigy of Allenby. But despite the official decision, the El-Mastaba Center for Egyptian Folk Music has continued to celebrate both occasions.
Port Said’s version of the Shem al-Naseem celebration dates back to the early 1950s, when demonstrators created an effigy of Lord Allenby and burnt it to protest the British occupation – and its repression of both the populace in Ismailiyya and the Free Officers Movement. After the British withdrew, the Allenby effigy came to signify not just Allenby himself, but all tyrants and aggressors. Sometimes it is fashioned with an eyepatch, like Moshe Dayan; at other times it has represented Ariel Sharon, George Bush, and others. (Whether it has ever been made to represent a local official is uncertain.) And so it was only natural that the course of the concert was guided by the memory of songs of resistance. These were the songs that emerged and flourished in the cities of the Suez Canal – which became the front lines of the wars of 1956 and 1967 – as well as in the cities to which their inhabitants were subsequently evacuated. Performed with the instruments and rhythms of the simsimiyya (the name given both to a musical genre and the lyre-like instrument it features) and with bambuti style dancing, they embody the incomparable musical heritage of the Canal.
I was utterly taken with what I saw and heard – and so were those around me. Despite rudimentary sound engineering and enormous low fidelity speakers, the concert was like an Olympic event. Each person who danced, sang, played or performed represented his own vivid expressive vision – while simultaneously being completely fused with the others. Melding contestation with collaboration, they also managed to incorporate the individual character and interpretations of the diverse participants.
Their number included those outfitted in galabiyyas and turbans, as well as those behatted in tarboushes, derby hats, and berets. Others appeared bare-headed. Their clothes were far from fashionable. And some – only some – donned outfits that hinted at a re-embodiment of times long past. Others dressed just as they did in their everyday lives as plumbers, mechanics, water meter readers, and fishermen.
By custom, the audience members actively participated in the performance, responding with dancing and applause. Those closest to the dance floor often burst onto it, spontaneously blending amongst the musicians. It gave me the impression that Egypt herself was epitomized by what I was witnessing, in a way that transcended time and space. At the risk of exaggerating or romanticizing, it felt as though Bes, the ancient Egyptian god of merriment, was there among them, playing the kinara (the forerunner to the simsimiyya harp) while laughing and jumping about.
In Cairo, we had attended an El Tanbura concert where stage and audience were divided. Here, by contrast, there was only one level, with no raised stage. The sohbagiyya entered according to the call of Zakaria, the leader, not according to the wishes of the audience – which, in turn, didn’t whistle or scream like the youth of Cairo do. They barely even clapped, in fact: instead, they said “ya ‘ayni”, touching the shoulders of the best performers, as singers and players thronged together, cigarettes in hand. Mimi, a singer and simsimiyya player, sang a mawwal that included dedications to “al-Mu’allim Sayyed Rahal” and “the people of Ismailiyya.” I asked Shawqi al-Ridi, who plays the tanbura, simsimiyya, and gandwa, about a particular group of larger, four-stringed instruments, and he replied that the venue wasn’t big enough to accommodate them that night. What most fundamentally distinguished the Port Fuad performance was the way it brought together voices and music and dance in their original, organic setting.
Sohbagiyya Suessi improvised a mawwal as an introduction to a song:
Time ago, we said hello by hand
Today a mobile phone brings greetings from afar
Tonight is sweet because of you, ya Port Said
And thus in their lyrics (and even more so, in the music itself) the sohbagiyya continue to bring an experimental boldness to their performances – bringing new compositions, additions, and developments to a vast inherited repertoire.
In 2003, when U.S. forces mobilized in the Gulf and invaded Baghdad, an Egyptian truck driver struck down a number of American soldiers on a military base in Kuwait. El Tanbura referenced the event in its first new material in years: “The Egyptian Freedom Fighter Lutfi al-Barbari.” When the group was still in its early years, its members’ lack of contentment with the existing repertoire led them to record an album, ironically named Andahak (“Back Then”), made up entirely of original compositions. Each of El Tanbura’s albums includes a musical piece composed entirely by its members.
Qumm Zanoug entered in costume with a wooden instrument called the rangu (similar to a xylophone) and upright drums. One member of the group (in the zar ritual, his role is called “sutari”) was wearing a manjur, a belted instrument made of hooves, tied around his waist. They are members of a group that the people of the Canal refer to as alluun – a word that might be translated as “colored,” and which has come to be used throughout Egypt to mean a person with dark skin, particularly one with southern roots. Even the name of the quarter of Ismailiyya where they live, ‘Araishiyya al-‘Abeed, still bears the traces of discrimination and a racialized past.
