My sincere gratitude goes to ENANA for sharing so many aspects of their life with me, and for commenting on a first version of this text: thanks for spending all this time and effort. I wholeheartedly thank Cornelia Gruber (Austrian Academy for Sciences) for commenting on a previous draft of this paper. Thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
- 1 For a recent literature review see Ioannis Christidis, ‘Music in the Experience of Forced Migration (...)
- 2 Ozan Aksoy, in Anne K. Rasmussen et al., ‘Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2016, “Ethn (...)
- 3 See, for example, Ulrike Präger, ‘Enacting and Embodying Mobile Voices: “Musicking” as a Tool for ( (...)
- 4 Sabine Hess et al., Der Lange Sommer Der Migration. Grenzregime III (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2016).
- 5 Their full name is Enana Alassar, I will be using their stage name ENANA in accordance with their r (...)
- 6 Michael Parzer, ‘Double Burden of Representation: How Ethnic and Refugee Categorisation Shapes Syri (...)
- 7 Evrim Hikmet Öğüt, ‘The Short History of Syrian Street Music in Istanbul: Challenges and Potentials (...)
- 8 Dunya Habash, ‘“Do Like You Did in Aleppo”: Negotiating Space and Place Among Syrian Musicians in I (...)
- 9 Christidis, ‘Music in the Experience of Forced Migration from Syria to the European Borderland’.
1Research on musical practices after displacement and forced migration has been an important strand within ethnomusicology since the late 20th century1. The approaches and insights vary according to their immediate embedding in the local surroundings; however, there are some overarching topics: “love, longing for home, ‘away from home’, relation to a place, and nostalgia for a particular period’”2. Another common theme is that displaced people often find themselves in structural conditions of Othering that highlight their difference through social status, language, and/or national or ethnic background to a presumed “majority”. Furthermore, contemporary ethnographic studies on music in different migratory settings all share the perception that refugees – contrary to widespread media narratives – do have agency that can actively be employed, despite the highly demanding challenges of potentially traumatic experiences in situations of forced migration3. All these aspects apply to the Syrians arriving in Europe at the time of the so-called long summer of migration in 2015/164, when – for a short period of time – some of the European Schengen borders were opened and hundreds of thousands of people fleeing mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iran, arrived in different Western European countries. ENANA, the person at the centre of this article, was one of them5. Due to this specific situation in Europe, scholarship in general has paid considerable attention to displaced Syrians in recent years, and so too has music studies. Central aspects herein were the challenges of ethnic and political categorisation for migrated musicians6, the practice of street musicianship7, the challenge of cultural taboos and losing status8, music in refugee camps, and musicians creating life anew9.
- 10 Rasmussen et al., ‘Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2016’, 280.
- 11 Aksoy, in Rasmussen et al., ‘Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2016’, 297.
2This article contributes to this research with an individual ethnographic case study demonstrating the multi-layered reality of (non-)belonging in music and life after forced migration. As such, the study sits squarely within the framework calling for a move beyond area studies, and the perception of stable communities, and – in the words of Anne K. Rasmussen – “toward an ‘ethnomusicology of migration’”10. Taking up what Ozan Aksoy envisioned as an ethnomusicology with a “changing focus on the musical practices of immigrants instead of their original habitats”11, I discuss the complexity concerning the multiple and intersecting challenges of (non-)belonging that an exiled musician is confronted with, needs to react to, and needs to deal with emotionally, when forced to build a new (musical) life in new surroundings.
- 12 Upon my request, ENANA read an earlier version of this paper and agreed to the presentation of them (...)
3ENANA, then identifying as a lesbian woman, fled the civil war in Syria in 2015, travelling to Europe from Damascus by the then common route through Turkey and via the Mediterranean Sea in a boat to Greece. Having performed occasionally as a singer in Damascus, ENANA re-started their musical activities in Berlin soon after their arrival in 2015. In July 2020, ENANA came out publicly on Instagram as trans non-binary; ENANA’s pronouns are they/them12.
- 13 Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’, Patterns of Prejudice 40, no. 3 (2006) (...)
4ENANA’s personal trajectory during their first years in Europe made me ground this research in sociological and anthropological discussions on the notion of “belonging”, including its counterpart “non-belonging”. Belonging relates to institutionalised categorisations and “naturalised” identities, in what Nira Yuval-Davis calls the “politics of belonging”13, while at the same time being explicitly theorised as non-essentialised, dynamic, relational, and necessarily intertwined and intersectional. In this ambivalence, ENANA’s life and music highlight various bonds of belonging that exceed any stereotypical “Syrian” affiliations, and explicitly point towards the heterogeneity of the “Syrian” diaspora, as well as towards affiliations that reach beyond a “Syrian” descendance. While positioned (musically) within frameworks and “groups” constructed by dominant discourses, including “Syrian”, “Arab”, “migrant”, “postmigrant”, “lesbian”, and “trans” identities, this ethnographic account demonstrates the complexities around the type of intersected (and changing) belonging that comes with a “Syrian” “(post)migrant” biography.
- 14 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018. All interviews were conducted in English; the chose (...)
5Born 1995, ENANA grew up in a middle-class, academic, and music- and art-loving family in urban Damascus. They learned to play the piano and the guitar during their childhood, took part in theatrical performances from the age of ten, and as a teenager even occasionally performed as a singer. They studied English literature in Damascus for two years, before fleeing Syria in 2015. Then identifying as a lesbian woman, ENANA never felt welcome in Syria: “I always felt like an alien; I always felt like I don’t fit in”14. Leaving the country was always ENANA’s dream:
- 15 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
I just wanted to go somewhere, where people don’t point at me if I have a shaved head or if I had a piercing in my nose, or if I like girls, or if I am holding a girl’s hand, or if I am kissing a girl, […] or if I have my guitar and I am doing a concert, or whatever, just fucking freedom, you know. Freedom, simply, like nothing more than that: freedom15.
- 16 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, August 2021.
6Later ENANA would describe this sense of hope of being able to live a life in peace both with oneself and with society as “naïve”16.
- 17 Jesse D. Ruskin and Timothy Rice, ‘The Individual in Musical Ethnography’, Ethnomusicology 56, no. (...)
- 18 Sabine Strasser, Bewegte Zugehörigkeiten. Nationale Spannungen, Transnationale Praktiken und Transv (...)
7This article starts with an introduction presenting certain theoretical perspectives around “belonging”. Thereafter, I discuss five songs and performances by ENANA, in near to chronological order. Each “event” highlights specific notions of (interdependent) (non-)belonging that became relevant for ENANA and were lived through in both their life and music following their forced migration to Berlin. I show how different issues relating to belonging and non-belonging acted as a driving force in ENANA’s musical practice and creative processes. ENANA has been part of my research on Syrian musicians since 2018. Over the years, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have documented much of ENANA’s development, both in music and beyond, up until the end of 2021. The material includes personal interviews, social media posts, media coverage, all official musical releases, and a wide range of (online) performances. For this article, this material has been thoroughly and systematically analysed to detect utterances, performances, statements, sounds, and images, with the aim of uncovering different personal attachments, networks, and local and translocal social (musical) spaces. This all adds up to a person-centred ethnography, or an ethnography of an individual17 – or maybe more suitably to a “biography of belonging”, wherein belonging is not assumed beforehand but detected through ethnographic research18.
