Transcribed by Elif San
Noura Erakat (NE): Welcome to Status Hour. My name is Noura Erakat and I am here now with Naima Grace Shalhoub two days after a very special performance in the San Francisco County Women’s Jail in a Mother’s Day performance. I will let Naima tell us a little bit more about what the performance was and what led up to it.
Naima Shalhoub (NS): Sure. Thank you Noura. It is so good be here with you and talking with you about this. I am seriously honored that you were there—it meant the world to me. So, basically, around a year and a half ago, I started asking around in my community of folks who had any connections to people inside—either juvenile halls, or jails, or prisons—working with women. I wanted to have the experience of sharing some music with incarcerated women. Coming from my own, just wanting to learn more about the prison industrial complex, what I could do in terms of my small part in playing a role in ending it like so many other artists and educators are doing now. So, I got connected with Angela Wilson at San Francisco County Jail. I pitched to her my idea of facilitating a music session, having themes of freedom and resiliency, and she was excited about it. And before that even started, there was a Mother’s Day event—actually it was a year ago this week, last May—and I was invited to play a couple songs to open up their celebration that they were having for the women. That was my first time meeting the women, and I went in not necessarily having any expectations, and it was just so powerful. I played a Billy Holiday song, I played God Bless the Child, I played Summertime, and then I played Sam Cooke, Change Is Gonna Come. It was so moving and so powerful. And it just kind of kicked off our building relationships together from that point on and then after that I started going every week.
[Naya’s voice]
NE: Naya is part of this interviewing process.
NS: Hi Naya.
NE: What would you do with the women on a weekly basis?
NS: It has been an organic process, figuring out what kind of works in these sessions and what is meaningful for the women and for myself. I started out just by bringing in my own music that I wanted to sing and just to see what resonated with them. And it kind of took shape into conversations about the music, about their lives. And every week it was something different. And I started bringing in songs that they wanted to hear—Lauren Hill, Erykah Badu, even Mary J. Blige in addition to other songs that I would pick. So I would pick a few, they would pick a few, and every week we come together. Sometimes I would sing them by myself. I try to encourage them to sing along with me. But it usually would stem into greater conversations about other things that are happening in their lives. And most recently—it has been about a year now—we are at the point where I do an opening ritual, usually of like, how they are doing that day, I ask a question, we go around the room, this sometimes that just takes twenty five minutes of itself. People are just wanting to share that they are having a hard day, their meeting with their lawyer went really bad, they miss their kids, “I do not want to be here”, there would be tears. Some people come in and they are in a great mood. It really just, it kind of just, less about the music. Or, I don’t want to say that. The music became a vessel really for talking about their lives and I think that is because I have just been building with them over the course of the year. And we have written our own lyrics to songs such as Nina Simone, we would sing Feeling Good alive and instead of using her lyrics we would write own lyrics in class. We do a lot of that kind of thing.
NE: Maybe you can talk a little bit about your own intellectual journey into the space in the work that you actually did. At which point do you feel like the homework, so to speak, you were doing on? What is the prison industrial complex? And the work with them, how those things intersected? Maybe, and you know, you are thinking about what they were incarcerated for? Because my impression was that most of them were incarcerated for harm that they inflicted upon themselves rather then harm that they were causing to society writ large, which tells us a little bit about who were incarcerated, what were punishing, and what for. So if you can just expand on that—because you know them much more personally.
NS: No, that’s a great question. So one of the things I was really staggered by in learning in terms of intellectually about the prison industrial complex are the drug policies in this country and the war on drugs that had been huge, and you know, in the 1980s the prison population skyrocketed. It was really also staggering to find out that these women that I am with every week are mainly there for drug charges and so, one starts to think, what does it mean to criminalize someone for drug use? Why are they using drugs? It is usually because there is poverty involved, there is abuse involved, there are other structural impediments that allow for this type of life that really does not have to do with harm imposed on other people. There is more support that needs to be offered in these communities. So, for me, it was just that understanding those personal individual stories—making up these statistics are still mind blowing for me today. And also learning about how, you know, I read in books that seventy-five percent of women incarcerated are mothers. And on Tuesday, for example, Rhodessa Jones who opened up the space for us room asked, “Who of you in this room are mothers?” I think about eighty or eighty-five percent of the women’s hands went up. So, there is a very clear relationship between what I was learning about and the lives of these women and their own personal stories.
