As an Iraqi-American, I am straddled between the oppressor and the oppressed; a taxpayer to the country that is bombing my family purely for global economic dominance, an individual who, like too many others, has grown up in the crosshairs of our generation’s defining war. As an Arab-American, I was prematurely forced to understand that global equality, the age-old dream advocated by every major religion on earth, was no longer a moral obligation, but an imperative for our mutual international security.
As a singer, my efforts to popularize this universal truth have continuously been confronted by prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and marketcensorship merely because my identity conflicted with the false caricatures of good and bad, black and white, east and west, left and right, Arab and American, by which the entertainment and media industries ignorantly and tirelessly segregate us.
As I struggled to understand the forces beyond my control, I found Freemuse while writing an article for the San Francisco Chronicle on the censorship and ineffectiveness of protest in contemporary music. Attending Freemuse’s World Conference in Istanbul in November 2006, I realized that what I faced in market-censorship had many correlations with what artists who had been censored the world over faced in various regimes, religious extremism, and socio-economic forces.
Whether Afghani musicians digging up their instruments long buried under Taliban rule, Kurdish and Anatolian folk singers maintaining songlines older than Turkey’s current Republic, Palestinian rap artists crying out for justice in a country where they remain unrepresented on their own land, or Arab-American’s like myself trying to give voice to the world’s silenced majority wanting peace — if we shall give a better world to the next generation, it will be because a group like Freemuse protected our musicians so that they could help lead the way.
Stephan Said
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