- 3 I Fashion a Nest Between Spines & Stories
- 4 Sonic Beirut, Displaced
- 5 The Translation Institute
- 6 Air as Commodity, Image as Spectacle
- 7 Auditory Escape
essays
2 Between City and Self
American University of Beirut * Spring 2021
The Politicized Voice:
An Alternate Eulogy
An Alternate Eulogy
Independent Paper &
AUB BArch Thesis
Advised by Rana Haddad and Joy Kanaan
Advised by Rana Haddad and Joy Kanaan
Abstract
The voice of Lebanese singer and national icon Fairuz permeates the everyday lives of inhabitants across Lebanon. Her distinct voice colors early morning commutes to work and infiltrates afternoon coffee breaks on sidewalks and balconies. In its pervasiveness and daily companionship, the voice communicates messages of patriotism and a longing for an imagined national identity. Heavily laden with subtext, the lyrics sung by the voice are etched into the nation’s collective unconscious. As a postcolonial project aiming to construct a modern Lebanese identity, Fairuz’s music delivers a series of themes and messages that serve a political agenda. In order to understand Fairuz’s influence on the nation and its inhabitants, this essay explores the linguistic, political and physical power of her voice. In its dual nature as an autonomous force as well as a subservient apparatus to the orchestrators of a national myth, it is the contention of this paper that Fairuz’s voice is repurposed a tool for storytelling and world building. I explore this condition by delineating the historical context of her stardom and bodies of work, particularly analyzing her nationlist songs and breaking down their lyrics. The characteristics of the voice are mechanisms for constructing an idealized national identity, one at the intersection of reality and fiction. Ultimately, understanding Fairuz’s voice as a tool for storytelling invites a postulation on the relationship between the voice and the body, and what that could imply about the imminent future of a voice untethered to its source.
Fairuz’s throne in the world of popular culture has transfigured her into an unequivocal icon through which the story of the nation is narrated. Held in great reverence by the Lebanese people, her iconic figure marks the representation of the nation as one of the purest and most dominant images of post-colonial Lebanon. Born in 1935 in Jabal el Arz in Mount Lebanon, Fairuz grew up in the pericentral district of Zokak El Blat in Beirut where she spent her formative years as a singer. Upon collaborating with the Rahbani Brothers, specifically Assi who became Fairuz’s husband and manager, she quickly established national recognition and prominence. At the beginning of her career in 1957, Fairuz and the Rahbani Brothers, Assi and Mansour, were commissioned by then-president Camille Chamoun to perform in the Baalbek International Music festival, with the intention of amplifying a particular facet of Lebanese culture, one that is more European than Arab.1 This contributed to the larger project promoting a specific type of Lebanese nationalism, one that is largely emblematic of Mount Lebanon, specifically the Maronite Christian account.
The aim to hegemonize a particular image of Lebanon emanated from President Chamoun and the Rahbani Brothers’ political and personal beliefs in a Maronite nationalism.2 This version of the nation sought to spread a romanticized image of Lebanese villages and the countryside, with particular emphasis on the ancient, pre-Arab cultural history of Lebanon. The Baalbek International Summer Festival was an apt ground for spreading the vision of a pastoral, green Lebanon allusive to its rural landscapes. Soon after Lebanon gained its independence from the French Mandate rule in 1943, a reimagined version of Lebanese national identity was conceived and disseminated. Since there lacked an abundance of opposing narratives to challenge Fairuz and the Rahbanis’ national discourse at the time, their vision was consumed with negligible contestation for the most part, being seen by many as an authentic truth of the nation’s identity. As Mohamad Khalil Harb remarks in his essay “Imagining a Nation: Discourses of Nationalism in Fairuz’s Early Music”, the Baalbek International Summer Festival of 1957 “would be the first time post-independence that the idea of ‘Lebanon’ and its culture would be performed and presented on an international stage”.3 In the context of a post-colonial nation attempting to define its identity, one can argue that the soil on which tradition is planted was fertile, and the citizen was, and remains to be, soft and malleable for the shaping of an idealist nationalist.