8This is how ENANA described their feelings towards issues of belonging in one interview:
- 19 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
I will always suffer from [issues of] belonging. Because when I was there, I never felt that I belonged there, and when I’m here I never feel that I belong here. So, I don’t think that I will ever manage to feel belonging19.
9The “there” in this statement means Damascus and/or Syria; “here” means Berlin and/or Germany. The term “suffering” points to a constant feeling of non-belonging and longing, rather than a feeling of belonging: while ENANA was living in Syria, they were rejected by society for being a lesbian woman; since living in Europe/Germany, they have been rejected for being Syrian, a refugee, a migrant, and an Arab. Such feelings of (non-)belonging, expressed through a distinction between a European and an Arab-speaking world, and alongside dominant expectations concerning gendered behaviour, were the most prominent and most visible in ENANA’s performative life, and have informed their musical output in different ways throughout the years since their arrival in Europe. However, belonging is much more complex than supposedly binary oppositions. While the imposed, often institutionalised categories of belonging point necessarily towards issues of ethnic and national categorisations, gender and class identities, and experiences of racism, ENANA’s diverse and changing feelings and performances of belonging show the intersectionality, the immediate situatedness, and the emotional relevance of belonging and non-belonging, and their consequences in musical practice. How these affiliations are enacted can be surprising and unusual, and may potentially reveal conflicting ideas and imaginations. I argue that feelings and the politics of (non-)belonging are a central musical force for musicians after displacement.
- 20 E.g., Andreas Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks (Oxford: Oxford Univers (...)
10In this context, I deem it necessary to point out that by applying such an approach to “belonging” as described, my intention is not to explain why people (musically) “belong” to a group or not, nor why they become attached to one community and not another. I do not aim to explain the boundary-making practices of and within groups, as others have already done20. Rather, by applying belonging as a processual and transformative concept to an individual case study, I aim to show the manifold aspects of belonging that individuals must deal with, respond to, and draw upon. I propose a conceptualisation of belonging that might be situated next to and in addition to the concept of “identity” as being more stable, more “essential”, and embodying notions of the self. In relation to ENANA’s life this inevitably brings the entanglement of different categories to the fore, amongst which ENANA is considered to “(not) belong” or has had to create their own attachments.
- 21 Johannes Brusila, ‘Music and Identity, Then and Now – the Questions That Remain’, in Sounds of Migr (...)
- 22 Tina K. Ramnarine, Beautiful Cosmos: Performance and Belonging in the Caribbean Diaspora (London: P (...)
- 23 Floya Anthias, ‘New Hybridities, Old Concepts: The Limits of “Culture”’, Ethnic and Racial Studies (...)
- 24 Tina K. Ramnarine, ‘Musical Performance in the Diaspora: Introduction’, Ethnomusicology Forum 16, n (...)
11In ethnomusicological research, belonging has rarely been used as a distinct theoretical perspective; rather, the term is commonly used synonymously with membership, citizenship, or identity, often in connection with the topic of national or ethnic categorisation21. One exception is Tina K. Ramnarine’s monograph Beautiful Cosmos. Performance and Belonging in the Caribbean Diaspora, which uses “belonging” as a central theoretical framework to demonstrate the non-static reality and constant reformulation of belongings for people living in diasporic settings. Asking where “home” is in the diaspora, she argues for the need to move beyond a perspective of disconnection that often grounds studies on diaspora, and rather opts for an understanding of “multiple subjectivities” that people in diasporic contexts – in Ramnarine’s words – “rehearse” and “experience”22. In discussing processes of place-making and the creation of “feeling at home”, Ramnarine concluded that we need to abstain from creating a border between homeland and diaspora, as both are “home” and contribute to constituting the reality of people in diasporic contexts. My research on ENANA’s life and music is grounded in this understanding of “translocational positionality”23. Musical practices as performative acts can produce and support different notions of (non-)belonging; music – commonly understood in ethnomusicology as including not only the sound itself, but all connected practices and actions – can be an important means to create and overcome difference, to produce senses of self and other, to include and exclude24.
- 25 Yuval-Davis, ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’.
- 26 Marco Antonsich, ‘Searching for Belonging – An Analytical Framework’, Geography Compass 4, no. 6 (J (...)
12A major analytical perspective on belonging, which follows Nira Yuval-Davis and is employed by a variety of scholars, is to conceptualise it, on the one hand, as an emotional attachment, often as a feeling of being “at home” or feeling “safe”, and on the other as relevant structural categories, framed as “politics of belonging”25. The latter refers to practices of boundary-making, such as affiliations to formal and informal communities, and the active negotiation of such boundaries that are highly affective, mainly relating to ethnically and/or nationally defined categories in any migratory situation. Floya Anthias also explicitly connects belonging to places, or communities, in the form of attachments, claims, or attributions, in addition to formal memberships. Concerning the notion of “home”, Marco Antonsich identifies five relevant factors to which I will refer in this case study: auto-biographical, relational, cultural, economic, and legal26.
13A key question in relation to this perspective is how “belonging” relates to “identity”, a commonly used framework in music studies. I draw on the understanding of Anthias, who precisely formulated the central difference between these concepts:
- 27 Anthias, ‘Thinking through the Lens of Translocational Positionality’, 8.
The two terms of identity and belonging live together but involve a different emphasis: […] Identity involves individual and collective narratives of self and other […] and identification. Belonging, on the other hand, is more about experiences of being part of the social fabric and the ways in which social bonds and ties are manifested in practices, experiences and emotions of inclusion27.
- 28 Tine M. Gammeltoft, ‘Belonging’, Social Analysis 62, no. 1 (2018): 89, https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2 (...)
- 29 See, for example, Yuval-Davis, ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’; Strasser, Bewegte Zugehör (...)
- 30 Strasser, Bewegte Zugehörigkeiten, 32. My translation.
- 31 Strasser, Bewegte Zugehörigkeiten, 32.
- 32 Strasser, Bewegte Zugehörigkeiten, 31. My translation.
- 33 E.g., Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2020); (...)
14A perspective of belonging thus puts the focus not on the self, but on the relations, the fabric, the networks, and connected practices and feelings of inclusion and exclusion. Furthermore, an understanding of belonging allows us, as Gammeltoft states, “to capture the plural and often competing and contradictory memberships that characterise human lives”28. Current understandings of belonging conceptualise it as dynamic and relational29. Belonging does not describe what someone “is”, but focuses on a process, an action. It is a continuous – although not arbitrary – process of transformation and change: “belonging emphasizes social and emotional connections between people, without having to call on fixed/unchangeable identities”30. Belonging is not something essential that humans have or do not have, that they cannot change or influence; it is not a fixed status. A given person might not in all situations be able to individually decide to belong or not, since structures of exclusion exist beyond individual control; a person can, however, shape the intensity and time of any ascribed and self-chosen “identities”, be it nationality, ethnicity, and gender31. Conceptualised in this way, “belonging” can be used to account for the different layers of attachments and social groupings that lie beneath, above, or in between our – more or less – fixed identities. Notions of belonging “become movements with points of intersection, rather than a singular aim of arrival and establishment”32. This metaphor of intersection points immediately to the necessity of a thoroughly intersectional way of thinking33: fluidity, performativity, and the processual character, as well as the parallel and intertwined character of feelings of belongings and the political expressions of belongings, necessarily call for an analysis of belongings that does not focus on singular categories but continuously considers the mutual interdependence and inseparability of different social and cultural categories, such as race, gender, class, age, ability, and national identity. For research on musicking in migratory contexts, this means coming to terms with the multitude of different attachments, anchor points, bonds, and boundaries that musicians deal with and potentially perform in their own music.
