‘The years will go by / So tell them the stories’
Kufiya on keys & Leg warmers on arms: proudly sharing heritage and questionable fashion on stage since 2010 (see photo on the left). Live music has always been how I express narratives and reclaim freedom. But also, how I feel connected to strangers and friends. Every city - even home cities - has felt foreign at some point. It's a privilege, and a very strange mindset, to be able to connect through music, especially when you're almost always an outsider. It’s why I feel like I belong to nothing and everything at the same time.
These past seven months, I've been somewhere between rage, heartache, and hope. I came across the photo below, taken in 2014 as part of an awareness media campaign for the same exact cause - Gaza. I remember back then, within one week of the media campaign, the number killed increased to 700. Fast forward ten years, and we're 7 months into a genocide with over 40K lives lost, an underestimate.