Their instruments were on the verge of extinction – though some had made their way, along with the melodic tanbura, to the beats of the zar ritual – before Zakaria discovered them and brought them back to life. And so it may not come as a shock to see the rich complexity that emerges when al-Hagga Shadia sings in praise of the Prophet, the beloved Taha al-Rasul, accompanied by the simsimiyya with percussive darbuka, dahla, and sajaat solos. It was the first time I saw her perform this way – and her songs bore no relation to the damma of the Sufis. Indeed, for all the talk about “experimental” art and music, experimentation is, at its heart, quite the infernal matter…at its most basic level it depends absolutely upon starting with the right ingredients, rather than superficial or artificial ones.
Next entered Hassan al-Waziri, leader of the Sohbagiyya Ismailiyya, powerfully striking the five strings of the simsimiyya to produce a sharp and resonant sound, to which he added concise embellishments. Just after, Suessa Far’a burst onto center stage. Their simultaneous performances led me to realize that simsimiyya music is much more than the sum of its parts – the layers and variety of its sounds, the structuring of its lyrics, a particular style of singing, even the way its shared texts are sung to different melodies and rhythms. It remains a musical form about which very little has been published.
The Sohbagia Suessi sang, dressed in the fellahi style, the middle sections of their galabiyyas tucked up over their belts to lift the hems off the ground:
Over yonder by the waterwheel
I saw a beautiful girl in a lemon dress
She threw me a glance with her bewitching eyes
Ah, fishermen, show me how to land a catch like that!
The melody they were singing was one that Walid Saad and Tamer Hosni stole – that is, they used it without acknowledging or referencing its origins and forced it to carry trite lyrics. In the music video Tamer Hosni does a break dance and drives a flashy motorcycle. And even before that, Muhammad Munir distorted the rhythm and collective spirit of the song “Ya Laally”, taking the simsimiyya itself out of it. He and his composer, Kawthar Mustafa, could easily have drawn inspiration from elsewhere, but instead they neutralized the song’s candid and sensuous imagery: in place of “my beloved is pleasing in bed,” we’re left with the blander “beloved, my heart is pleased.”
One cannot exaggerate the magnitude of the difference between what is referred to as shaaby or “folk” singing, which has been frozen in place and set aside as a “folkloric” sideshow curiosity (and which is different from the “shaaby” music of Cairo and the other major cities) and the stars of the major production companies that appear on radio and television – the stars of mainstream Egyptian pop music. The former is a pristine and guileless expression of everyday people: their sentiments, ideas, and collective awareness. El Tanbura’s Mousaad Bagha makes us laugh with a performance that appeals to our inner chauvinist with a song railing against the women in his life. Complaining to the olive oil salesman, he numbers his wife’s flaws in a scandalous manner, without embellishment or elaboration – or any sense of shame, either. Meanwhile his comrades invoke the hashish den and wine.
It is worth mentioning that Egyptian state censors cut out the erotic parts from the song “Shuft al-Qamr” (“I Saw the Moon”) from the recording Noh al-Hamam (“The Weeping of the Dove”). This is among the oldest songs in Egypt, preserved and passed down by the men and women who continue to sing it on wedding nights:
Come and play, young sweet thing
You pretty maid, with no husband yet
Sell your ring and get yourself a man
To play with you beneath the mosquito net
Apart from the censorship are other reasons suggesting that a battle is being waged on multiple fronts. The Ismailiyya directorate of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture rejected the participation of any of the groups mentioned above (with El Tanbura at the top of the list) in the Ismailiyya International Folklore Festival. This is despite the colossal success El Tanbura has had in concert – not only in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt, but also in Jordan, England, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden, Mali, and beyond. The group took first prize in a folk music festival in Canada; moreover, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris put out a live recording of the group in the 1990s that sells for 20 euros. While El Tanbura and its sister groups were innovating this brilliant musical form, Channel Five was busy nearby promoting a handful of stars from Cairo.
So it seems that the state’s methods of imposing conformity on the Egyptian people, combined with the winds of globalization, have torn out the roots of local music. On our way into the city I jokingly asked the middle-aged Port Saidi bus driver to play a simsimiyya recording instead of Umm Kalthoum, and he answered without hesitation that “simsimiyya is done; drivers don’t even carry it around with them anymore.” When I asked why, he simply said, “we're over it.” In the city itself, there wasn’t a single cassette vendor specializing in selling recordings of simsimiyya music. Only a handful of tapes can be found with any simsimiyya recordings – not even enough to warrant a full corner or shelf.