- 34 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
- 35 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
15A poster depicting ENANA’s first public concert in January 2016 is stuck up on the wall in their Berlin flat. It states “ENANA sings Amy Winehouse, James Blunt & Adele” (Image 1). The concert took place during a gallery opening only a couple of months after their arrival in Germany in August 2015. For ENANA, this was the starting point for making and performing music again: “[The concert] was amazing. After that, I was like, yah, I want this. I want this the whole fucking time”34. More concerts soon followed, one of them at the Lesbisch-Schwules Stadtfest Berlin (Lesbian-Gay City Festival Berlin) in July 2016, which ENANA specifically mentions in the interview: “This is so huge for me, 2000 people in that place, it’s so crazy. And yeah, I performed there”35.
Image 1: Photograph of the poster of ENANA’s first public concert in January 2016
Design by Salomé Guyot. Used with the kind permission of ENANA.
16During the initial period following their arrival in Berlin, ENANA’s identification as a lesbian woman soon led to their “belonging” to a loose LGBTQ+ community, an affiliation which proved crucial in helping them settle, get involved, make friends, and even find a flat. Helping out at a Berlin state-run social centre that was coordinating the arrival of refugees, ENANA got to know people active in a local NGO supporting LGBTQ+ people, and it was through these contacts that their personal network began to grow. Although ENANA did have extended family connections in Berlin, their burgeoning network was not characterised by genetic relations or potentially connected forms of responsibility or closeness, or even “Syrian” connections. Rather, their expanding bonds were made through LGBTQ+ alliances. This was also the case in terms of performance opportunities: ENANA performed mostly at LGBTQ+ events during their first years in Berlin, and subsequent offers to perform regularly came from within these same circles.
- 36 Brunner, ‘Popular Music, Forced Migration from Syria, and Welcome Culture in Germany and Austria’.
- 37 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
- 38 For more on the song see Brunner, ‘Popular Music, Forced Migration from Syria, and Welcome Culture (...)
- 39 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
17At that time, ENANA’s music consisted of cover versions of various English-language pop and rock songs, accompanied by guitar. The repertoire based on ENANA’s Facebook posts in 2016/17 included songs from bands and musicians such as Nirvana, The Cranberries, Beth Hart, The Animals, Adele, Frank Sinatra, James Blunt, LP, and Vaya Con Dios. A hand injury in early 201636 left ENANA unable to play guitar and, for a time, another guitarist accompanied their performances before they took up the instrument again: “I started making my own concerts with my own playing, by myself. And keeping my sound the way I like it”37. ENANA’s desired sound was mainly individual covers of (mostly) mainstream English pop/rock songs; they played guitar and sang solo on stage. The idea to form or join a band never occurred to them. Rather, ENANA turned to songwriting, and even performed one of their original songs on stage: the English-language song “Backpack” narrates the story of ENANA’s journey from Syria to Berlin in a funny yet sarcastic way38. ENANA only began writing their own songs in Germany; in Syria, they had only previously written poetry39. ENANA’s voice received acclaim and was celebrated, which encouraged them to continue making music.
18It is evident that during their first years in Berlin ENANA aligned themself, consciously and with dedicated effort, with a tradition of Anglo-American pop/rock culture, and their performances presented a belonging to this globally available form of musical expression. This choice points to cultural factors related to belonging connected to autobiographical details relevant to ENANA. With their parents both being English literature graduates, and having studied English literature themself for two years before leaving Syria, ENANA grew up surrounded by English language and culture, and was drawn towards English-language music genres. Performing English-language music, such as mainstream pop/rock, was a way of presenting a certain strand of belonging that made ENANA feel comfortable – it represented a world that was theirs, that continued to exist, and that formed a bridge between their old and new living arrangements after their arrival in Berlin. Arabic music forms or genres, on the other hand, were not at all present in these early years after displacement.
19Two forms of structural belonging relevant to ENANA need to be highlighted before delving into any detailed ethnographic accounts, as these were evident throughout the material, even if never directly addressed by them. The first is age: the time span covered in this article relates to when ENANA was in their early twenties. This is obviously relevant when analysing and interpreting their musical development and attachment. The second is class: in terms of educational background and access to financial means, ENANA had very much grown up in a “middle-class” family. This, of course, provided ENANA with certain forms of cultural capital that proved relevant following their arrival in Berlin, most obviously English-language proficiency and a degree of familiarity with formal education systems.
- 40 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
20In 2018, ENANA had already started to listen increasingly to rap music and included rap songs in their wider covers repertoire. In February 2018, they performed the song “Be Free” by US-American rapper J. Cole at a special Women’s Night of the performance series Poetic Hafla; ENANA posted a video from the event on Facebook (February 10, 2018). The original song is about the killings of Black people by the police in the US. In summer 2018, ENANA re-posted the video of their performance on Facebook in response to the death of the popular actress May Scaff, an important figure in the Syrian Revolution (July 25, 2018). In our interview, ENANA stated that they could relate to this song, and much of the suffering of African American hip-hop artists. It was about displacement and losing friends: “J. Cole in the ‘Be Free’ Song is talking about being free as Black people, from racism, and from violence against them, and all that stuff. But, also in those lyrics, every word he sings about – I can definitely, definitely, definitely project it on my situation”40. ENANA’s version of the song has no hip-hop features; they performed it in the then to them familiar singer-songwriter style, making it more melodious. ENANA attached the following hashtag to the video on Facebook: #Enaned_the_shit_outta_that_hiphop_song (Facebook post, February 10, 2018; see Image 2). In short, ENANA adapted the original to fit their own musical comfort zone, i.e. a guitar-accompanied pop song.
Image 2: Screenshot by Anja Brunner of Facebook post of ENANA, February 10, 2018
Used with the kind permission of ENANA.
- 41 Yuval-Davis, ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’.
- 42 Brunner, ‘Popular Music, Forced Migration from Syria, and Welcome Culture in Germany and Austria’.
- 43 Antonsich, ‘Searching for Belonging – An Analytical Framework’, 648.
- 44 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, August 2021.
21In the realm of the politics of belongings, as proposed by Nira Yuval-Davis41, it is necessary to add some additional context: the commonplace and inevitable categorisation as a “refugee” served for ENANA as an entrance ticket to many performances during those first years in Berlin, up until about 2018. As I have discussed elsewhere in more detail, it was mainly two “identity” ascriptions that propelled ENANA onto the stage: being a refugee and being a lesbian woman42. In many cases, the intersection of these two categorisations elicited a specific interest from certain segments of the public; ENANA was widely covered in different forms of media during their first years in Berlin. ENANA also recounted their regular experiences of being pushed towards a very specific image, one expected of a Syrian refugee woman by the media and often used to stigmatise Muslims. Media requests and offers to perform tied to this “refugee” context began to decline around 2018, and ENANA actively and openly rejected the label of “refugee”. At the same time, ENANA’s music interests drifted slowly towards rap and hip-hop as potential new fields of performance. In relation to certain economic factors, which are also relevant in frameworks pertaining to belonging43, it is important to note that ENANA made it clear that they often played voluntarily, without remuneration, and that they only realised much later that they had often been exploited44.
