Singing in the Rai, Just Singing in the Rai…

Other than the usual things a woman looks for in a man; GSOH, dark, handsome, intelligent, loving, affectionate, with the ability and willingness to cook and clean, and preferably economically self-sufficient (sorry, what was that? too fussy? staggeringly unrealistic? unreasonable sense of entitlement? –  a girl can dream, can’t she?!) it would seem that I had an additional little radar that hunted out those men who could offer me the sort of cultural enlightenment I apparently felt was lacking in my Middle-England background.

Manolo had given me flamenco, rumba and gypsy lore; now it was Abel’s turn to teach me about life across the Estrecho de Gibraltar and introduce me to the joys of Raï.

The direct meaning of the word raï is ‘opinion’, or ‘advice’ and this musical genre originated in Algeria in the 1920s and 30s singing about many of the social problems and issues of the time. Bedouin folk music mixed with Spanish, French, African and Arabic rhythms, it was a thorn in the side of the colonial forces as the subject matter undermined their authority by pointing out to a largely uneducated population the injustice of the situation in which they were living.

Poverty, disease, marginalisation, lack of education and political imprisonment were all things that were a direct result of the French colonisation and therefore laid the Raï singers open to continuous persecution and harassment from the colonial police.

They sang on regardless.

Although women had been performing musically in public since the turn of the 20^th century, Algerian independence in 1962 put a stop to that with a state supported Islamic reformist movement. This rendered the musical genre a principally male domain, and although this has changed somewhat today, one is still more likely to hear it sung by men than by women.

Raï began to be modernised from the mid 1960s, and became more of the sound that we are used to now, reaching the pinnacle of its success in the 1980s. In the 1990s, however, the Algerian government placed restrictions on the music form, blaming it for inflaming the public into protesting against high food prices, and an excessively brutal government control.

The protest cost a devastating 500 lives. Many cheb (Raï singers – the prefix ‘cheb’ meaning ‘young’) relocated to France to escape the restrictions and to keep the music alive, but one, Cheb Hasni, decided to brave government opposition to perform in Algeria in 1994. He was promptly assassinated by members of the Armed Islamic Group, and was sadly not to be the last.

Although the gritty topics previously sung about before independence were largely left to one side in favour of more romantic and light-hearted themes, one controversial ballad in particular ‘El Harba Wayn’ (To Flee, But Where?) was adopted by protestors as the anthem of their rebellion.

Where has youth gone?
Where are the brave ones?
The rich gorge themselves
The poor work themselves to death
The Islamic charlatans show their true face…
You can always cry or complain
Or escape … but where?

The undisputed (at least by me) king of this new and more modern Raï had to be Cheb Khaled; singer of El Harba Wayn, as well as ‘Aïcha’.

In fact despite the almost unbearably romantic overtones of the latter, the lyrics are quite intriguingly feminist in nature – I am not altogether sure that this is an accurate representation of the singer’s views as there have been reports of domestic violence involving Khaled – however the lyrics, sung in a mixture of French and Arabic are touched with poignancy.

Essentially, the singer offers the woman, Aïcha, everything he thinks she could possibly want: pearls, jewels, gold, his eternal love etc. She, however, tells him that bars are bars and can imprison a person just the same even if they are made out of gold. No, she doesn’t just want love, she wants the same respect and equality that he, as a man, simply takes for granted.

There were many other singers, and indeed many other music forms from the Maghreb and also Lebanon that I was introduced to by Abel and by our Moroccan neighbours.

On one particularly memorable evening, I found myself in the flat of a group of North African students, eating freshly prepared couscous and delicious maqlouba (a sensational Levantian ‘upside down’ dish with rice, meat, vegetables and almonds or pine nuts) from big earthenware pots in the centre of the table.

Once we had eaten our fill, the cd player burst into life and everyone got up from the table and began to dance and sing in accompaniment to Saber el-Robaey’s ‘El Ghorba’ (homesickness).

It really didn’t matter that we were all only a few hours away from home; that we hadn’t been cast into exile and that we weren’t economic migrants force to leave behind a beloved homeland; nor did it matter that we were all privileged in one way or another to be able to be sitting around that table in Granada bettering our futures and enjoying our ‘present’: we were still all imbibed with an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia.