NE: Did they make those connections also, in your weekly sessions?
NS: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, we talk about the system all the time. Yeah, so, yeah! A week doesn’t go by when we don’t end up talking about the system, because it is what keeps them in there and it is what keeps them coming back. And something we talk about a lot is recidivism and the frustration with recidivism. And we had this really intense conversation a couple weeks ago. I was asking them where they would want the profits of this album to go to—the half of the profit, I am going to give back it to them. So I was asking them where would they want it to go, and then it was this whole conversation of “Naima, we can’t get even food stamps, we cant’ get jobs, we can’t get housing.” These are all the basic parts of being able to sustain yourself that they are not being provided. Of course, one is gonna resort to whatever they can just to survive. What policies need to change, what sort of re-entry programs needs to be created so that they are more supported? So, that is one thing, recidivism as well.
NE: And so, one of the things I noticed is that all the songs you chose… You chose songs that had a message of uplifting spirit and a resistance. And in fact I thought it was really ironic that what you began with at the beginning of your concert—not the very beginning, not how you opened the space, but the first song—was about breaking down the jail walls and walking right out. So, that was very explicit and yet— you know, you are dealing with the politics of being in a jail that probably, that is a threat, that’s a threat to them. And yet it has been very accepted because it is celebrated in a way that I think… Can you describe how you were cultivating that spirit with them in ways that it became accepted?
NS: Wow, that is a great question. I found that early on bringing music that stemmed from the Blues and from Black American culture that is ingrained in resistance and their own experiences—being enslaved, confined, held captive— was in immediate resonance right away. And that is kind of what paved the way when I said that the first time I sang was a Mother’s Day a year ago—when I sang Billy Holiday, when I sang Sam Cooke, the women were coming up to me and just saying that “that resonated”. And so, every week I tried to introduce songs like that. And so, I felt like they were telling me that “Yes, we want more of this type of music.” And so, we kind of went on that journey together. And Keep Your Eyes on the Prize is a civil rights spiritual folk song that was really integral in the civil rights movement. And I came back across it recently and I had to sing it just because of the words—it was just too close to home for what this event was about for all of us. And I brought in, I sang one of Johnny Cash’s songs before about Folsom Street Prison, and they loved that one too. So I was just kind of learning about what lyrics to they resonate with, how can I keep bringing music back.
NE: Naima, one of the things that we noticed is that there was a comparison to you and Johnny Cash. Can you explain to our listeners how you actually continue his legacy in the work that you are doing now?
NS: Well, it is a big compliment for me when anyone ever compares me to Johnny Cash. And then there are a lot of other artists as well—B.B king is one. Several other artists have done prison shows. But for him, in particular, playing at Folsom Prison and San Quentin, both being in the Bay, opened the doors really for me to be able to imagine myself doing the same thing. I am really being inspired not just by him visiting the inside, but the choice of songs he chose to perform, and his lyrical content, and even not just that, but his mannerisms, and the way he would be speaking with the prisoners was very much like “I am for you and I am with you” to the point, you know, making fun of the words and this and that, just, in solidarity with them. It planted the seed that, you know, I might not go about things the same way but what can I do if I have this moment every week with these women who are incarcerated? What can I do to build solidarity between us? I don’t have their experience. I’m not gonna claim to even know what it is like to be incarcerated. But what could I bring in that may resonate with them and have them feel heard and seen in some way and Johnny Cash’s music is a good example of that.
NE: I think that’s really a good point, because there is a big difference between doing some sort of a charity concert where “I’m just gonna perform to alleviate how difficult your circumstances are”, and wholly another, to do a solidarity concert. I felt very much as an audience member-- very honored to be an audience member in your concert that it was a space of solidarity. That there was nothing about it where you just came in and left. But that this was a concert by them as well, and that was evident. They sang along with you, your recording was picking up all that sound, the floor was opened up to them afterwards where they took to an open mic and shared their stories. Was that something that you had consciously discussed with them that this is how you would play it out?
NS: Yes, definitely.
NE: Okay, can you tell us about that?