- 45 Antonsich, ‘Searching for Belonging – An Analytical Framework’, 648.
22Feelings of belonging and non-belonging, during the period following ENANA’s arrival in Berlin, were mainly connected to communities, not places. Returning to Antonsich’s five factors of belonging, we can identify here, in these initial years, two important auto-biographical factors: ENANA’s attachment to the English language and to pop/rock music. The other relevant aspect is the relational (non-)belonging based on gender identity – i.e. finding community anchor points through gender identity in Berlin while still feeling rejected by Arab culture for the very same reason. Syria as a “home” is undoubtedly present in the on-going comparison of ENANA’s memories of certain places in Damascus with their new surroundings, but not as an immediately relevant marker of belonging. The categorisation as a “refugee”, however, as a specific form of non-belonging, is certainly relevant; Antonsich considers this to be a “legal factor of belonging”, but it is also a relational one in that it clearly affected ENANA’s musical interests and opportunities, as well as their personal networks, in terms of channelling specific attention and focus45.
23In August 2021, one of the summer breaks between the shutdowns of social life during the COVID-19 pandemic brought me to Berlin for field research, where I met ENANA for the second time. We had an on-and-off interview spanning a whole afternoon and involving different places. I met ENANA in front of their friend’s place and we headed to a café. Walking down the Oranienstraße in Berlin, ENANA mentioned, somewhat emotionally, that this particular street always reminded them of Damascus due to similarities with some streets there. The shops, the little cafés, the signs of life, for ENANA, all resembled the streets in Damascus where they had spent much of their youth. This auto-biographical connection creating a (kind of) feeling of “home” was striking. Soon after, we were sitting in a café; ENANA rolled a cigarette, I turned on my recorder, then I asked questions about their music and their life, and ENANA answered while smoking and holding their face up to the sun. About an hour later, the sun had moved on and we began chasing it. ENANA, who described themself as being addicted to sunlight, knew another spot where the light could still be glimpsed through the houses and trees, and where they could continue to absorb the light on their skin. In the end, we found ourselves sitting on the grass in a small park, where literally the last tiny spot of sunlight remained, while everywhere else around us was in shadow. It turned out that ENANA often came here; they had effectively developed a sunshine map of Berlin Kreuzberg in their own head. This notion of chasing the sun repeatedly came up in my encounters with ENANA; the need to feel the sun on their skin was a very real, physical, and psychological desire. For ENANA, exposure to the sun had a direct effect on their well-being, which had led to this strategy of quite literally chasing the sun throughout the streets and buildings of Berlin.
24With this in mind, it should come as no surprise then that the first self-composed and produced song ENANA published on YouTube was about Damascus and its own sun. In February 2020, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Europe, ENANA released the song “Vivid Dreams” across various online platforms. The video consists entirely of a still picture of ENANA, light shining upon their face, their eyes closed, as if they were dreaming (see Video 1). For ENANA, this was an experience that opened up new futures: it was their first rap song. The lyrics of the song are connected to a dream that ENANA had experienced repeatedly during the winter of 2019-2020: in the old city of Damascus, sitting in a café, with friends, feeling the heat of the sun on their skin. ENANA recalled:
- 46 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
[In the dream,] I was just like in the middle of the heat, and all of a sudden I wake up in the middle of the darkness, empty, quiet fucking darkness, you know. And somehow it affected me so hard, I was shaking, and I was like, I need to get this image out of my mind, […] it’s just stuck in my head. I need to get it out of my system. And I thought, yeah writing, just fucking write it down, just describe it exactly the way it was46.
25
26Working with the words that were flowing out soon made ENANA realise that this could potentially be a rap song:
- 47 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
I was trying for such a long time to make tracks, and there was always this “na, this is not enough”, “na this is not right”. I would give up on it, because I had never done it before, so I always would get discouraged. But starting to rap made me realise my voice and how I can utilise it and what I can actually do. Somehow, starting to rap made me able to make songs as well, you know. It’s so crazy because I had been trying to write songs for such a fucking long time. […] It just never worked out before. So, this happening was like a game changer, it was a total game changer47.
- 48 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
27In addition to the musical style of the song, where ENANA leaves behind their guitar-based singer-songwriter style and switches to rap as their primary public performance mode, there is another important shift: the use of Arabic in the song’s lyrics. Until then, ENANA had only written lyrics and other texts in English. They did not feel as competent in Arabic as they did in English when it came to writing poetic texts. In addition, ENANA connected Arabic language and culture very much with their experiences of discrimination in Syria as a then-lesbian woman: “No, I definitely wasn’t interested in Arabic. […] I connected the culture with the language and everything, and refused it, rejected it back, because it rejected me. I was just so connected to English, growing up and being”48.
- 49 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
- 50 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
28The lyrics of “Vivid Dreams” combine English and Arabic words, often mixed together within sentences (see Video 1; the lyrics are included on the YouTube page). Even rhymes are translingual: “It started with me being stuck on rhymes basically, me trying to write four bars with the same rhythm, then maybe the third or fourth one would be like, damn, what can I rhyme it with, and then I think Arabic, and it just rhymes, you know”49. Using Arabic in “Vivid Dreams” gave ENANA more flexibility of expression, and it established a new connection for them with their mother tongue: “I started actually to create a relationship with Arabic again”50.
29The song marked an important shift in both ENANA’s life and music. Arabic, their mother tongue, wove its way into ENANA’s music and performances. A language and culture that they had previously rejected – since it had rejected them due to their sexual orientation – and consequently did not feel they belonged to, consciously became what Antonsich calls a “cultural factor of belonging”. ENANA, of course, has always been Arab and Arabic-speaking, and would not seek to disavow this; it is very much part of their identity. However, this aspect of belonging based on cultural lineage only became capable of producing a conscious sense of “We”, i.e. a community to belong to, for ENANA in 2018. This shift accompanied a reinstatement of place as a factor in belonging, through a bodily feeling of sun on the skin, and feelings of attachment and longing. Re-enacting these available forms of belonging propelled ENANA towards rap as a new genre of music.
- 51 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
Before I came here, I always thought, oooh, Europe! Utopia! I wanna go there! And then I came here and got slapped in my face by reality, you know, because it’s not utopia, there’s homophobia here, and while I don’t suffer from homophobia as much as I suffered in Syria, I suffer from racism. Racism! And I didn’t have racism in my life before51.
30This quote acutely highlights the consequences of forced migration that ENANA – like many people from Syria and other countries – has experienced: while they did find refuge and support, they were also allocated a new position within a society systemically entrenched in racism. Reading this quote again in 2024, when I had asked ENANA to review an early version of this text, they wished to clarify that they had previously experienced racism, but “didn’t suffer from it overtly” (WhatsApp communication, March 15, 2024). In 2018, at the time of the original comment, ENANA had been in Berlin for three years – a city known for its multicultural environment, generally welcoming atmosphere, and for the possibilities it offers to live an alternative lifestyle. Nevertheless, their experience of racism was an issue to which ENANA repeatedly returned.
