1996: Cheb Khaled, Sahra
By Nashwa Lina Khan
A year ago, before the pandemic, a dear friend of mine and I met to talk about our dreams of moving to New York and share delicious food; as we parted ways in the subway station he started singing Cheb Khaled’s, Aïcha. This week I reconnected with that friend to confirm it was that song and not a fever dream. He confirmed and texted back: “ecoute moi ooooo.” I went back instantly, that moment I felt magic. My heart swelled. Someone knowing this enormous yet secret part of me. Music not many understand the words to. There is no bad Cheb Khaled album but 1996’s Sahra will always stand out to me. Aicha is from that album. It also was a song that did well with non-Maghrebi audiences and made it on charts throughout Europe.
When the pandemic began, I started posting a lot of music on my timeline. I never used to post music and adamantly declared I am not a music person. The first time I posted Raï I hesitated. That hesitancy was weird for me, someone who sometimes shares too much. But for some reason music, especially something I assumed was niche, made me hesitate. Music to me though always just seemed like something out of my range, I played oboe for years but I was never a natural and had to work hard at it. I attempted tuba for a stretch of time and again found that I just was not great at it. Cheb Khaled is one of the artists I seem to be sharing the most lately. It still shocks me when someone knows who he is because he feels weirdly like mine and Maghreb’s, although I know that is silly.
The other day on hinge someone asked me what I was up to and I said I was writing a piece on Cheb Khaled and he automatically responded “Omg I love Khaled…” and later “...discovered him when I was in Europe, had quite a few Moroccan friends and he is like God to them.”
Adapted in many languages including Urdu (my father tongue), Hebrew, Malay, Polish, and more. It's silly when I get surprised that people know Khaled yet I am always in awe and appreciation and reminded not to be shy or skirt around the music I love and was raised around.
When people talk about artists here I often find I do not relate, nothing resonates or sticks. I can sing along to a top 40 (sometimes) but I never really had music on my phone. Buying music was always a luxury for my family growing up. In Florida, where I spent my childhood, we only had maybe five “real” CDs. They were just CDs of singles that cost less than $3 and were bought on birthdays, among them Brittney Spear’s Hit Me Baby One More Time and Hoku’s Another Dumb Blonde.
What we did have were cassettes my mom had brought with her from Morocco or had been given. Later burned CDs you could buy on the street in Casablanca or at an Indian or Pakistani grocery store, the ones that came in a white envelope with cellophane circle or a plastic sleeve with a bootleg printed paper cover. A few dollars spent and you could enter a world so different from where my parents had settled for a stretch of time, central Florida. A world very few could or can understand.
I never got to go on vacations, I got to go back home. Back home meaning Morocco. Morocco meaning landing in Casablanca going to Berkane and then Oujda and then back to Casa. Now as an adult I make some detours, have some small adventures but as a child, the vacations I knew were back home and back home was Casa, Berkane, Oujda.
The latter two towns, now cities, are close to the Algerian border. Oujda, where my grandmother hails from is the birthplace of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the man who would be president of Algeria for almost 20 years. Oujda borders the Algerian town Maghnia, a closed border since 1994. That year would be the same year Cheb Hasni, age 26, was killed by Salafists who viewed Raï as a threat. He was known as the “nightingale of Raï.” Two years later, 1996 is when Raï artist Cheb Khaled would release Sahra, an album named after his daughter. Soon after, 1997, I would be in Morocco twice. Once for Eid and once for my tati’s wedding. There is a romantic way darija can describe so much with so little. I never hear songs like this in English.
On these trips I would go to Oujda and hear Raï, at the wedding there would be a Moroccan orchestra, a Moroccan wedding staple, and mixed in with the classic wedding songs there would be Raï. In stores you might catch Raï these days or in a small red taxi. If you do it is likely Cheb Khaled. Oujda has often been described as the most “Algerian” Moroccan city.
Over the last few years, I learned that Algerians and Moroccans sometimes have tensions. I have always been in spaces and places where Morocco is so foreign that finding an Algerian is finding a sibling, any Maghrebi is family. Perhaps my ignorance is in my own geographic distance from Morocco and a constant yearning and longing to find parts of this secret self, people who understand the music I love and words I know in a place where they are so rare.
Cheb Khaled is proof of this in a sense. He has both Algerian and Moroccan citizenship, something that has been discussed and even controversial at times. He said during an interview on French television 2017 “You know, I’ve always felt Moroccan since I was a kid. The borders between the Maghreb countries, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, have never existed for me.” His wife is from Oujda. Relationships, like music, have and always will transcend this border.