The power of music in action…

Another nostalgic moment occurred one day, as I was strolling along Puerta Real having just visited the El Corte Inglés department store in another desperate (and unsuccessful) search for trashy English novels and/or Cadbury’s chocolate – even Modern-Day Nomads sometimes require a taste of home. I was suddenly surprised by someone calling my name in English; by that I mean pronouncing it correctly, something that had become a bit of a rarity during the three years I had been in Spain.

Whirling round, I was astonished to come face to face with Anja, one of the Dutch girls I had met whilst ‘studying’ at the Instituto Español.  With her was a slim, dark young man, who she introduced as her boyfriend, Salvador.

Salvador’s parents had emigrated to Holland from Spain when he was only a few weeks old, and although they still had ties with their Spanish family who lived in a small village in Málaga, both he and his brother had been brought up in the Netherlands and were bilingual – trilingual if you count the sickening way the Dutch manage to master the English language from the age of about two and three-quarters.

Anja had so enjoyed her few months in Granada, that she and Salvador had decided to pack up and drive down to Spain to try their luck at a vida española.

Nobody was more thrilled than I was by their decision: I had a serious dearth of girlfriends with whom to do the customary complaining about the men in our lives – and discussions of weighty issues like diets, period pains and how difficult it was to find a decent bra in Spain (it was: they were all minuscule and heavily padded, not at all suitable for us rather more generously endowed Northern European types) were long overdue.

My social interactions with the frighteningly sophisticated Moroccan girls consisting primarily of them wondering (out loud) why I was so reluctant to adopt their tight, all-black with gold accessories dress sense, why I ignored their advice to wear sky-high heels – they would have lengthened my legs and make me look lots slimmer, apparently – and why I wore barely discernible make-up instead of layering it on with a trowel, nouveau-riche-from-Casablanca style.

The nail in the coffin of Anglo-Maghreb relations came when Abel and I lent my camera to the most sought-after Moroccan beauty queen, Betisam, for a weekend trip to Madrid. Appearing at our door rather tight-lipped four days later, she silently returned the camera, plus a handful of extra photos that she had found having developed the roll.

Our puzzlement at her frostiness didn’t last long: leafing through the pictures we came face to face with the most intimate of self-portraits…

Whose manhood actually held the starring role would remain forever a mystery, but thinking back to when the camera was last used, it could have only been the work of aunty Kenza and one of her extra-marital playmates.

So my reputation with the flirty but virginal Moroccan girls unlikely ever to recover, I couldn’t have been more delighted at the opportunity to spend some time with someone from a more similar background.

Abel, on the other hand, seemed to be decidedly less than delighted; possibly because he had become accustomed to having me all to himself with no other social obligations impinging on my time; but rather than politely keeping his feelings to himself, he made it embarrassingly obvious from the outset that he considered Anja to be a real threat to our relationship.

So after one awkward evening when I decided to hold my first grown-up dinner party in honour of my new friend and her boyfriend – inviting them round to sample some dubiously executed recipes from my well-travelled but under-used Delia Smith and so they might also have an opportunity to get to the know a mortifyingly recalcitrant Abel – it was decided that any future socializing that went on with Anja would be just the two of us; girls only.

She and Salvador eventually managed to find jobs (ill-paying, but paying nevertheless) in the little language school Anja had chosen to get back into her Spanish studies, and after a brief stint in a horrible, windowless apartment somewhere in the back of beyond, they even managed to land themselves their dream home.

A one-bedroom apartment in one of the older buildings along the steep Cuesta de Gomérez leading directly to the Alhambra; the views from the roof terrace were unique.

The Red Palace, just visible through the thicket of trees, towered above the buildings, and Anja and I spent many a happy hour sitting up there, sipping at great big mugs of tea with melting Dutch stropwaffles balanced on top, goggling at our incredible surroundings, marvelling at our luck at finding ourselves in such a place, complaining about the men in our lives and discussing weighty issues like diets, period pains and how difficult it was to find a decent bra in Spain…