- 52 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
31In terms of their skin colour, ENANA describes themself as “brown”. For example, when recounting an experience of being racially profiled on a train from Amsterdam, they stated: “There were all other people around me, but they were all Whites. They were all White. The only difference was that I was the only Brown person”52. In 2019, ENANA was stop checked on the street by the Berlin police. During the check, ENANA accused one of the police officers of being a “racist”. They were issued with a fine of some hundred or so Euros, which – given the fact that they were mainly living off social aid, supplemented by some additional performance fees – was a significant amount of money for them. To pay the fine, ENANA launched a small Instagram campaign through their various friendship networks, which proved successful. But the frustration and anger they felt at having being treated unfairly by biased police officers did not dissipate, and ENANA began to increasingly engage with the topic of racism, and wider perceptions of their own background, in Germany more generally. This political engagement also fed into their music: ENANA released the song “Camels, Flying Carpets, and More” on YouTube and SoundCloud in April 2020, and on Spotify in May 2020.
32
33The title of the song “Camels, Flying Carpets, and More” (YouTube video posted April 27, 2020; see Video 2) clearly references certain orientalist narratives that have informed European stereotypes of Arab culture for many centuries. ENANA consciously uses these images to address general stereotypes that still exist and continue to influence European perspectives of people from Arab backgrounds. Similar to “Vivid Dreams”, the song’s title is in English. The lyrics, however, progressively incorporate Arabic: while the first verse is predominantly in English, as the song develops Arabic becomes more prominent. This indicates a change in self-positioning on ENANA’s part: i.e. their increasing use of Arabic to enact belonging to this cultural field. The content of the song then intensifies this conscious positioning within Arab culture: ENANA inserts themself as the lyrical speaker into references to different monuments (“Damascene castle”), cities (Aleppo, Damascus, Homs, Palmyra), characteristics of the landscape (“olive tree”, “sand”, “jasmine”), and figures of cultural history (“Ashtar”, “Gilgamesh”, “Zenobia”). They paint a powerful, poetic picture of strength and self-confidence based upon these connections to nature, history, heritage, and landscape. The “camels” and “flying carpets” empower the lyrical speaker, who cries out and claims to be “invincible”, draws connections to the Syrian revolution, and declares that all that was destroyed will be rebuilt. Aside from showing the performer themself, the video also presents snippets of popular US-produced films, such as “Kill Bill” and “Popeye”, and visual references to corruption, like the exchanging of money, presumably in Syria but possibly also elsewhere. Of special relevance is the very final segment where ENANA, in an increasingly aggressive voice, repeats the line:
بس كلشي انهدم حيرجع يتعمر
But everything that was destroyed will be rebuilt.
34This line is accompanied by the English words on the screen, set in red text, alternating with – using fast video cuts – the bottom-half of ENANA’s face, which shows their mouth rapping in Arabic. The rapping is done over an electronically produced 4/4 beat, including a melodic line that can easily be identified as a reference to Arab music culture. In this specific combination of lyrics, musical references, and the narrative snippets in the video, the song marks a conscious and public self-positioning of ENANA within an Arab culture of revolution, strength, and empowerment. They inscribe themselves into a cultural background they had always belonged to but previously actively rejected, while incorporating references from global US/American mainstream culture. Due to their displacement and experiences in Germany, this sense of cultural belonging grew in importance for ENANA: it became possible and necessary to position themself as an Arab person. Posting the song on Instagram (April 27, 2020), ENANA commented (in English) that “working on this piece was so damn empowering!”. They also added a further sentence in Arabic, which was obviously intended for their Arab-speaking followers:
الكلمات مش كافية لتوصف هاد التراك فمنتركها عليكن وانشالله يعجبكن!
- 53 Translation by Nihal Salama.
35This translates as “Words are not enough to describe this track, so I will leave it for you and hopefully you will like it”53.
- 54 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
36In 2021, ENANA cited the feeling of non-belonging in Germany as a major factor in turning towards Arab culture in their music-making. Commenting upon their song “Meen Ayoub”, ENANA said: “I am so oppressed in my life for being an Arab so I wanna fucking carry that like a badge of honour, you know. Like, fuck you, for thinking that’s something wrong or that’s something bad, you know. You’re annoyed by it? I’m gonna rub it in your face, you know”54. In their view, the ones who should have this “Arabness” rubbed in their faces were white people: those who acted racist, or in accordance with racist ideologies and structures of inequality, which included stereotypical thinking and attitudes towards other peoples whom they perceived as “cultureless”. The frustration and anger they felt provoked urgent feelings of non-belonging and formed part of ENANA’s need to re-enact some of their auto-biographical and cultural belongings of having grown up as an Arab in a majority Arab-speaking country, as can be seen in the references to cultural heritage and the Syrian landscape in “Camels, Flying Carpets, and More”. This performance strikingly foregrounds concrete places, highlighting ENANA’s cultural belonging to Syrian/Arab culture and, in a – for ENANA – novel way, articulating a collective “We”, thereby enacting a conscious connection to both the real and symbolic Syria.
- 55 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
- 56 Strasser, Bewegte Zugehörigkeiten, 32.
37Their experiences of structural racism, and the associated politics of non-belonging that they attributed on a political level to a general conceptualisation of “Germany”, were omnipresent themes for ENANA, to which they repeatedly returned. This was also linked to their categorisation as a “refugee”, something that ENANA regularly had (and still has) to deal with. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that ENANA has not really developed any genuine sense of belonging to “Germany” at all. Nevertheless, ENANA does intend to apply for German citizenship, because it would mean safety: “Definitely, that’s my only chance of survival, you know, like, where can I go?”55. At the time of writing this article, ENANA still retained their Syrian citizenship – a form of citizenship that is ranked among the lowest in indexes relating to freedom of movement. ENANA’s chances of being able to apply for German citizenship, however, are relatively low, as they live their life as an independent musician without a regular source of income. While being granted German citizenship would not automatically create a feeling or sense of belonging56, any forms of legal recognition could potentially change the relational dynamics between ENANA and the country in which they now reside. This situation exemplifies the relevance of the “politics of belonging”: the power to grant or deny belonging.
- 57 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
38For our first in-person meeting, an interview that took place in May 2018, ENANA invited me to their apartment in Berlin, a cosy one-room flat where their bed was situated on a built-in platform. After discussing at length their history and background, as well as their arrival in Germany, I asked ENANA where they considered “home” to be. The answer was short and clear: “Here. This flat”57. This small apartment, which ENANA had been able to rent with the help of the contacts they had made through an LGBTQ+ NGO in Berlin, was seemingly the most important anchor point for them, a place of belonging and safety:
- 58 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
This is the only home I have felt. I don’t think I have ever created a bigger feeling of home outside of here. Like this place has really been the first place where I really feel like, yeah, this is my home, this is where I come at the end of the day and just like feel safe and feel at home. These fucking 35 square meters, you know, it’s really nice58.
