INTERVIEW WITH UK’S POETIC PILGRIMAGE – PART 2

While attending the Urban Voices 2014 music festival in Stockholm, Sweden, Freedom Beat interviewed the festival’s performing artists about their music, the political atmosphere in their respective countries, music of nonviolent resistance, and how their own music engages these issues.

Can Hip-Hop Spark A Revolution? by Cassie Balfour

“Inexcusable war crimes / but they don’t get chastised” – Poetic Pilgrimage (feat. Mohammed Yahya, “Silence is Consent”)

Muneera Rashida and Sukina Abdul Noor, two women who make up the hip-hop duo Poetic Pilgrimage, are both Muslim women based in the UK with roots in the Caribbean.  In an interview with Freedom Beat they emphasize that anyone can participate in hip-hop, you don’t need to be an accomplished pianist or even have an instrument other than one’s voice.  Hip-hop is a democratic art form with the potential to unite people by speaking directly to citizens who aren’t often reflected in mainstream society.  Poetic Pilgrimage’s song, “Silence is Consent,” featuring rapper Mohammed Yahya, addresses leaders across the world (honing in on the Arab world) for not protecting their citizens and subsequently calling for ordinary citizens to challenge these derelict leaders.

“Silence is Consent” is a clarion call to leaders who ignore the mandate to listen to their people and who sit by while human rights are violated.  This song calls out leaders for their misdeeds, and calls upon ordinary people to stop being apathetic and to start resisting.  At the end of the video, the words “in solidarity with those who stand up to oppression in Tunisia, Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, Yemen, and anywhere that corrupt leadership prevails,” float across the screen as security forces brutally beat up protestors.  This sends a message that people located in the Muslim diaspora are in solidarity with citizens living under corrupt and apathetic leaders … and they’re paying attention even if the mass media isn’t.

Poetic Pilgrimage is adept at calling upon their Muslim identity and employing it against corrupt Muslim leaders in the Arab world.  Although the line, “your silence is consent to their sinning / guilty as those that are pillaging,” is, in the context of the music video for “Silence is Consent,” directed at rulers, the duo also takes responsibility for atrocities committed by and ignored by leaders when they say, “keeping it secret / out of public domain / i’m gonna speak up and speak out/ not in my name.”  Poetic Pilgrimage uses their music to expose the truth of these regimes, and their music itself is an act of nonviolent resistance to put pressure on these leaders by letting them know that the international community is watching.  Although these women are pointing to Arab leaders in the music video and the women are from the UK, they’re employing their Muslim identity in the song to build connections with Arab citizens and their lyrics implicate anyone who ignores injustice.  Your silence, in other words, makes you complicit in the senseless killings articulated in their song.

Crafting an argument, or creating a message that former president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Jack DuVall, refers to as a “unifying proposition,” one that mobilizes and unites people can be an important component to building a lasting and effective movement.  As mentioned by the duo in the interview with Freedom Beat, music of resistance can play a role in not just catalyzing change but actively helping to build a movement on the ground.  In addition to performing directly for Muslims as well as at festivals that focus on social issues, such as Festival of Resistance and Fuse, Rashida and Noor also run workshops for youth, including working directly with young Muslims to help them articulate social issues through the increasingly popular genre, hip-hop.  No instruments required.  Working with youth on the ground and performing songs that indict corrupt leaders in front of audiences that have potentially been impacted by these regimes can unify disparate members of the diaspora in the UK and the US by reconnecting them with regimes in the Middle East.  Speaking directly to youth on their level, about issues that impact them, in a language they understand has worked to bring down leaders before.

In the interview, the women of Poetic Pilgrimage point out that Senegalese rappers were instrumental in bringing down the Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade, who was spending millions to install a statue in Dakar while the rest of the country was constantly facing power-outages and a stagnant, corrupt economy.  Senegalese rappers and journalists, members of society that often associated with narrating and voicing problems, founded the movement “Y’en a Marre” (“We’re Fed Up”) to demonstrate against both Wade changing the constitution in order to serve another term as well as more entrenched corruption.  Although the rappers who started the movement were arrested and beaten, they continued to organize the youth by employing hip-hop that unified a downtrodden, unemployed youth as well as going to the streets to participate in nonviolent action including street demonstrations even after public protests were banned.  And their “get out the vote” drive to vote Wade out of office was augmented by employing nonviolent tactics to bring down Wade in 2012.

Poetic Pilgrimage’s music follows a global trend of hip-hop with featuring a message of unity, power, and resistance becoming popular. Hip-hop is an effective vehicle for delivering messages to fight against societal ills due to its wide appeal to youth around the world and its accessibility.  But music of resistance doesn’t have to just articulate the problem, it can play a powerful role in fixing the problem too, by building international solidarity and encouraging mobilization.  Poetic Pilgrimage emphasize in their interview how often people don’t see a way to create change, but as the Senegalese movement Y’en a Marre, proves, as soon as the people withdraw their consent, the power rulers hold starts to crack.  “We the people can make a change and this has been proven through the history of the world,” said Rashida in the interview with Freedom Beat.  Poetic Pilgrimage seems to hope their music will help people see themselves as both instruments and instrumental in change.

Cassie Balfour is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan and a Communications and Media Associate at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.  She had the opportunity to study and intern in Cairo, Egypt in 2012 where she witnessed first-hand how art was leveraged to create meaningful social change. Follow her on Twitter.