Great song. Lyrics here.
Maryam Saleh is a fox. Not this one.
Way underground.
Forget Om Kalthoum. She’s just a throwaway line in a Broadway musical now.
Drink arak and listen to Arab underground music, and sigh like you aren’t listening to the music of a doomed country.
After all, there’s still Andalusia.
Maybe you should start a Portuguese band called The Moriscos.
Underground music, underground politics, everywhere you look the Chinese are trying to put up golf courses while the mountains burn.
Look at what happened last week in Egypt and as if it’s all been decided.
Everyone must be either be hanged or live in The Scorpion, says some Egyptian judge, as the tourist bureau banners and headlines scream:
Tourism is up!
El Gouna movie festival!
No, we have no dead Brits today!
Don’t mention the body parts being sold on the raseef, the disintegrating pavements of Cairo.
Don’t read Raseef22 — it’s not suitable for the siyah, the tourists.
I want to meet Maryam Saleh.
Where is she?
In some bookstore in Tavira reading this, or this, or even this?
I want to ask her: how do you support the rights of those who would never give you any?
And why does everyone want to kill everyone else?
I grimace.
It’s Monday morning and I have shit to do before leaving for Portugal.
My chromebook is synced up to a speaker that’s playing El Gouna radio in the background.
Why doesn’t this station ever stop playing safe feel good touristy music and instead blast tunes from Lekhfa?
It wouldn’t solve anything, but it would be a start.
Wake up the fat Germans and smug Brits and their fancy real estate deals and see for once what is actually going with the mitnayileen — this does not mean people of the Nile, but it could, if you were in a joking mood — who serve them their barely chilled Sakara Golds.
It doesn’t matter.
New Arab music and fiction writing is exploding.
What a great time to be alive!
Unless you’re rotting in some Sisi jail.
Leaving Amerika 