Songs as Sites of Memory

A panel toward an Arab reckoning with Nubian dispossession, with Dr Alia Mossallam, Dr Diana Abbany, Eslam Krar and Leil Zahra Mortada.

Songs are archival documents - dynamic carriers of emotion, ideology, and identity. They hold stories of loss and survival, bearing the weight of what has been taken and what still flows through memory. They also embody people’s histories, becoming a way for communities to remember. For the Nubians displaced under Nasser and in exile till this very day, songs became living archives of what was submerged: the villages left behind, the homes abandoned, the languages at risk of erasure, and their ways of life with the Nile. In them, grief, mourning, healing, and resistance converge. They stand as a counter-archive to the official narrative promoted through major song productions by iconic singers of the era: Um Kulthum, Abdel Halim, Sabah, Faida Kamel, and many others. These songs, which remain central to Arab identity today, continue to shape our collective consciousness around the dam and the Nubian plight.

Listening to these voices now raises difficult questions. What does it mean to return to these songs today, as Arabs? How do we remember histories that were silenced, or that silenced others in turn? How do we avoid reducing memory to either glorification or simplification? And how do we listen across contexts, histories, and geographies without erasing their differences, while also reckoning with our responsibility?

This panel turns to songs as sites of memory, where histories of displacement, dispossession, and survival are preserved, contested, and reimagined, and where mourning, healing, and resistance intersect. This convergence is bound up with Arab anti-colonial politics, while also raising urgent questions about nationalism and the nation-state, and about identity itself in the so-called Arab world.