Idly scrolling YouTube for something to take me out of the funk of this day, it finds me

The exact performance, I know it from the first notes, the tempo, the crowd noise—and suddenly I’m transported…I’m four, I’m nine, I’m fourteen, and my dad has once again put on the Sony cassette tape, with the green, white, and black label, of a concert by Umm Kalthuum, the famous Egyptian diva. A tape he’d recorded live off the radio in 1960, around the time he met my mother, and brought with him to Canada five years later when they married and had to leave. I know it’s the correct one, because I’ve heard it so many times, the sounds are embossed on my heart; hearing it again, it’s like they fit into the spaces left from years of repeated listenings.

Dad used to mischievously talk about how Umm Kalthuum held onto a cloth through her concerts— broadcast all over the Arab world—sniffing cocaine from it to keep on her feet for her hours-long performances. His eyes would twinkle as he told me this, a man who’d never done anything harder than smoke a cigar or a pipe, who wasn’t someone who used any kind of substance to excess, or for inebriation.

It’s this song, and this performance of it, which occupies such a major space in my brain and my heart. When I was little, it sounded like not much more than a woman wailing in pain, for no reason that I could understand. When I hit my teens, and I asked my dad about the lyrics—because I couldn’t fully understand Arabic—was when it became lodged in a spot in my heart, like a fishhook, which is where it tugs every time I hear it now. I sit listening to it, replaying it over and over, and I feel tears and a sense of dissociating, coming slightly out of my body, replaying something that is more a feeling than a set memory. Longing, loss, something more than just a love song.

Of course it’s a love song. But it’s love as a force that allows you to see and feel love everywhere, which is what makes it so agonizing and powerful at the same time. Qul’el nas ahbab…all the people become lovers when I see you. What better way to explain what love does to your consciousness than that, repeated over and over again, like a realization that is so overpowering, it’s all you can do to absorb it? It strikes me now that this is the realization of a loss than feels greater than the loss of a person: the loss of identity, of place. A loss that sometimes feels like drowning, sometimes like being on a treasure hunt, sometimes—like today—feels like an unfillable emptiness and this song is echoing in that empty space within me.

The way Umm Kalthuum’s voice wails over the instruments, sometimes mimicking them, sometimes harmonizing, and the way the music will seem to ebb, then she brings it back with a phrase that shifts from her previous repetition…it kills me. Like a change in a love affair, it appears to float as if on its own stream of air, then drop like a shift in the breeze. A kite losing the gust and dropping to earth like a fainting woman.

This music, that annoyed me as a kid, then intrigued me as an adolescent, now calls to me like something I knew not that long ago, something that is so deep within me that all I feel is its truth, all I know is the real feeling in it, unlike the colourless world I find myself in.

In this music are colours I recognize, not the ones I grew up with. Oranges and yellows, greens and reds against a stark blue. Not the northern greys that drain my soul and depress me more days than not. I feel like a stranger here, because I am. This is not my native land.

I feel the tug of that hook, and I am emotional for something that was taken from me, that I am fighting to reclaim, that it feels so strange to think of as “reclaiming” when I’m only one step removed from it, but it feels as if a whole world was taken away from me. A world I am fighting to find a way back into, somehow, with the fear that the most I’ll be able to do in the time I have left is catch the slightest of glimpses. And as skint as that makes me feel when it comes to understanding who I am, just that slight sliver would be like entering a genie’s tomb and finding untold riches, jewels and gold.