Algerian Saharawi singer-songwriter and activist, Aziza Brahim, has released her third Glitterbeat album.
‘Sahari’, according to The Guardian, is “music about her experience as a migrant, and about the contrast between the desert and the metropolis, between Africa and Europe, between traditional and modern.”
The album art cover depicts a young girl posing in ballet shoes and a glistening white tutu. It’s a common childhood scene, but it’s tipped upside down. She’s not privileged and the backdrop isn’t a comfortable suburban home. She’s an exile, living nowhere near her homeland, and behind her stand the tents and buildings of a refugee camp. There’s a desert on the ground and a burning sky above. Yet even in this bleakness, she has optimism. She believes in a better future.
Brahim’s music reflects both the sorrow and hope of people like the young girl. She grew up in a refugee camp in the Algerian desert, along with many other Saharawi who were removed from their homes in the Western Sahara.
As one of North Africa’s most lauded singers, Brahim uses her music to make the plight of her people known – and of the refugees across the world who have no choice but to continue living in the camps.
“My purpose is to denounce the extreme living conditions there and the great injustice that prevents Saharawi refugees from returning to their home,” Brahim said. “I try to capture the feeling of longing that my elders express for the land that was taken away and for their past life in their country. But I know it’s not just us; there are currently 70 million people forcibly displaced in the world. 26 million of them are refugees.”
“Ard El Hub” is one of the most powerful pieces on ‘Sahari’. It is a cry for home from someone caught in the flux of exile.
Brahim, who currently lives in Spain, explained: “It speaks of the impossibility of returning to the homeland. The song’s power is in its gentleness, the sense of distant hope.”