I first saw Bint Mbareh performing at Unsound 2024, singing a series of Palestinian rain chants to a crowded auditorium on a drizzly Krakow morning. I met her a short time later, at the industrial warehouse unit of the festival. We talked about Palestine amid the continuous electric throb of an overdriven kick, but our conversation was all too brief and I knew that I had more to ask her. So, two weeks after the American election, I messaged her on Instagram requesting an interview. I wanted to learn more about Bint, who struck me as an interesting artist and an interesting person to talk to. Over the course of our hour-long conversation we discussed Palestine, the state of activism, the state of art and self-care routines.
Photo credit: Alicja Kowalczewska
Harry: For people who don’t know you, who are you and what do you do?
Bint: I’m Bint Mbareh. I’m a sound researcher and I sing—I sing by myself, and I sing folkloric songs that I’ve researched from Palestine. I’ve also been working on a lot of choirs that involve making sounds and then ensuring those sounds are anonymized by the fact of being sung together. At some point over the past year, I became quite disenchanted with singing because it felt as if it was a sound that was not coming from the correct direction. It was coming from me, and I wanted to extrapolate how sound can be multidirectional rather than coming from one place.
H: What provoked that change?
B: I think it was about feeling that I wanted to avoid music as a category so that took it away from “I am here, and I am making the music.” It really fucked up the category for me in a way that was fun.
H: Traditionally musicians want to be the focus of attention so you’re breaking from the norm of the rock star mentality.
B: I think some musicians hate being the centre of attention.
H: Some, yeah.
B: At the same time, it’s about skill. As a musician I don’t want to be at the centre of this thing but only I have the ten thousand hours. Only I have this deeply, extremely unique education in baroque piano music or The Smith’s Anthology. And I should acknowledge that a lot of this change that we talked about came from looking into Palestinian folklore and being really weirded out by the category of music. It reminded me that the conditions for hearing music have other possibilities. Like you can go and you can make music so that you don’t have leprosy anymore. You can go and you can sing to a shrine so that you are able to produce a baby. And I don’t know if those forms call themselves music.
H: It’s been less abstracted from its original intent?
B: It’s really hard to say. But there is something that I try to do which is to not imagine myself pretending to be a Palestinian, if that makes sense.
H: I guess it can be something you assume. I want to call it a cloak. Are you saying you try to avoid doing that?
B: Yeah. Like, I’m going to perform today at a fundraiser because I’m Palestinian and there’s something about me that wants to regurgitate that in a way so that it doesn’t make sense anymore. So, I’ll go and I’ll play a fucking ambient set.
H: I was curious about your practice from that sense because I wanted to know if it is more preservationist, more archival for you. Is your role as an artist to archive and preserve these narratives?
B: It’s about being a walking archive. Being in the flesh and singing can be archiving. For an archive not to be colonial it has to be activated by and responsive to specific moments.
H: And still present in the moment.
B: Yeah. This is something that I try to do a lot. There’s a comfort and a calm that comes from knowing something can be put into a drawer. Or has the accessibility of being written down. I really worry about the quality of that research. That comfort. The sedation that research offers us. This is another one of the reasons that I feel like activating the voice is still relevant. I don’t like singing very much but I love when I see people singing. I love being in the middle of that song shower. That has been one of the most activating experiences of my life. It speaks to the difference between what’s written down and what’s spoken out loud.
H: I wanted to go back a little bit and ask about home. Where is home? Where was home growing up?
B: I grew up in Ramallah. My mother is from a village called Beit Iba – that’s near Nablus. My father’s family is in Jordan. They left Palestine in the 50s – they’re from Southern Hebron, Dura, Al-Khalil.
H: Is it tough at all to talk about home?
B: It’s not tough but I think…let me tell you my memories of home. After 1993 – I’m referring to the Oslo Accords – there was this semblance of peace. This is how I describe my upbringing and the frustration that comes from being privileged enough to live a very easy life. We got to have nice things – to go to school, to be able to learn and speak English, to travel – and within that comfort there was this underlying defeat.