- 59 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
- 60 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
39Three years later, I repeated this question in another interview; ENANA had by then already come out as non-binary and trans, and had switched over to rap music as their dominant public performance style. The answer was the same: “My flat; this is the closest to home”. And they continued: “This has been the only consistent thing in my life since I came here, this flat, and this is where I feel [… stops and pauses]. If I have a home, it is this flat, and yeah, even my home is unstable”59. That final comment referred to some complex contractual issues; at one point, it had even looked as if ENANA might have to move out, which was an understandably difficult and upsetting time for them. Fortunately, the matter was able to be resolved. ENANA’s attachment to the flat clearly demonstrates the power that belonging to a place can entail: it does not necessarily have to be a nation, or a geographical region, or a community, but it can simply be a physical place, one that can provide safety, the possibility to get away from life’s various hassles, and the opportunity to create one’s own space. ENANA also extended this general feeling of home to their immediate surroundings. When recounting the experience of having to look for another flat, ENANA made it clear that they could not live anywhere else other than in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood in Berlin: “I just don’t fit in any one other [quarter] than Kreuzberg, because there are just so many freaks here, that even the non-freaks are used to the freaks, you know, so it’s like you don’t feel so ‘strange’ and othered”60.
40During the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent restrictions on social life and access to public spaces, ENANA’s flat – their home – became their primary performance venue. ENANA had originally set up an Instagram account in 2016, which they filled – to varying degrees of regularity – with stories and posts about their life and music, for example concert photos, pictures of themself smiling in the sun, images of Berlin, and general content comparing their new surroundings with Damascus and Syria. Syria was then still very present in ENANA’s public social media content, as was their journey to Germany, presented in retrospective posts. However, it was only after the COVID-19 pandemic had hit Europe that the digital space (and audience) provided by Instagram became a central performance arena for ENANA.
41In March 2020, the German government enforced extensive restrictions on all forms of human contact (which would come to be known as “lockdown”). Like almost everyone else, ENANA was confined to their flat without any direct social contact. ENANA soon started to post regularly on Instagram. Accompanied by the hashtags #coverbymoi, #FuckinAroundAndSharing, and #causequarantinesaidso, ENANA shared numerous short videos, shot in their flat via smartphone, which featured them singing different songs. Interestingly, these “home-made” video performances quickly amassed over 2,000 views, compared to the few hundred or so views some of their earlier posts received. ENANA began to actively use their Instagram account as a platform to share their music with the world. For instance, the release of “Camels, Flying Carpets, and More”, discussed above, coincided with the extended period of lockdown in Berlin from March to June 2020.
42The songs ENANA shared with their digital audience during this time demonstrate a diverse range of cultural rootings. They covered a variety of English language pop/rock songs on the guitar, such as “Make Me Cry” by Pip Millet (post on Instagram, March 8, 2020). Sometimes the song performed held a specific meaning, i.e. “Titanium” (by David Guetta, featuring SIA): in the post accompanying this recording, ENANA informed their followers that this song felt empowering to them, so much so that they had even got themself a tattoo of the title: “‘cause it helped me believe That [sic] I am indeed Titanium” (post on Instagram, April 18, 2020).
43Aside from cover versions of English pop/rock songs, ENANA turned to songs from their own childhood and youth including well-known Arabic songs, a genre that ENANA had not previously publicly performed. When recording a version of the popular song “Asmar Ellon”, a folk song from the Syrian city of Aleppo (post on Instagram, March 30, 2020), ENANA expressed their love for this particular piece: “I usually don’t sing in Arabic, simply cause I know my weakness and my strength points but here’s to culture, to folklore and heritage, baby!”. In the video, ENANA smiles as if they are not taking the performance too seriously, but at the same time uses their entire vocal repertoire to produce the best possible version of the song they can. Similarly, when covering “Ahwak” by the Lebanese singer Fairuz, whose music is popular throughout the whole Arab world, ENANA described how they had grown up listening to this song (post on Instagram, April 1, 2020). These Instagram performances of popular Arab songs were performed a capella. ENANA did not use a guitar nor any other instrument. ENANA used the hashtag #because_WegotHeritageBabyWegotCulture, which serves a didactic function, explaining to a White, mainstream audience that culture and heritage are not exclusively European/White, while simultaneously using a “We” framework that loosely points to Arab/Syrian people.
44The third musical framework that ENANA utilised, during the pandemic and its associated lockdowns, to position themself was rap. Not only did they continue to work on new releases throughout this time, but they also gave mini performances in their flat that featured spontaneous rapping to a beat played by their computer (e.g., posts on Instagram, April 18 and 20, 2020).
45ENANA’s flat produced a feeling of “home”; the place itself created a sense of safety. From this safe space, ENANA started to communicate directly to an audience through social media, mainly via Instagram, a practice that they then continued after the pandemic. It was possibly this general sense of safety, and the feeling of being locked in and alone, that made ENANA recall moments from their own past that were connected to Arab music, which they had not previously publicly performed. From this place of safety, reaching out into the world, ENANA inscribed themself into three different strands of musical belonging: memories of Arab folklore, the music of their childhood; English pop/rock, a genre that had also surrounded them since childhood and followed them into adult life; and rap, a form of musical expression they had discovered after their displacement and in light of new experiences of non-belonging, of racism, and their new position in a new society. The notion of place in connection to home is different than a longing for a “homeland”; here, it is the immediate safety of their flat, and its immediate surroundings, that creates a sense of belonging and home. Furthermore, it was this very setting that enabled the creation of new auto-biographical performances.
- 61 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, May 2018.
46July 15, 2020, was a special day in ENANA’s life. On that day, they came out publicly as trans and non-binary on the social media platform Instagram (see Image 3). By doing so, ENANA publicly communicated their potential attachment to people and communities whose performing of gender identities went beyond the mainstream binary system. All their life in Syria, ENANA had felt uneasy, to say the least, with their sexual orientation and gender identity: “I lived in a really long, like, fucking process of trying to convince myself that I am interested in men, and that I can be with men, or that I could love men or whatever, it was just fucking self-torture”61. ENANA had already wanted to leave Syria for this very reason before the civil war had even started. Berlin, thus, offered the possibility of living out different gender identities. ENANA realised that this was the way that personally felt right for them; it led them to come out as non-binary and trans, an identity that was simply not possible in Syria. In Berlin, the ability to live this non-binary identity – and I use the term “identity” here deliberately, to point to an embodied fact – was made possible through networks, friendships, and the availability of information.
Image 3: Screenshot by Anja Brunner of Instagram post of ENANA, July 15, 2020
Used with the kind permission of ENANA.
47In the coming-out post of July 2020 ENANA still referred to themself as “she/her” but with the aim to slowly introduce “they/them”. Tied to this was also an ongoing emphasis on “femmeness” and a connection to woman’s struggles:
- 62 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, August 2021.
I lived all my life socialised as a woman, I’m socialised as a woman. I lived the woman’s struggle, you know. And a lot of people read me as a woman, they still perceive me as a woman. […] And I don’t not perceive myself as a woman, I don’t perceive myself as just a woman, like, me considering myself trans non-binary is because I feel all the genders in me. And that’s probably not gonna change any time soon. […] For me, it’s about the fluidity of gender basically. Until all men are emancipated, are actually equal to all men, then I can tell you, okay, I’m not a woman maybe62.
48ENANA also continued to use their stage name: “Enana”, or “Inanna”, is their first name, and is derived from the name of the Mesopotamian goddess for love, war, and fertility, read as female in a binary system. By the time of writing this article, ENANA nevertheless clearly communicated their non-binary identity.
- 63 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
- 64 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, August 2021.
