Feb. 20th 2019
inma zanoguera
The Western Sahara has caught significant media attention in recent months. Occasional headlines announcing a scheduled dialogue between all parties involved beat the shy drums of potential agreements: one talk in December, one in February, then March. The number of press appearances with the words Western Sahara fluctuates like ocean tides: they rise, and they fall, and they follow this course as though talks without resolution are an end in themselves, occurring and reoccurring, ad infinitum. Beneath each political fad is an entire generation of Saharauis who have much more to say than what is reflected through the media. Yslem, a Saharaui Hip Hop artist and activist who lives in Spain, will not appear on the news, to be sure, but his songs serve to bring alive a side of the Saharaui youth, specially those in the diaspora, that everyone should be listening to.
And Wearing An Angela Davis Shirt We All Need
Browsing YouTube with no particular end, I one day encountered Yslem, aka Hijo Del Desierto (Son of The Desert), and immersed myself in his channel. As I indulged, verse after verse, every last one of his posted songs, I quickly got a sense that Yslem has this uncanny way of the poet – this rare capacity to convey the uncomfortable truth of one’s lived experience.
Given the amount of art that leaves one’s thirst for authenticity unquenched, listening to Yslem was enlightening and sobering. After I visited the Saharaui camps for the first time, a trip that included countless hours of conversation, my distrust for the content that is circulated through mainstream channels grew even deeper. (That is not to say that there aren’t people doing extraordinary journalistic work, however, like Western Sahara Resource Watch, and a few others. I am obviously and paradoxically a believer of good online content since I am, after all, trying to write it myself.) But I knew I needed something different, something that would cut through the political correctness of media outlets and would shed a light on what Saharauis really want for their lives, their families and their future as a nation. Yslem’s conscious art brings a fresh look at the struggle of displacement, the camaraderie of diaspora youth, and the role of art in political resistance.
***
In a 1962 lecture titled The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity, James Baldwin made the following declaration: “There is such a thing as integrity.” That was, and still is, a radical statement. Given that the world around us is being swallowed by a sea of fake news and general mistrust, one is inclined to believe that Baldwin would have probably been more hesitant to speak about “integrity” had he lived in 2019. In fact it is much easier to believe that the opposite is true: that integrity, if it ever existed, is all but dead.
But I don’t suppose his times were any better, or more hopeful, than ours. The choice between safety and integrity has always been a difficult one for those with a public voice. The role of the media being as unpromising today as it has ever been, who is best equipped to discern the truth, and convey it to the rest of us? Who can we trust? Without a trace of doubt, says Baldwin in the same lecture, in order to find the truth we ought to turn to the poets. He said “Poets are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.”
A similar notion is that which sister Audre Lorde taught us when she said:
“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”
– Audre Lorde
My encounter with Yslem and his artful, unabashed articulation of the Saharaui experience (specially in the diasporic context) only deepened my believe in the truth-telling power of art, and in artists as the messengers of the nuances, complications and paradoxes of marginalized, internally-colonized communities. What is poetry, when distilled to its utmost essence, but art with words? And what is Hip Hop, other than poetry over beats?
“Of course.” Says Yslem. “Before I am a musician, before I am a rapper, even, I am a poet.” Yslem’s songs aren’t tailored to please the audience, instead they are a true and uncomfortable reflection of the desperation, but also awareness, of a whole generation of Saharauis. Through them one is apt to learn about a side of the Saharaui experience that may, as it did for me, changed one’s view on activism, art-making, and resiliency.
Born in the Algerian refugee camps, the young Saharaui emigrated to Spain when he was very young, after having lived shortly in Italy, and soon he was using his talent for words and rhyming to create rap songs that weaved together Hassaniya Arabic, a mix of Spanish and Gallego, and some English slang words:
Levantate camarada,
si hay sangre por tus venas,
y grita conmigo: Sahara:
Freedom, Freedom, Freedom
Rise up, comrade,
if blood runs in your veins,
and shout it out with me: Sahara!
Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
(my translation)
Universal Justice (Ft. Profesoul & DJ Sunshine)
Yslem’s lyrics are composed of uncompromising, unfaltering conviction, radical hope, and a lyrical bluntness that leaves little room for contestation:
El efecto que esto causa
Weld Eseguia
no tiene reparación.
Destinado a ser quien soy:
hijo de la Revolución.
Un poeta en el desierto,
en la ciudad soy un b-boy.
The effects that this creates
will have no solution.
My destiny the only possibility:
I’m a son of the Revolution.
I’m a poet in the desert,
A b-boy when in the city.
(my translation)
Though his epithet, “Son of The Desert”, can easily sound romantic, the reality from which it emerged is everything but: the refugee camps where he was born (where his family still lives), began as a provisional group of tents placed in the middle of the Sahara Desert during the POLISARIO-Moroccan war of 1975. Forty-three years later, twenty-eight since the ceasefire, the tents have multiplied and have been grouped into several camps of brick-and-mortar shacks that house more than 160.000 Saharauis.
