“It’s a Movement”: Performing Palestinian Past and Future in Saint Levant’s Deira

Keywords: Palestine, sonic geographies, Palestinian futurity, performance, music
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

On June 7, 2024, Palestinian-Serbian-French-Algerian artist Saint Levant (Marwan Abdelhamid) released his second album Deira. The album’s name is both an homage to his father’s hotel, al-Deira, in Gaza destroyed by the Israeli military in bombings proceeding October 7th, and a symbol representing return to Palestine. The album blends hip hop, lyrical, and traditional Arab Shaabi musical styles and features Gazan artists such as MC Abdul and Sol Band (Aswad, 2024). Following the album, Saint Levant began a US-Europe tour pausing shows to talk about the genocide in Gaza and the Palestinian cause. This paper explores the Deira album and tour, as a work that weaves the artists’ diasporic roots and imagined futures for Palestine and Palestinians through sound and performance. Through sonic geography frameworks on both memory and resistance (Kanngieser, 2012), we consider how Saint Levant uses sound and lyricism to evoke a decolonial nostalgia and conjure imagery of a liberated Palestine. We also engage a lyric analysis to evaluate how the artist utilizes different languages (Arabic, French, English) to recall Palestine, speak to and about current dispossession and violence, and evoke his own lived diasporic experience. We examine the album’s visual materials and tour as that which builds transnational political solidarity over space and time across platforms such as Instagram and Tik-Tok. Lastly, we explore Saint Levant’s performances in select shows through a performance ethnography framework (Conquergood, 2013) to think about the body as a site of memory and knowledge and performance as a site of resistance.