49ENANA’s gender is, not surprisingly, relevant in their music-making: “In my music, I am very like: I am who I am. I am the gender fuck that I am, the feminist that I am”63. In August 2021, ENANA stated: “I was talking about the sun, the darkness, about racism, about systems, blablabla, now I’m talking more about female empowerment, fem empowerment, queer empowerment, radicalness”64. Only a month after this interview, ENANA published an Instagram post, rapping on exactly this topic. The short rap piece, which was shot in their flat during a jam session with an unnamed friend, was called “Fuck this shit” and accompanied by the sentence: “A message to all the ignorants out there;💪🏼” (see Images 4 and 5). Sang in a rather high-pitched voice, alternating with rap lines at a lower-pitch, the song complained in a satirical way about the sorts of identity positioning that society demands.
Image 4: Screenshot by Anja Brunner of Instagram post, September 17, 2021
Used with the kind permission of ENANA.
Image 5: Screenshot by Anja Brunner of Instagram post, September 17, 2021
Used with the kind permission of ENANA.
- 65 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
50Such publicly performed critiques and trans gender identity were increasingly accompanied by a feeling of obligation in terms of representation. While ENANA told me that they do music first and foremost for themself, for self-empowerment, and even as a therapeutic measure, they also mentioned the sense of responsibility that came with the very specific intersectional position they held: “I think, I am the only queer Arabic rapper there is right now, you know”65. They later expanded on this:
- 66 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, August 2021.
Before, I was just doing things for me, because I just wanted to express myself and I just wanted to release my tension, my passion, my thoughts, my opinions, all of it. And then, being put in this position, made me realise that this is much bigger than I am. Like, when a teenage girl who lives still in Palestine or in Syria or whatever and writes to me and is like “oh my god, thank you so much for existing”. It happens all the time, which is fucking amazing66.
- 67 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
- 68 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, August 2021.
51In recalling that they themself had not been able to find adequate representation in music and culture with which they could engage in Syria, ENANA expressed an intense desire to create a feeling of belonging for other people enduring similar struggles: “If I can make one fucking person feel less alone in this world, then I’ve done a magnificent job, you know?”67. Creating a feeling of belonging was directly connected to social media, most notably ENANA’s Instagram account, where they shared both their music and political messages with all their followers. ENANA started to gain recognition within a transnational underground Arab rap scene, addressing through their music a mainly transnational community brought together around (queer) Arab rap. ENANA aimed to offer themself up as a role model or an anchor point for other queer/gay/lesbian/trans/non-binary people across the Arab world who were also searching for a sense of belonging. To do so, it was necessary for ENANA to position themself consciously – both visibly and audibly – as an Arab, so as to create a non-conforming Arab alternative, and this applied to their music too. As a result, ENANA increasingly brought their Arab up-bringing and cultural rooting to the fore in their musical output, consciously using snippets reminiscent of South-West Asian musical traditions in their rap songs: “It’s part of my culture, it’s part of my identity”68. Their main musical “home”, however, continued to be hip-hop:
- 69 ENANA, interview with author, Berlin, August 2021.
I love it, I identify with – again between air quotes – “oriental” music, but for example I identify the most with hip-hop, let’s say, I feel it in my body and in my being the most, hip-hop. So, for me when you take South-West Asian sounds and you put it in hip-hop, then that represents me the most, I feel, because that represents my identity and my question of belonging to begin with. Belonging everywhere, but nowhere69.
- 70 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
52Access to this transnational network was only possible by being in Europe. Describing a key difference between Europe and Syria, ENANA stressed the “access to globality” and the feeling of being “closer to the global scene”: “Berlin is a much more international place than Damascus”70. ENANA discovered a global, transnational belonging that they could not have possibly imagined in Syria. Via social media, ENANA engaged with an Arab rap world spanning digitally from Beirut to Berlin, from Morocco to the UK, and so on. In short, across the Arab-speaking world and its diaspora, they discovered new artists and music, creating a new audience for their own music and a new community to engage in.
53However, the increasing popularity of ENANA’s music and performances, on social media, did not only potentially empower and support people with non-conforming sexual and/or gender identities in the Arab-speaking world: ENANA also experienced hate and harassment to such an extent that, at one point, they gave the passwords to their social media accounts to a friend in order to filter incoming messages. Most of these reactions to their videos came from Arab people, primarily men:
- 71 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
They don’t have a lot of information, but they just see me, and they know, I’m a gender fuck, because to them, if you’re a woman, then you have to fix your eyebrows, you have to take off your moustache, you have to behave like a “woman”, right? If you’re a man you have to be aggressive, you have to have short hair, you have to have blablabla, you know. So, they see me and they’re like, oh, what is this?71
- 72 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
54This violence and intrusion through comments and messages prompted ENANA to remember how they had felt in Syria when they were struggling with homophobic and traditionalist opinions and reactions: “I came all the way, I ran away from you people 4,000 kilometres, not for you to chase me all the way here, you know”72. ENANA’s motivation to fight injustice and inequality, to speak out across their channels, as well as through their music, was obvious, and was relayed to an Arab-speaking audience in the digital sphere, as well as to those in their immediate physical environment in Germany.
55In this context, it should be emphasized that transnational networks involve more than just sharing content via social media. ENANA, like many other artists at this time when it has become far easier to share music digitally, made use of a variety of transnational recording practices in their attempts to achieve the “right” sound for their music. In ENANA’s case, for example, this meant working with a friend in Latakia (Syria), who was to contribute a verse to a particular song; or a friend from Syria then living in Poland; or trying to work with a rapper residing in Palestine. The reason for these collaborations was to secure certain sounds and voices for their songs, but it was also in some cases to provide a form of support for people who were “deserving attention”, typically due to their artistic skills. ENANA, however, also mentioned the various challenges that were related to this practice: for instance, conflicts over time management and deadlines; the financial troubles of people from non-privileged regions; and having to rely on people living in conflict zones, where the necessary infrastructure was not always available. Nevertheless, ENANA continued to value such transnational work, as well as continuing to recognise the importance of embedding themself in transnational, non-conforming Arab, and global queer networks. Within these networks, around the end of 2021, ENANA identified another (possibly even the most important) sense of belonging.
56These biographical snippets of the singer-songwriter and rapper ENANA, taken from the years following their arrival in Berlin, make visible certain intersected layers of belongings, all entangled within different communities, to real or symbolic places, and to conceptions of “home”. While the notion of being “Syrian” comes through, and is sometimes also consciously evoked, ENANA’s performances reveal many more structural and emotional attachments and anchor points. “Syrian” is – as a general descriptor but also in connection to music – first and foremost an empty term, one which has to be imbued with auto-biographical meaning, relations, and cultural experiences, as well as other more formal and legal aspects. For researchers in music studies, then, this means that it must be complemented with other (intersected) forms of belonging that both emerge within musical lives and that musical lives themselves draw upon.
- 73 ENANA, interview with author, online, May 2021.
- 74 Anthias, ‘Thinking through the Lens of Translocational Positionality’, 8.