Perhaps this provoked our astonishment because in the rest of the Egyptian provinces, local music still enjoys a degree of circulation, whether at public celebrations, private gatherings, or in the cassette market. There are small companies in the Upper Egyptian cities of Qena and Aswan, for example, that are exclusively devoted to producing recordings of local music genres like nameem and kaff. Even in Cairo, where such a wide range of cultural influences converges, there are distributors and vendors who specialize in local and regional music, alongside Sufi songs and music featuring stars drawn from the Cairene and Alexandrian cultural elite.
Perhaps the transformation of Port Said into a free-trade zone is partly responsible for the relative swiftness with which simsimiyya’s popularity has been diminished. The spirit of infitah brought with it the restrictive demands of businessmen eager for the music to acquire commercial status and a “touristic” quality – which, in turn, contributed to a decline in the quality of the music, as the art form was emptied of any content that might offend or upset the bourgeois sensibilities of nearby hotels and cultural institutions.
Port Said Has No End
Considering all this, my mind turned to Port Saidians’ love for Anwar Sadat – whom they consider to have restored peace, opened the canal, and revitalized the city economically. Perhaps Nasser had become connected, in their minds, with the wars of ’56 and ’67 and the subsequent evacuations of the city. This history is connected, too, with songs of resistance and the famous simsimiyya group Walad al-Ard. I had seen a Nasserist propaganda flyer advertising a concert featuring “the people’s poet” Ahmad Fuad Nagm and “the singer of revolutionary Egypt” Ahmad Ismail. It seems that both the opposition and the intelligentsia are contributing to the process of cultural fragmentation in a way that is both politicized and elitist. El Tanbura and El Mastaba have faced fierce attacks from “anti-imperialists” since accepting support from the Ford Foundation (after, that is, the Ministry of Culture neglected them).
Despite all this, at the concert we spoke with Rais Hassan al-‘Ashary, who formed a simsimiyya group in the late seventies and produced an annual series of records through the company ‘Alam al-Fann. In contrast to the record covers of a quarter century ago, however, he appeared this time unaccompanied by the young men in matching outfits and Saidi skullcaps. His son, Mohsin al-‘Ashary, is a member of El Tanbura and its singular composer, and his grandson, Muhammad al-‘Ashary, joined the group al-Suhba as a singer and dancer when he was just ten years old. So it seems that wanton hands and winds of change haven’t managed to uproot the tradition entirely.
We might conclude, however, that the existence of the simsimiyya of the Canal faces a serious threat. Indeed, extinction was very nearly the fate of damma, another of Port Said’s musical forms (and one that is a cornerstone of El Tanbura’s music). The last living connection to the art and tradition of damma was Ali Abu ‘Auf (a dancer, singer, and musician with El Tanbura), who took part in his first and last damma ceremony in 1987, when he was still in secondary school. Ali was raised in the home of one of the senior figures in the damma tradition, Rais Imbabi Abdullah. And so even though damma practice had disappeared completely after the second evacuation of the Canal, Ali memorized dozens of adwar (the term used to refer to the musical components of the damma repertoire) without actually having seen them performed once in his life. He relates with pride how he performed “Khull ‘Anak al-Yawm” in that one exceptional damma ritual in which he took part – which was understood to be a kind of retirement performance – one final exhibition for the generation of older sohbagiyya.
Imbabi died in 2001, after recording with El Tanbura three-fourths of the material that he had absorbed. The rest was entrusted to Rais Walim and Rais al-Dashin and Usta al-Qat – all of whom died in the early nineties – and some others. Thus, after years of being confined to the dufuf and kasat – the mostly percussive music of Sufi songs and traditions – we now find damma in an adapted form, played with the music of the simsimiyya, the tanbura, and the kawala. Over time, nabawi praise poetry, the songs of pilgrims on the Hajj, and songs of divine love have been integrated – along with adwar of both love and playful banter – in a blend that remains distinct from the genre of simsimiyya, which is concerned with more worldly things: the workplace, social gatherings, nightspots, drinking and smoking.
Although Europeans represent a significant segment of El Tanbura’s fan base (we were told that some of them make a habit of traveling from abroad specifically to attend performances at Negma Café), they were absent from the audience that night. It was unknown whether perhaps their absence was related to the recent attacks in Cairo. After much experience, Zakaria Ibrahim is determined that the existence of his group in Egypt will never deviate from its singular goal (which, if achieved, would not be an insignificant accomplishment): the life of its art and its artists – i.e., good fortune, merriment, gatherings, and companionship. But as for material support and cultural awareness, those things would only come from the “fortunate West.” And so according to Zakaria’s wishes, the production and distribution of El Tanbura’s next album “Ruhna” will be foreign (their first album was a live recording of two concerts in Paris, and the second two were produced in Cairo).
