Emel Mathlouthi: "Ensen Dhaif"
The recent Iranian documentary No Land’s Song had a wildly ambitious premise: it followed the Tehrani composer Sara Najafi as she attempted, bravely, to stage a concert in her city highlighting an array of female singers, each performing solo. In Iran this is illegal, and has been since the Islamic Revolution of 1979—individual women are forbidden from singing in public. (When, in the film, a religious scholar tells Najafi that “no decent man sitting in public and listening to music should get sexually aroused,” the astonishment in her eyes jumps off the screen.) The goal of No Land’s Song is to “restore the female voice” in Iran—it draws on icons of decades past such as Qamar, Delkash, Googoosh—and its theme is fearlessness.
So it’s no surprise that Tunisia’s Emel Mathlouthi figures prominently into this film. She’s one of the soloists at Najafi’s concert—a trenchant force of hope throughout—and in the Middle East her reputation proceeds her. There, Mathlouthi has spent a decade instigating rebellion among Arab youth with her remarkable protest songs. In Tunisia her music was banned from radio and TV before 2010, but her song “Kelmti Horra” spread in videos online, becoming an anthem of the Arab Spring revolutionaries. “We are free men who are not afraid/ We are the secrets that never die,” she sings on “Kelmti Horra.” “And we are the voice of those who resist.” Last December, in Oslo, Mathlouthi sang it at a ceremony for the Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s a gripping story that only belies the considerable power of Mathlouthi’s music itself. Her international debut, 2012′s Kelmti Horra, played like industrial folk—bearing out influences of the East and West ranging from political Egyptian composer Sheikh Imam to Dylan to Björk, earning comparisons to austere Arab pop legend Fairuz. For her next record, out later this year, Mathlouthi worked with a former Björk collaborator, Iceland’s Valgeir Sigurðsson (founder of Reykjavík label Bedroom Community). “Ensen Dhaif” was produced by Mathlouthi and Tunisia’s Amine Metani with additional production from Sigurðsson.
In Mathlouthi’s words, “Ensen Dhaif” is “about the fact that we all think we’re in control and we’re told to push and give—but we’re nothing but twigs at the mercy of winds.” She wrote the song while Tunisia was still under a dictatorship, and it’s “a reaction to that and to the suffocation of global power systems in general.” “Ensen Dhaif” is a gorgeously ornamented fusion of towering beats and darkly-shaded Arabic minor scales. Its incendiary tone is conducted by Mathlouthi’s galvanic voice, which is at turns vulnerable and strong. On “Ensen Dhaif” you hear a person refusing to compromise, a searing vision founded on real risks and the necessity of truth.
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