H: Because it acknowledges what so many others don’t have?
B: These things are not just acknowledgements of what others don’t have; they’re acknowledgements of our failure. For those of us who were privileged enough to live the kind of life that I lived, we now ask ourselves a question: “Is it worth it?” And I think we can all answer fully and convincingly that this was not what we wanted. This kind of peace and this kind of privilege – being able to travel between cities, having the ability to go to Jerusalem intermittently, or to go to see the beach once in a while – all of those veils have now dropped on what the reality of that comfort was and at what expense it was coming. Does that make sense to you?
H: I didn’t grow up in Palestine, so it probably isn’t as present for me, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that preserving our connection in whatever way we can is of fundamental importance. I’m trying to stay connected in my way, but it always comes with conditions; it always comes with some failure or some regret – I regret that I don’t speak Arabic, I regret that I didn’t visit as much as I maybe should have.
B: Yeah, but this is a huge part of it. This mediated experience of “What in your culture are you allowed to celebrate? What in your culture are you allowed to see?” We can hold regret as our own until the end of time. We can say, “I wish I could go to Palestine,” you know? But the premise is that you’re not allowed. I had a friend whose mother, may she rest in peace, was quite ill for a while and she was receiving treatment in Jerusalem. He had participated in exposing something that happened in the West Bank that the Israeli Army was imposing on some young people. So, as a result of that, he received a travel ban and he was unable to see his mother on her deathbed. His story is not the only one but the reason I’m bringing him up is because, one of the few times I spoke to him about it, he was like, “I feel guilty. What if I just didn’t say the thing? What if I didn’t write that thing? What if I had shut my mouth for a minute, given it to someone else so I could be with my mother?” I was shocked in that moment because I recognised it as a very widespread phenomenon of this extreme abuse and the relentless taking away of our agency and our power and all the things that we love and the people that we love. It’s so intentional and so exploitative and so in your face, being done by this higher power and we’re the ones feeling guilty. We’re finding a way to blame ourselves. If I’m to answer this question about my childhood, I feel like I know what would happen if we did tone down our resistance and became submissive and servile. We lose any reason to be here.
H: I was curious, coming from that place, how did you end up as a sound researcher?
B: So, some of the infrastructure that came with this state building attempt was this beautiful conservatory of music where I learnt how to play the piano. I wasn’t really good at it, to be honest.
H: What conservatory was it?
B: The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. I dropped out of my last year to study in the Netherlands. Then I came back to Amman and Ramallah and I started working for the UN. I was in an office doing communications and some part of me was like, “Ok, you can sing whenever you want but this is your job now. This is who you are. Music – you can listen to it, you can find more music – but I think this is your…
H: Life.
B: And then after a while I was like, “You’re being really silly.” So, I applied to a master’s in ethno-musicology at Goldsmiths and I studied rain summoning music.
H: I don’t want to be too glib, but is your art your activism?
B: I think that we act where we are. In that sense I do feel that where I am is where I’m most likely to be active.
H: Does it influence the work you do?
B: The reason I chose rain summoning to begin with is because I wanted to hit where it hurt Israel the hardest in a way. In order for Israel to exist, it needs to be able to say it’s a thought-leader about the resources that are available to Palestinians and others in the region. It can say, “I innovated drip-irrigation. I innovated the most efficient way to run a de-salination plant.” I made that choice because it was a way of disrupting what Israel is trying to claim: its claim to power, claim to authority, claim to knowledge, claim to epistemology. I don’t know if that counts as activism and I don’t know if I consider myself an activist because at the end of the day, I make this work and it doesn’t change anything. I can sing my lungs out and there will still be a genocide going on right now.
H: Just while we were talking, I was thinking about American Liberalism and how people are rethinking the left’s role in enabling Trump, and the failure to hold Maga Republicanism to account. I think Western Liberals are starting to realise how ineffective they are. I think that gets to the heart of a lot the conversations that are happening now. You can’t really live in the UK, in the western world, without experiencing a contradiction between liberal beliefs and the system you live within. I was wondering about your perspective on that, now that you live in London. Do you experience these kinds of contradictions? How do you deal with them?