Whatever the case may be, these enthralling and inspiring sohbagiyya have an incredible sense of pride – which is what led many of them to stop performing entirely in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Tariq al-Sany, a percussionist with Sohbagiyya al-Ismailiyya says that you can tell those who haven’t worked on simsimiyya by their inferior sense of rhythm. Tariq does not perform “in the street,” he does not accompany “Far’a Ourg (synthesizer)” and does not play for tips, either.
Our conversation turned to a sohbagiyya group under official ministry sponsorship, which he introduced with a witty and sarcastic song:
All the people come to sing
In the Ismailiyya Festival
They will present art
From the Folk Arts
In the festival, the festival
The Festival of Ismailiyya!
To which he added lines from a familiar children’s rhyme:
When is papa coming?
6 o’clock at night!
Riding, not running,
Riding on his bike!
He continued with more references borrowed from here and there, concluding with a line from a famous Egyptian commercial for baby formula:
Bring us Riri
Bring us Riri
Bring us a package
Bring us two!
* * * * *
Port Said “lives and sleeps like any city. But upon a boat’s arrival she awakens, no matter the hour. And before long, life begins to stir within her with force and with speed: movement spreads, lights flicker on, and the heat rises. In the evenings the most enchanting folk songs ring out from the direction of the ports.” Thus tells us the hero of Love in the Rain, a Naguib Mahfouz novel about Port Said before the Naksa of 1967.
As we returned from Port Fuad on the ferry boat Al-Raswa 12, close to dawn, there were steamships, barges, feluccas, and punts; there were qalftiyya and bambutiyya too. There were no folk songs playing. But that night, I saw a vibrant and steadfast Port Said – a Port Said that was never abandoned or left behind – and my head rang with what had been sung in the copper throat of the African woman:
Sing with me, my friend
Come along, let’s go
Port Said has no end
Hayla huba, hayla huba
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El Tanbura Timeline (2006 – 2013)
2006: El Tanbura performs in the Port Said Festival on the fiftieth anniversary of the tripartite aggression, and releases an album, “Bayn al-Sahra’ wa al-Bahr” (“Between the Desert and the Sea”), produced by 30IPS. It stops its free weekly performances in Cairo after low attendance at a ticketed concert at El Sawy Culture Wheel.
2007: After thirteen years, funding from the Ford Foundation stops, based upon the claim that this amount of time was considered to be sufficient for the organization to be financially self-sustaining.
2008: The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture finances an album, “Arwah” (“Spirits”). Though originally intended to feature only El Tanbura’s music and a different title, it includes folk music from the Canal as a whole.
2009: El Tanbura records another record, “As-hab al-Bambuti”, also produced by 30IPS
2009-10: Salah al-Husri (2009), Um Hamam, Masaad Bagha, and Um Ragab (2010) pass away in separate illnesses.
2010: El Tanbura opens a space on al-Hara al-Balaqsa in the Abdin area of downtown Cairo, where it performs on a Thursday evening once a month. The group planned to offer simsimiyya music lessons under the direction of Mohsin al-‘Ashary, but the lessons did not have high turnout.
2011: After the 25 January revolution breaks out, El Tanbura revives the street festival of Sham Nessim three times in the three subsequent years. Following the massacre at the Port Said stadium and resulting incitement against the city, the Allenby effigy is made to represent Ahmad Shubir, a member of the former ruling party and former Ahli goalkeeper. In 2013, the effigy represents an Egyptian president for the first time (then-president Muhammad Morsi). The effigy is not burned on any these occasions, due to security restrictions.
2012: A Mobinil ad features the song “Ashan Lazim Nakun Maʿ Baʿd” (“Because We Must Be Together”), with music and singing by Ali Abu Auf. The group tours France and England.
2013: El Tanbura responds to a call for civil disobedience by participating in protests in reaction to court rulings about the Port Said stadium massacre – which result in further killings on January 26, 2013. It releases another album, “January 26,” featuring songs from the repertoire of resistance music. It also performs at the World Social Forum in Tunis. It participates in the sit-in at the Ministry of Culture calling for the dismissal of the Muslim Brotherhood-appointed minister. In the lead-up to the June 30 protests demanding Morsi’s ouster, the band releases a music video with clips of concerts at universities and public squares of Egypt, including images of the Maspero martyr Mina Daniel.