Yslem’s recollections of some of his first encounters with Hip Hop involve getting his hands on American music cassettes. Having made their way from the USA to Cuba, these mixtapes traveled in the suitcases of Yslem’s older cousins who at the time were students in a Cuban university. When he pressed play, the airwaves carried English verses by Public Enemy and other American rappers that he could not understand. The beats, however, spoke for themselves, and he found an instinctive pull toward Hip Hop’s beats, patterns and rhythms. But it was through Algerian band MBS, short for Le Micro Brise Le Silence, that his passion for this music truly bloomed.
While speaking of his cousins, Yslem tells me that a very significant number of Saharauis were able to study abroad through educational programs. After about half an hour of our first phone conversation, Yslem began to speak an unadulterated discourse that is the hallmark, the essence, of him as an activist-artist: “They have all the programs possible in place. And that’s great, but
It’s ironic: How are you going to tell me, ‘we are fighting for your right to return to the Western Sahara,’ but then use the camps to build 5-year, 10-year projects so that your NGO looks good? This is what I hear: ‘You’re going to spend the rest of your lives in these shacks.’
“Same goes for educational programs: one doctor per capita, they said. Well, what use is that to us, if there are barely any hospitals, barely any jobs, in the camps.” Thankful as he is for the NGO and humanitarian work being done to help Saharauis, he will not sterilize the irony of the situation. Yslem’s version of justice is hypocrisy-proof:
No hay solución,
pero si “nos dais pena”Y nos mandaron como ayuda
latas de sardina en conserva
La misma sardina
que robaron de nuestro mar
para tapar el problema,
pero el frente tiene hijos
qué no se olvidan del tema
There is no solution,
But a lot of “we feel bad for you”
So they put in aid packages,
sardine cans from the seas
they stole from Saharauis
and say “we got this for you”Universal Justice (Ft. Profesoul & DJ Sunshine)
They want the problem masked
but a new generation has turned up,
that will not forget the past
(my translation)
Yslem first arrived to Spain via a host-family-program called “Vacaciones en Paz,” a network of organizations throughout Spain, Italy and France that arranges summer home-stays for Saharaui children living in the camps. Like many, Yslem eventually moved from the camps to the town in the north of Spain where his host family lives. For many other Saharaui children, this new European world of free medical treatment and mild summer temperatures are a luxury that only lasts a couple of months a year, for only a few years in a lifetime. Permission to survive should not be a luxury. One cannot help but to condemn the fact that this program, in spite of how undeniably needed it is today, is the only way for Saharaui children to be able to thrive and build a worthwhile future for themselves. With the amount of technological resources, transportation, infrastructure, and human capital in the world, no children, no person, should be required to leave their homeland in order to survive.
While the occupation persists, and the colonial history of Spain is ignored, Saharauis’ best scenario is to pray for a streak of luck that grants them a way out of the camps, to live a new life away from their home. Whilst in the diaspora, Saharauis do like other displaced people do: they live on. They persevere, making impossible arrangements, after having gone through impossible journeys, to build a life for themselves and their children. Like Saharauis living in Spain, France, USA or elsewhere today, there is a vast amount of African, Caribbean, South Asian people whose uprootedness is rooted in colonialism. Yslem is defiant toward Spain’s refusal to accept their responsibility toward the Saharaui people. He and his music embody the boldness of a youth that refuses to apologize for its presence, and won’t shy away from claiming their human rights. As late Sri Lanka-born British writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan put it: “We Are Here Because You Were There.”
Demonstration supporting the independence of Western Sahara in Spain. Via www.dailymail.co.uk
The Saharaui youth, according to the rapper, inhabit a unique generational space: they have heard stories of the war, but never fought in it; unlike previous generations, some of them have been educated in academic institutions, yet they still find themselves obliged to compromise proximity to their families for a job in a foreign country. The greater injustice, though, is what they have in common with their parents:
They were born refugees, and must fight every day, each through their own means, not to die as refugees.
Yslem’s battlefield is in a recording studio, and Hip Hop, he says, has been a sharp weapon for liberation struggles since its beginnings. “America is where Hip Hop was born,” says Yslem to me. “that’s from where the rest of us learned what Hip Hop is. Most of the rappers I knew in Spain during the 90s, tried to rap exactly like [American rappers], but I found no use in that. In Spain there were no ghettos, no guns, and many of the things we heard them rap about!”
“Hip Hop is a tool to voice people’s struggles. My life’s struggle is to find freedom for the Western Sahara, so that’s what I rap about.”