B: For the past year, I’ve been trying to look for the ways that being in the spaces I’m in can also be activism. I can’t say I’ve found a convincing answer. One of the things I’ve done is to initiate, with my friend, Kareem Samara, The Regular Working Group, which is a series of shows we do at Café Oto. We’ve done four so far and we theme each one according to what we see is most relevant for the moment and we usually put the funds towards eSims for Gaza. Another thing that I do is talk to the venues that I’m in and try to convince them to announce the boycott. It’s been quite unsuccessful, which brings me to this core issue that I can say all of the things that I want to say in all of these places and if they are not structurally willing to change their economic models as such that they reflect some kind of solidarity with Palestine in a meaningful way then I’m not sure we’re doing anything. Israel is experiencing the most shocking level of impunity, and the Tate is whitewashing the name Blavatnik – Blavatnik is a personal friend of Netanyahu’s, and he’s funded a lot of media development in Israel and his name adorns one of the biggest buildings in Tate Modern. And to point out one of these contradictions I had a performance at Tate a while ago and I asked the entire audience to yell out his name inside that hall. I think all that I can do right now is point out the fact that if I pull out of something like this, that wouldn’t have happened. We call do all the pullouts we want to, but the silence will still be there.
H: Do you have any hope for the future?
B: It’s hard to say the word hope. It’s not hard to see that the world has changed in a fundamentally necessary way but I’m so aware that it was on the backs of people who didn’t need to experience that. It feels like some kind of betrayal to be living in hope right now. One thing I would like to continue to say is that I don’t want to act without it. Everything without hope that I can do right now is extremely performative. If I’m acting without performativity then I’m acting with hope, against my will almost.
H: I was wondering, what do you do as self-care?
B: I do a lot of screaming. I think organising has been the only way to get the worm out of my ass. Does that translate?
H: Yeah, it kind of does.
B: Ok. The only way to get the worm out of my ass is to work. It’s purely selfish. I can either be looking at death and surrendering to it or I can be organising. Being around the conflict and the hatred and the shit – looking that in the face is the finest and the most long-lasting form of self-care that I’ve found. Talking about it. Being with the people who are real about it. We are impotent. I want to hate the people that made us impotent, I want to hate the institutions that took our money, I want to hate the landlord class that made us so dependent on our day jobs that we can’t think for five minutes. I want to hate the generational wealth that was taken away from us because all of our connections to our land we’re severed very early in our lives. I want to hate that. Oh, I’ve been smoking cigarettes. What’s been your go to?
H: I recently took up sewing. I think I recognise in your answer a lot of urgency and I feel that too. It felt like I had to start doing things. One of the reasons that I wanted to do this interview with you was that I feel like connecting to the world, connecting to people, is important in some small way.
B: Yeah, I think there is some strange magic in feeling less alone.
H: To round off, if people are interested in your work, if people are interested in the choir, where can they go to experience it? What have you got coming up?
B: I’ll be playing in Basel in February. I have a couple of gigs in Geneva. I’ll be showing some installation work in the Shajar art Biennial. And hopefully I’ll be showing some work in Kazakhstan. Couple of gigs in London. If you’re interested in them, please look at my Instagram and my website: https://bintmbareh.today/.
Harith Badwan is a half British/half Palestinian playwright based in London. His work has been performed by City Academy, the Metalore theatre group, at George MacKay’s Oofle Dust and as part of a collaboration with Floating Shed. He is also a contributing journalist to Qisetna, an online magazine that showcases stories from the Syrian Diapsora.
Bint Mbareh @bintmbareh is a Palestinian musician and sound artist. Her practice has focused on employing Palestinian water narratives as a means of opposing settler colonialism. She is also the co-founder of The Regular Working Group – a series of shows run out of Café Oto committed to the act of “aggressive listening” – as well as a number of choirs that embrace the power of the communal voice.
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