Notes
1 Mohamad Khalil Harb and William Granara, “Imagining a Nation: Discourses of Nationalism in Fairuz’s Early Music,” (December 2016), 1.
2 Ibid, 3-6.
3 Ibid, 5.
The voice of Lebanese singer and national icon Fairuz permeates the everyday lives of inhabitants across Lebanon. Her distinct voice colors early morning commutes to work and infiltrates afternoon coffee breaks on sidewalks and balconies. In its pervasiveness and daily companionship, the voice communicates messages of patriotism and a longing for an imagined national identity. Heavily laden with subtext, the lyrics sung by the voice are etched into the nation’s collective unconscious. As a postcolonial project aiming to construct a modern Lebanese identity, Fairuz’s music delivers a series of themes and messages that serve a political agenda. In order to understand Fairuz’s influence on the nation and its inhabitants, this essay explores the linguistic, political and physical power of her voice. In its dual nature as an autonomous force as well as a subservient apparatus to the orchestrators of a national myth, it is the contention of this paper that Fairuz’s voice is repurposed a tool for storytelling and world building. I explore this condition by delineating the historical context of her stardom and bodies of work, particularly analyzing her nationlist songs and breaking down their lyrics. The characteristics of the voice are mechanisms for constructing an idealized national identity, one at the intersection of reality and fiction. Ultimately, understanding Fairuz’s voice as a tool for storytelling invites a postulation on the relationship between the voice and the body, and what that could imply about the imminent future of a voice untethered to its source.
Fairuz’s throne in the world of popular culture has transfigured her into an unequivocal icon through which the story of the nation is narrated. Held in great reverence by the Lebanese people, her iconic figure marks the representation of the nation as one of the purest and most dominant images of post-colonial Lebanon. Born in 1935 in Jabal el Arz in Mount Lebanon, Fairuz grew up in the pericentral district of Zokak El Blat in Beirut where she spent her formative years as a singer. Upon collaborating with the Rahbani Brothers, specifically Assi who became Fairuz’s husband and manager, she quickly established national recognition and prominence. At the beginning of her career in 1957, Fairuz and the Rahbani Brothers, Assi and Mansour, were commissioned by then-president Camille Chamoun to perform in the Baalbek International Music festival, with the intention of amplifying a particular facet of Lebanese culture, one that is more European than Arab.1 This contributed to the larger project promoting a specific type of Lebanese nationalism, one that is largely emblematic of Mount Lebanon, specifically the Maronite Christian account.
The aim to hegemonize a particular image of Lebanon emanated from President Chamoun and the Rahbani Brothers’ political and personal beliefs in a Maronite nationalism.2 This version of the nation sought to spread a romanticized image of Lebanese villages and the countryside, with particular emphasis on the ancient, pre-Arab cultural history of Lebanon. The Baalbek International Summer Festival was an apt ground for spreading the vision of a pastoral, green Lebanon allusive to its rural landscapes. Soon after Lebanon gained its independence from the French Mandate rule in 1943, a reimagined version of Lebanese national identity was conceived and disseminated. Since there lacked an abundance of opposing narratives to challenge Fairuz and the Rahbanis’ national discourse at the time, their vision was consumed with negligible contestation for the most part, being seen by many as an authentic truth of the nation’s identity. As Mohamad Khalil Harb remarks in his essay “Imagining a Nation: Discourses of Nationalism in Fairuz’s Early Music”, the Baalbek International Summer Festival of 1957 “would be the first time post-independence that the idea of ‘Lebanon’ and its culture would be performed and presented on an international stage”.3 In the context of a post-colonial nation attempting to define its identity, one can argue that the soil on which tradition is planted was fertile, and the citizen was, and remains to be, soft and malleable for the shaping of an idealist nationalist.
Notes
1 Mohamad Khalil Harb and William Granara, “Imagining a Nation: Discourses of Nationalism in Fairuz’s Early Music,” (December 2016), 1.
2 Ibid, 3-6.
3 Ibid, 5.
* Paper available upon request *