Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi.

The air rose against the door

And I thought the wind carried news

Oh heart have patience

[to endure] the separation

From our loved ones [1]

Since Israel began its violent attacks on Gaza and the West Bank over a year ago, Palestinian musicians and performers have been faced with the difficult question of what the role of art is in the midst of a genocide. This was the question with which Palestinian musician and composer Maya al-Khaldi began her performance, titled Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience. She explained that the question of how artists can help their communities survive in the face of such extreme violence was at the heart of her research on Palestinian wailing songs, on which her performance was based. Al-Khaldi’s performance draws on written sources, the sound archives at the Popular Art Center (Markaz al-Fan al-Sha‘bi, مركز الفن الشعبي), and her own interviews with women. Based on this research, al-Khaldi composed the music for a collection of songs, the lyrics of which were derived from extinct Palestinian rituals of mourning. In her introduction, she explained that many of these songs disappeared due to the cultural loss incurred with the mass displacement of Palestinians by Zionist forces in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) and the rise of Wahhabism, which considered such practices to be sacrilegious. Indeed, even during interviews, several of the women reciting the lyrics of these songs would pause for a moment to ask God for forgiveness.

Yet the loss, pain, and feelings of longing embedded in these songs are more relevant to Palestinians than ever. By returning to these extinct practices, al-Khaldi is creating a space for Palestinians to come together to mourn the loss and grapple with the immense pain they are enduring. These songs of mourning, and Palestinian wailing practices more generally, used to be performed by women. Citing the lyrics of a song that says “I cry for my soul and most of my wailing is for my wounds,” al-Khaldi explained that such songs can only be performed by those who have endured the pain of loss and that these mourning rituals were a means for people to guide others through the process of grieving. According to al-Khaldi, this is the part played by the nawaḥa (نواحة, the woman who performs mourning songs) in society, a feminist role that continues to have revolutionary potential in the present. During her performance, al-Khaldi explained that the significance of the nawaḥa is that they create the space for us to collectively feel our pain as a community, pain we are often denied because of the urgency of needing to find a way to survive.

Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience is part of a series of performances organized by Gradus-العتبة, an initiative started by musician and composer Dina Shilleh to create space for musicians to artistically innovate and collaborate. It was performed twice on the 2nd and 3rd of February 2025 at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah and Wonder Cabinet in Bethlehem. Accompanying Maya in her performance were Sarouna on the Qanun, Faris Amin on the cello, and Zeina Amro as a vocalist. The performance began with a song about a host asking visitors for forgiveness as she is unable to celebrate the Eid (the Muslim feast) because she is in mourning. In a culture that places so much emphasis on hospitality, not being able to celebrate or properly host a guest during the feast represents an immense state of sadness. But it is perhaps also worth mentioning that Eid is also a time of remembering the deceased as it is customary for family members to visit the graves of their loved ones during these times. By the time the first song had finished, an atmosphere of sadness had already overtaken the room. I wondered who the other audience members were thinking of, those who had been martyred in Gaza? Did they have family in Gaza? I thought of a close friend who lost twenty-two family members on the same day as a result of Israeli bombing. Or were they thinking of those who have been killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank? Or those murdered by the Palestinian Authority in Jenin? Perhaps others remembered those who have passed from disease, but is stress and grief not the cause of disease?

The second song, an adaptation from a poem from the Ottoman era, then began. [2] Its slow pace and the repetitive melodies of the cello and qanun were a meditation of the tragedy of loss. Yet it also emphasised Palestinian agency with the alteration of the lyrics to include a verse about a clementine that ‘heals sadness,’ the clementine here being a symbol of resistance. And although there was an element of otherworldliness in the first, it was this second song that made me feel we were on a journey to another time and space. The qanun, cello, singing, and repetition had a mesmerising effect. Along with the surreal aspect of this song, there was almost a hint of the beautiful, as if Khaldi was trying to remind us that there is beauty even in grief.

The third song was a supplication to the grave, written in the voice of the deceased. It was mainly composed of  repetitions of the verse “oh grave, feel my mother calling, open for her an opening so that she may come and go,” with a deep sense of pain and anguish. It is difficult to describe what occurred with al-Khaldi and her collaborators during this song. It was not only that I felt them feeling their grief in that moment, not only that I saw four individuals come together in a unison that all great performers aspire to, but it was that I felt the room being overtaken by the power of the sound. It was a grief intertwined with anger, as if it were a defiance of death itself. It was at that point that I began to cry. I thought I glimpsed the qanun player tearing up, and then I noticed several members of the audience were also crying. This song embodied the power of grief; it was simultaneously mourning the dead and challenging the injustice that took them away from their loved ones. The following song began with equal intensity, protesting against the injustice with a demand to be heard: “I yell with a sound with which they will hear me.” It ended with the following verses:

You ask for your rights

And you are told they are lost

My rights have been lost

And the one who has wronged me walked away

Where are my loved ones?

Oh my loved ones, where am I?

I wandered in the night

With moon and light absent

We crossed the flowing sea

With no water

Gardens in bloom

With no fruit

Oh people of knowledge

Give me an answer

The song is not only a poetic commentary on the injustice in which Palestinians live and the pain they are forced to endure but also an act of protest. This sense of defiance permeated the entire performance as if crying were an act of rebellion in itself, for we, too, have the right to feel pain. Perhaps al-Khaldi is right; perhaps we cannot continue our struggle to survive without taking a moment to mourn the loss. The final song was about a woman’s longing for her martyred son, describing death as “ghurbih, غربة” or a prolonged journey. And I wondered how many audience members were coming to terms with the reality of never being able to see their loved ones again. The term ghurbih is also used to describe exile and evokes the experiences of Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Nakba as well as Gazans fleeing the genocide.

Al-Khaldi’s work is a pertinent reminder of the power of extinct indigenous performance traditions, such as wailing rituals, and their ability to create spaces for people to come together and heal from the ongoing traumas inflicted by Israel’s genocide. However, this return to the past is not about creating static versions of lost forms, for the power of al-Khaldi’s work is her ability to innovate to defy Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid in the present. And as these wailing women guided mourners in the past, al-Khaldi too guides us through an overwhelming pain in a sonic journey that implores us to survive.

Research for this article was supported by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities and the Palestinian American Research Center. The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Palestinian American Research Center.