57Throughout ENANA’s first six years in Germany, we can detect a series of deliberate inscriptions into certain communities or symbolic connections to various groups. There is an attachment to their immediate chosen family based around queer and queer-ally friends whom they found both in Berlin and beyond; and, on a larger scale, there is an active and public positioning within a community built around non-conforming gender identities, sometimes termed as “queer” in LGBTQ+ contexts and communities. In addition, ENANA felt a sense of belonging to a Syrian/Arab rap scene, despite some of the harassment they encountered. ENANA also drew upon a “We” framework in relation to a transnational rap music scene, in the sense of “we rappers”. In addition, they felt a sense of belonging to a fairly loose conception of the Arab world, especially through their mother tongue and up-bringing in a mainly Arab-speaking country. There was even one occasion, in this regard, where they used the expression “my people”. When I asked to whom that referred, ENANA replied: “Arabs in general, but Syrians specifically”73. This sense of attachment became more nuanced and differentiated after their forced migration: the more excluded or discriminated against ENANA felt in Germany, the more they turned back to the Arab language and Arab music that evoked Middle Eastern connotations, whilst at the same time beginning to embrace rap as their main form of performative expression. In other words, they moved to embrace the culture that had once rejected them on account of their gender identity, and began to publicly perform through their music a cultural belonging that was deliberately positioned in opposition to the white, German-speaking majority around them. What is evident here is the direct link between ENANA’s experiences of exclusion and their musical trajectory, confirming that – in Anthias words – “a notion of belonging becomes activated when there is a sense of exclusion”74.
58This performance of a – by no means straight-forward and linear – sense of national/ethnic belonging also served to draw a clear boundary with Germany. As mentioned previously, ENANA’s experiences of structural racism and the politics of non-belonging in Berlin, which they attributed on a political level to a general conceptualisation of “Germany”, were persistent and pervasive themes, ones that they engaged with openly and repeatedly. This went hand in hand with their categorisation as a “refugee”, something that ENANA had (and still has) to regularly deal with. While these structural frameworks of categorisation (“refugee”), citizenship, racial discrimination, and Othering served as structures of exclusion for ENANA, other structural frameworks provided a degree of safety and security: for instance, the legal right to choose one’s gender identity made it possible for them to live a public life as a non-binary trans person. NGOs supporting individuals and communities identifying as LGBTQ+ were also important anchor points.
59On the level of feeling at “home” and safe, the relevance of place was the most obvious. First, ENANA repeatedly evoked Damascus and being from Syria; for example, in their longing for sunshine, and in their references to history and culture, but also in the accounts of their experiences of discrimination due to their sexual identity. Second, they identified the district of Kreuzberg in Berlin and especially their flat as important anchor points. Combined, these two places represented “home”, and ENANA drew comparisons with their memories of Damascus’s streets. At the same time, ENANA actively engaged in transnational networks, be it through social media communities tied to Arab rap, Arab queer rap, or queer/LGBTQ+ networks, which appears to indicate the sense of political responsibility they felt in terms of promoting and contributing to transnational musical presentations and productions.
60In music terms, one particular auto-biographical aspect of belonging that was not connected to a specific place was ENANA’s affection for the type of English-language pop/rock music that they had grown up with and cherished during their youth in Syria. Such attachments to any specific global fields of music, in a language that is not one’s own mother tongue, are often overlooked in ethnomusicological studies that focus on ethnically marked musical styles. For ENANA, however, this embedding of their musical development in English-language pop/rock remained an important factor when it came to performing music in Germany. Despite the shift in their performance language and style towards Arabic, as a song language, and rap, which included references to Arab soundscapes, ENANA’s own Anglo-American pop/rock heritage remained relevant. There was also a conscious connection to the field of Arab folklore and wider Arab-Syrian music culture, even if this was only noticeably present during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, when ENANA would sing certain “childhood songs”. All three of these musical strands formed ENANA’s musical universe. Having experienced increasing incidences of discrimination relating to the “politics of belonging”, ENANA evoked their own sense of belonging to Syria, to Damascus, and to the wider Arab world, and brought it to the foreground. Their identity, of course, has always been Syrian and Arab; however, their connected, intersected notions of belonging substantially changed as a result of their migratory experiences. ENANA employed these different musical attachments in different situations, enabling them to respond to a variety of life’s challenges and to (musically) produce answers to thorny political questions and feelings of belonging. In short: the various shifts relating to belonging and feeling at home, in terms of ENANA’s own private and personal identifications, as a result of being exposed to a new “politics of belonging” as well as new emotional anchor points, led to a significant change in their performance style. Therein, “Syrian” or “Arab” (musical) conceptions emphasised different notions of belongings in changing, non-stereotypical, and intersected ways. Furthermore, these attachments did not only relate to feelings connected to ethnic and national (imagined) communities – and even when they did, these were often nuanced and differentiated, and must be read in relation to experiences of different structures tied to the “politics of belonging”.
61One of the key challenges in ethnomusicology today continues to be the need to diversify the theoretical and methodological concepts within the field to engage adequately in research on the complexities of music and life beyond and in-between ethnic/national identifications. Thinking in terms of (musically) ethnic “ties”, which is still especially the case in migration studies, excludes people who do not (musically) fit into these preliminary categories. Using the case study of ENANA’s years after forced migration, I have put forth in this article one such way to escape the trap of an “ethnic lens”: through a detailed analysis of the trajectories of individuals and their need to negotiate various attachments. Researching notions of belonging – namely communities, places, and notions of “home” – allows us to capture the complexity of attachments, claims, and attributions, through ascribed labels, networks, local positions, and musical preferences, and to highlight different emotions and politics of belongings beyond ethno-national identifications. Furthermore, an explicit and conscious perspective on belonging, especially in the context of music and migration, illustrates how different attachments and categorisations, emotionally and politically, can and do act as a musical force that transforms and challenges musical practices, emotions, and (self-)ascribed categorisations.
- 75 Ruad Absaroka, ‘Music and Urban Migration: The City, Mobile Ethnography, and Affective Citizenship’ (...)
- 76 Rasmussen et al., ‘Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2016’, 280.
62Using this perspective of belonging in music research has the potential to contribute to a normalisation of migration and to a deconstruction of the ascription of often essentialised group characteristics that is still so often the case in migration research. It opens the way to not only affirm heterogeneity within a “diasporic group”, but to actively seek out the attachments and anchor points that go beyond a potentially ethno-national identity: not only is the Syrian diaspora heterogeneous, but there is no “natural” belonging to an ethno-nationally imagined Syrian diaspora. Ruard Absaroka recently warned that we as music researchers would “do well to remember that there is an epistemic violence in pigeonholing migrant musics in any kind of identitarian framework and in failing to accord migrant creative practices the dignity of being able to transcend identity boundary work and socio-cultural-ethno essentialisms”75. A conscious and theoretically grounded perspective of belonging is a relevant tool that places emphasis on relations, experiences, and processes, accepting belonging as ambivalent, contested, dynamic, actively formed and performed, without denying those we work with the right to claim their cultural and ethnic identities and senses of belonging. Such an approach might also lead to the increasing inclusion of musics that have not often been the focus of ethnomusicological migration studies, such as popular musics that are not ethnically linked to the community under study. While ethnic and national “identities” conceptualised as “natural” are politically prioritised, and we have to take this into account as a reality, we are called to tease out the complexities of ambivalent and overlapping processes and practices of belonging in musicking after migration, working towards an “ethnomusicology of migration”76 that positions migration as the norm rather than the exception.