NS: I wanted their voices to be involved the entire time. I wanted it to be raw. I could have just done it in a studio. But for me, the music to me has become so much more powerful after singing in a jail. The music—it comes alive in a way where, if you are singing about Billy Holiday and she is singing about God Bless the Child, and, “Money, you've got lots of friends/ Crowding round the door/ When you're gone, spending ends/ They don't come no more”--when you say that to a group of incarcerated women, they’re all gonna nod and say “hell yeah, that is life, that is real, and here we are now, stripped away from our rights”. So, to me, the music came alive and so, I could not imagine doing an album for them without them being involved and being a really integral part of whole canvas this, of this experience. And I wanted to hear from their poetry, I wanted to hear not just call and response, but opening it up at the end and having them share was really powerful for me. They are some amazing talented women that come through there and their voices need to be heard as much as anyone else’s.
NE: And they are very eager to share their stories.
NS: Yes!
NE: So, Naima, maybe this is a good place to pivot about you.
NS: Okay.
NE: And your own journey as an artist, and how you came to that—you know, you came to sing. How was it that you come to sing, Naima?
NS: Oh, how was it I came to sing? You know, it started of kind of like you hear a lot of other artists. I started singing when I was little [laughs], you know, which was true. I started singing in choir all through elementary school, middle school, high school, musical theatre. In high school there was a jazz choir and that actually really opened the door to my deep love for this music. But, I will say, I did not have the confidence at that time to pursue it. When I went on to college, I did not study music. I hardly played, I hardly sang. I did informally here and there but I do not know what it was. I did not have it in me to be able to claim what it is that I wanted to do in life. I felt like all the other pressures of “you need to do this, you need to do that”, “you’re not good enough”, “why you”, “you are not”— all these voices in my head. And it was not until I went to grad school in 2006 in a Master’s program for Postcolonial and Cultural Anthropology. That was really radical, and [I] literally started finding my voice through a lot of healing, through understanding the privilege I have in my life, though understanding the different ways that I have experienced oppression.
NE: Can you talk about some of those? What is was that you felt like you experienced oppression? That’s a big statement. So, how was that coming together for you?
NS: I think that even acknowledging rather than individualizing trauma that, actually—individual trauma connected to greater social structures was incredibly empowering for me to name. I started remembering things that I have blocked out literally in my head. I mean, I experienced, for example, sexual trauma when I was younger and I had blocked that out. It was not until I was reading bell hooks, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldua. So many of these women talking candidly about the role of sex as a form of power and being a woman of color—it [is that] literally my memories became alive, and I had to confront them. And not only that, the immense amount of privilege I have growing up as a middle class American woman—sure, I am Lebanese and I am a brown woman—but there is an incredible amount of privilege that I have growing up here. I had everything I needed, I was provided for. And so, to really come into contact with that as well was really just as much empowering. So, I think, understanding the way these dynamics, social structures, impact us on an individual level.
NE: And so, how did that lead you, that kind of coming into consciousness, even into your own trauma and learning how to understand it on a collective level? How did that bring you home to that?
NS: Yes, good question. I had an amazing professor, Angana Chatterji. She first found out that I could sing and she would always ask me to sing at different school events and in her classes even sometimes. I started through this and through my healing and through me confronting all of these at the same time. My voice just, I just, I could not… There were certain things that I could not express in any other way, and I had to sing about them. The first song I ever wrote was actually— I woke up at 4 a.m., and we were studying about Kashmir, and my professor was sharing with us her work—she works with the people of Kashmir and these the mass graves that were found—and we had an entire class about it. And I woke up at 4 a.m. literally with lyrics in my head. It was a melody and it was haunting.
NE: Do you remember them?
NS: Yes.
NE: Can you sing them for us now?
NS: Yeah. [Naima Shalhoub singing] And it just kind of kept repeating over and over.
NE: You get me every time. [laughs]
NS: I mean, it literally, Noura, woke me up. And I grabbed the piece of paper, and I wrote down the words, and I sang them over and over on my ukulele until I knew that if I woke up, I would remember, and it was the first song I ever wrote. That was end of 2009.