“Stillmatic” Album Cover of New York rapper Nas, considered by Yslem “one of the greatest rappers”
Yslem forms part of a group of Saharaui artists that give voice and creativity to the struggle for self-determination. Simultaneously, in the Hip Hop culture, he is one of many marginalized youths that, all over Europe, take to the use of rap to make themselves heard beyond news headlines. To learn more about this immigrant/diasporic/po-co sub-subculture, I took up Griffith Rollefson’s book, Flip The Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality, in which the Hip Hop scholar creates a brilliant sketch of the postcolonial (and therefore defiant and non-normative) nature of Hip Hop. From its inception days, this music genre has served to express the joys and sorrows of postcolonial existence. Namely, Rollefson says, from “antebellum black music of the United States and Caribbean sound system cultures of 1960s decolonization, to its birth among African American, Afro- Caribbean, and Latino youth in the defunded, postindustrial South Bronx […] hip hop has evinced the postcolonial realities of asymmetry, hybridity, and paradox.”
The experience of oppression of underrepresented minorities of NYC in the 60s and 70s, and those of Saharauis today, are ostensibly incomparable in their historical and social contexts. However, and without dismissing the nuances and intricacies of local communities, I happen to be of the belief that, since the transatlantic trade and the “fall” of the European colonial project, both of which laid the foundations for this neocolonial mess we’re in right now, not much differs from one subjugated community to the other. In the same manner that marginalized communities of color existed (and continue to exist) under the yoke of a white, dominating and brutalizing force in the North America that birthed Hip Hop, so is the Western Sahara today, both in the occupied territories in the camps, and in exile. In both (and many other) scenarios, those who suffered most went purposefully underrepresented. Hip Hop came about partially as a means of protest and partly as a manifestation of the common human desire to engage in communal spaces where the joy of camaraderie and shared difficulties was celebrated.
Not all Hip Hop artists have an activist agenda, however today, rappers from all over the globe attest to the genre’s capacity to articulate and voice both local and universal plights. When hopes for a fair political and media representation are bleak, artist-activists will continue laboring toward an artful and imaginative dismantling of the status quo. For Yslem and for the Western Sahara, the status quo takes the form of a neocolonial establishment where most Saharauis are forced to live in exile, under Moroccan police occupation, or as refugees in Algeria and elsewhere. Meanwhile their land, rich in phosphates and attractive as a tourist destination for its beaches and sandy dunes, is violently plundered by Morocco and foreign powers of all nationalities. One is forced to wonder why, or how, under these dire circumstances, anyone would bother contributing to the human cultural heritage through the creation of art pieces.
That is one thing everyone must know about Saharauis, and that is their relentless, unbreakable, will to joy.
Saharaui society has bred many extraordinary artists whose creations keep the fight alive on two fronts: one the one hand, Saharaui art helps to preserve, in spite of the injustices, the dignity of the Saharaui people. On the other, the historical and artistic heritage of Saharaui and Berber people continues to be an oasis in the midst of a cultural appropriation desert cultivated by the cheap-art version of commercialized popular cultural agents, and the Moroccan indoctrination apparatus aimed at whitewashing every last trace of Saharaui folklore. Like author and fine artist Mohamed Sulaiman and music legend Mariem Hassan, Yslem’s gift is to enliven the struggle of a subjugated generation through his rhymes. Though only time will tell the reap of his harvest, Yslem has a way about him that appears miraculously unpolluted by the dominating narrative that the Saharaui cause is complicated, too complicated, impossible, etc… To him, the answer to the issue is simple: Freedom for The Western Sahara.
Maintaining faithful to his role as activist-artist, Yslem sees the struggle of his people and those of other nations under cruel imperial conditions to be one and the same. Through his songs and on social media, Yslem vindicates for Palestinian rights, and has dedicated a song to the late Nelson Mandela for “spending his life fighting — 27 [years] in prison,” for making of “South Africa an example of a nation.”
In 2017, Yslem released Ali27f (MasGraves), with four tunes each dedicated to honoring the Western Sahara’s right to self-determination. Yslem is currently working on a personal project that involves the creation of an independent record label – The Art Teapot, as well as an upcoming new record and subsequent tour.
“I want all Saharaui artists to be able to make music and release it independently. Even if as Saharauis we do activist work, we are still artists and we deserve to get paid. So I will start a record label to give Saharaui musicians the opportunity to create music with no strings attached to anybody.”
As a Hip Hop fan, and as a believer in the power of spoken word art, I often ruminate on what it is exactly about this genre that renders it so profoundly relatable and so refreshingly healing. The best answer that I have so far encountered came from Griffith Rollefson’s work: “The answer lies in the ways that the art form privileges local knowledge as a key to unlock global truths. Hip hop imagines the world from a bottom-up rather than top-down perspective. What’s more, it’s a form of progressive populism that has the capacity to correct our current path towards bigotry and intolerance, so I think it’s time to listen to these voices that are on the front lines of history.” While the popular music scene — in North America, Africa, and beyond — is in serious need for self-reflection, Yslem is an example of what Hip Hop can, and must, do.