Raï, is Algerian folk that transcends a border. Raï was a dying genre when salafists declared war on it. It lived on in secret during parts of the 1990s in people’s homes and France. Now Raï thrives again with a yearly festival in Oujda and Oran, its home.
Oujda, one of my homes is where my great aunt who was akin to a grandmother passed away this year. I could not go because of the pandemic and that will always gnaw at me. I have not seen her since 2017. That will always gnaw at me. The last time I was in Morocco she took care of me in little ways that were so big despite her old age and health. She would get distraught if there was no milk because she knew I loved coffee with milk there, the milk they sell in paper boxes and triangles. Every night she would watch Egyptian or Turkish dramas or live music. All media that no one I know here consumes or understands.
I sometimes know the word in a swollen darija but not in english, sometimes I know the words in darija but not in english. I can often sharpen or re-train my darija listening to Raï. This pandemic I re-visited Sahra, an album with so much range that takes me back to so many moments in my life that feel so dissociated from my life here and now in Mississauga but remind me how my life is so much more and beyond this geographical place. It reminds me of my honours and obligations, it reminds me of people who love me unconditionally so far away and of who I am and who I come from.
One night while a live Cheb Khaled show played on the tv (or that's the one my memory always wants to remember), my khalti and tati pulled out a few of her old dresses and spoke about the Algerian patterns and the French and how making these dresses was so easy yet to me it felt hard and intricate in a way mass-produced clothing does not parallel. Together we would sit in the family room where we would also sleep. Moroccan living rooms are framed by long sedaries, on them we would eat, sleep, spend time together, listen to live shows and music and watch dramas like I was a child again. Time moves differently in Morocco and time moves differently every time I hear Khaled’s Sahra.
Morocco always felt so different yet normal, the opposite of being lonely was when I was in Morocco as a kid and a big part of that was the soundscape and music, specifically Cheb Khaled. When I was in Morocco as a kid, I was so brave. I could sing suddenly and imitate Khaled’s popular Aïcha like my friend in the underground station here. I no longer think I have that in me. There is a commercial for jam that features the song Aïcha. I have been searching for it for a year now and only find writing on it but no video. It feels like a ghost, I swear exists and was played endlessly yet now I can only track down a mention of it in a marketing paper written by an undergraduate student. There are days where all I want is that jam from that moment in time when every commercial featured Cheb Khaled’s ode to Aïcha.
As an adult, I feel my tongue swollen when I try to sing along to these same songs, in an attempt to experience that same joy. On Sahra Khaled has a song where he repeats the lines من وهران لمارساي دلّالي, meaning from Oran to Marseille. This journey and the idea of a journey like that is one many khareej experiences. In summers Morocco floods with khareej. Khareej being people like my mom, people who left, people who left but send remittances, people who left but support families and homes in Morocco, people who long for a Morocco that has changed. Lilah another song on the album speaks of Algeria being a soul’s flower, a bride, a place of happy people and happy stories. The feeling surrounds you as the song plays with heavy brass instruments and light drumming. It blankets the listener in a warmth you feel when you land in bledna (our home). Although this album has been with me throughout my life and I never felt it until the pandemic. Wahrane Wahrane, another song on the album speaks again to the country but also the emigration, loss, and exile. Raï artists have been invaluable in creating art around but also part of. Their loss of home and having to leave because of Salafists is part of their story and music. Young Maghrebis find a home in Raï, as do I. Our losses and distance may be differentially shaded but we feel the gritty warm loss in the descriptors and the longing. The longing to even taste something as simple as a harissa and tuna sandwich on a beach. In Wahrane Wahrane Khaled sings قعدوا في الغربه حيارى, meaning “the memories came back to haunt me.” At this age now when I put on this album I suddenly understand the sadness my mom and other Maghrebis had when I was a child happy in America. They worked long hours, precariously, grinding themselves down hoping they would go back to homes they helped build and families they left before they were even full adults. They do not though. They stay here until it's time to retire and then are torn between where their original homes are and where their kids are now. They visit home in summers, fill suitcases seams bursting with gifts and all sorts of normal items from here, Benadryl, Motrin, Tylenol, shampoos, socks, underwear, and more. But home is so different and so are they. Khaled gives words to these feelings that are so difficult to explain and even translate. For me Khaled helps me not understand my elders but also understand myself.
Mektoubi, another song of Sahra speaks to destiny. I think although it has taken me a pandemic and tremendous loss to appreciate this particular album in full it was mektoub.
Maybe I am a music person but the music just lives somewhere else.
Nashwa Lina Khan is an educator, facilitator, and community-based researcher. She also hosts the podcast Habibti Please, you can find it here. She is also a writer and poet. Sometimes you can find her tweeting too little or too much @nashwakay.