NE: So, one of the things that I think our listeners would appreciate is right now, Naya, my little girl, is in the room and bouncing around. But the moment you started singing, she paused and she was mesmerized. In ways that, I think, is general, because everybody that I spoke to after your concert expressed the same thing, of being emotionally captive to the space you wanted us to be in, that you brought us in. And I think that goes beyond your voice and your talent. But there is something else, you are putting yourself in your music, and whatever pain it is you are feeling, you are opening it up that pain to be shared and to be alleviated. So, is it hard for you that this is constantly not just some project you sit down and just, you know [laughs] You’re actually almost like giving us a piece of your skin each time?
NS: Yes, thanks for asking that, because I forget that sometimes. I think actually the most beautiful part about it is being able to share it. I think the hardest part about it is learning how to channel the pain, I think sometimes. I can feel really isolated, I can feel really scared about that a lot. But it is another thing that sounds ironic. But singing, sharing this music in jail— these women I have come to know, they want to hear the real, they wanna hear real music. And so, the fact that I can bring these songs that I have written, and you know, they ask “Hey Naima, what songs have you written, can you share them?” Men, every time they just receive me with open arms, and I feel so validated. Here they are the ones incarcerated and I am just feeling [stops mid-sentence]. The juxtapositions are pretty intense. But I think that I have learnt that it is important to keep facing one’s pain and sorrow, because it really makes the music come alive.
NE: Why did you say that makes you scared sometimes that you do not know how to channel? What else would you do with it?
NS: Oh, God! We’re gonna be real now [laughs] It’s true.
NE: The real!
NS: This is the real deal. Oh, constant negative thoughts. Allowing what I mentioned before about social conditioning of “I am not good enough, I am not worthy enough to take over me,” anxiety, depression, being fed up, feeling entitled, you know, maybe, also, being a little privileged about things, and forgetting that I have it pretty good here as well. There is all of that. And you have to constantly come into honest reflection of yourself if you really wanna create art, and that is very inconvenient to the order of things sometimes. You cannot just go along with things. You have to constantly be real and face your demons.
NE: You know I am not an artist. But I keep saying, it is one of the things...
NS: [Naima Shalhoub interrupts] You are in a way.
NE: I am an artist in my own way but I’m not producing art, though I feel I am really good in this lifetime I’ll be reborn as a bona fide artist. But I happened to think that is a condition—that pain—what an artist needs to share with us. Is that this deep sensory, capacity to be in touch with the earth and with the living beings on it—animate and inanimate objects—that express these things to us? How is that, you know… Obviously this is part of your own healing, and then you open up the space and you create a healing space for everybody else. But do you see the trajectory of your music as remaining consistently as a source of healing for yourself, or do you see it growing in other ways as well?
NS: I hope it stays intimately connected in this way to my own healing, as well as I hope impacting others and inspiring others. I hope, because there is no way, I don’t believe that I’ll ever arrive, and I don’t believe that arrival really happens that we cannot just only continue to be masters of our lives, and to do that we have to face the joy and the sorrow. So, I hope the trajectory stays in consistency with the way it started.
NE: What is it that you, I mean, so you begin; music starts to come to you. Does it continue to wake you up in the middle of the night?
NS: That has not happened in a very long time in fact. I have not written a new song in a long time. And I am hoping that now that this music has been recorded, I have a feeling a lot of new music is gonna come through me. It has been a little bit… I have been hanging on to these songs for the last five years, so each have a pretty heavy weight of what they mean to me. And the lives—not just my own but that I feel like I carried with them. In a sense, I feel like once I release the record, whether or not it’s well received or not, I’m gonna feel relived. And I am hoping it will create a new space for some new message from the spirit world and from other people. I hope my songs… I wanna be a messenger really for voices that need to be heard whether it is my own or others’. So we will see.
NE: So it is interesting that you see that, because you bridge several worlds together. You are inspired by, it seems like, predominantly Black writers, Black artists, who sing songs of resilience, redemption, healing, triumph. But you also are very much rooted in your Lebanese identity, and so here you are bridging these worlds. Can you talk a little bit about that, I mean, ways that inter-cultural connections that you make, ways that when you bring your music into Arab spaces—what’s that like? Or ways that you bring Arab influence into other spaces that might be predominantly Black, and what’s that like? And maybe these binaries that I am creating of--Arab and Black—do not even, in the world that you traversed, do not necessarily exist so starkly. What has been your experience with that?
