Al Kofeyye Arabiyyeh: How Hip-Hop Became a Shelter for a Palestinian Girl Fighting Colonialism

• In Event: Still Nuthing Ta F’ Wit: Examining the Power of Hip-Hop to Advance Justice for Youth

Abstract

Objective:

For centuries peoples weaving between the villages along the waters of the Mediterranean Sea wore a patterned cotton scarf, the kofeyye. Over time the kofeyye became a symbol of their resistance to colonization. When the kofeyye came to be flooded with a color and emblem that had come to symbolize the rule of the colonizers, one girl turned to Hip Hop. The objective of this paper is to examine how Hip Hop supported this girl to reclaim the narrative of the kofeyye, and in the process, reclaim the narrative of herself, her people, and Hip Hop as African freedom culture.

Theoretical Framework:

Following scholars such as Fanon (2004), wa Thiong’o (2016), and Tuck and Yang (2018), this paper operates from an understanding of “colonialism” as a process of structural and ideological domination for the purposes of controlling and exploiting labor, lands, and/or waters.

As the lens by which the Hip Hop artist in this paper engages coloniality, the author engages studies exploring Hip Hop as African freedom culture (Kelley, 2022). That is, Hip Hop as a “culture” that has the power to decenter anti-Blackness and the oppressive perspectives of the dominant, and to subsequently prepare colonized populations to fight their ideological and material repression.

Data and Methodology:

Data primarily comes from one piece “Al Kofeyye Arabiyyeh,” and its lyrics, music video, and related materials. The author also gathered and interpreted digital documentation, including interviews, social media, and news stories. Contextualized in his longstanding ethnographic research with Hip Hop youth artists as a researcher and teaching artist, the author then made use of Hiphopographic sociolinguistic methods (Alim, 2006) to examine rhetorical features and semiotic markers appearing in poetic and discursive data.

Substantiated Conclusions:

Born in London to parents who had been forced from Palestine, the artist featured in this paper came to see how Hip Hop as African freedom culture aligned with her cause. Hip Hop helped her understand oppression and gave her a means to fight colonization, “Rap was able to convey experiences from the Bronx. When the first MCs came out, they rapped about grief and police violence.” When she saw what the occupiers of her homeland had done to the kofeyye, she was called to respond, and Hip Hop provided her a way, “I found this kind of shelter for my thoughts.” As of June 2023, the song featured in this paper had garnered more than 1.9 million views, and became one of the most prolific songs from a contemporary Palestinian artist. This paper examines how Hip Hop contributed to the transformation of the narrative of the kofeyye, along with that of the artist and her peoples, lands, and waters.

Scholarly Significance:

The power of Hip Hop to transform the lives of youth racialized as Black and Latinx in the U.S. is increasingly well-studied. However, there have been far less studies examining its power outside of American contexts, especially youth gendered as girls and gender non-conforming. This paper attempts to critically address these scholarly omissions.

Author

• Casey Philip Wong, Georgia State University