NS: That is beautifully posed. I used to struggle with that a lot more in the beginning whereas, you know, I would say my name and I am a Lebanese American artist, and people automatically assumed that I would be singing all in Arabiyah [Arabic]. And my spoken Arabiyah sucks, I cannot get by, but [laughs] let’s just be real, you know, I cannot get by when I’m in Lubnan [Arabic for Lebanon], and here and there. But I mean, anyone would tell you, I can only go so far. So, there is this pressure I was putting on myself, “what is that mean?” And I have always said, I grow up listening to Ella Fitzgerald, and Billy Holiday, and Whitney Houston, Lauren Hill, and Erykah Badu—[they] really were my main inspirations. There is also Mercedes Sosa and other artists like—I love Fairuz, I love Umm Kalthoum from Misr [Arabic for Egypt], you know, all these female [artists]… But I was very drown especially growing up in the States, and how much Black music has integrated to the arts and culture in this country. So, yes! So here I am, a Lebanese American artist, and then I tend to sing a lot of other songs that do not necessarily quote in quote have to do with Arab culture. But underneath it all, I found pretty much most of the time whether it is, it is one of the favorite songs that I sing in the jail is Adduka Al-Mayyas, the ‘Arabi one—almost every time, like, “Can you sing the Arabic one, can you sing the Arabic one?” And I ask, “What is it that do you like about it?” “It is just the vibe, we do not know what you are singing, but we can tell you are singing something that is beautiful.” And ask me whether it is a love song, and I explain the lyrics. They have resonated with this idea of deep and crazy love and adoration, as well as the struggle, as well as we talk a lot about—not a lot but several times of talks—Palestine and what is happening in Gaza—Gaza being the quote in quote largest open air prison in the world is often referred to. And a song that I wrote about Ferguson and Gaza—I sang it for them. And we had this conversation about what is Apartheid, who is Nelson Mandela, what is happening in Palestine, how is that connected to Ferguson? And once we talk about it, the relationships are very clear in terms of this idea of human struggle and oppression and how do you resist are just a part of the fabric of people and life. And I am still learning too. And I think that the binaries exist and they do not at the same time, and so I am still kind navigating my own way.
NE: Can you, Naima, sing us, maybe just one verse from Ferguson to Gaza?
NS: I am changing the lyrics a little bit. I did not perform it on the record. [Naima Shalhoub singing] It will go something like that. [Applauds] I am still working on it.
NE: True! it still moves me even if I have heard it a few times. Tell me, who are the audience you wanna reach? Who do you want to know you? What spaces do you wanna play? Where do you wanna go, Miss Naima?
NS: [Laughs] I would love to travel, and in the same cities, in the morning during the day play in the prison, and at night play at a big concert hall. I mean, I wanna live literally in the borderlands of that. What is it like to share music out in public space at a beautiful concert hall and, at the same time, share that music with folks who are incarcerated and held in confinement and in isolation? There is something there that I feel like I need to experience, then, almost like a larger theme that I wanna live. And I always wanna have one foot very much on earth with the people who are most impacted by these oppressive structures that I have a lot of privilege to kind of navigate around. But I always wanna be singing for those people because I wanna make sure that my music can be relevant in some way, but at the same time I wanna share that music with the general public. I mean, I do not necessarily have a specific idea of whom I wanted to reach and inspire. But if there is these themes of freedom and resistance and resilience through the music that I can create can unite various people, I would be pretty happy about that.
NE: Awesome. Are you thinking of new music now in response what looks like—It is an uprising in Baltimore, but there is now a term, Black Spring—based on, you know, just in the vein of the work that you do to connect spaces of resistance? Has that been on your mind?
NS: There has been, and I have not, because just giving birth to this project, have not been able to fully immerse myself. But when I do… Yeah, there is music that needs to be written. I feel like there is song that needs to be written and heard, and I definitely plan to do that.
NE: Well, we definitely plan to keep our eye on you and to bare witness your very inspiring concerts and to listen to and help spread that message. Thank you for joining us, Naima.
NS: Thank you so much Noura.
NE: Thank you Naya!
NS: Thank you Naya!
