‘We are a forgotten people’: how rap music processed trauma in war-damaged Iraq | Rap

The 2003 invasion of Iraq left a small but noticeable impression on US hip-hop. “Stomp, push, shove, mosh, fuck Bush / Until they bring our troops home,” as Eminem rapped on Mosh, and he begged: “No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our own soil,” alongside a bitingly direct video. “We rebellious … screaming ‘leave Iraq alone!’” Jay-Z rapped in 2003, and a year after the invasion, MF Doom questioned what the point of it all was on the Madvillain track Strange Ways: “All you get is lost children / While the bosses sit up behind the desks, it cost billions / To blast humans in half, into calves and arms / Only one side is allowed to have bombs.”

But the rap scene in Iraq hadn’t taken off in the same way it has now – Iraqi musicians such as the hugely popular Kadim al Saher continued to produce music influenced by the usual choubi and chalgi folk and pop styles – and so these relatively infrequent interjections from US rappers came to dominate the conversation around the war. In the 20 years since, though, rappers in Iraq and its diaspora have voiced their lived experience of the conflict and their reflections on its legacy, often striking a noticeably different tone to how the conflict was documented in western rap.

An entire generation born after the invasion lived with the aftershocks of war, which are ongoing, and this jyl il jdeed (new generation) didn’t share their parents’ sentimentality for the country’s bygone era (expressed in Iraqi “heyday” songs such as Seta Hagopian’s Droub El Safar and Nadhim Al Ghazali’s Fouq il Nakhal). Instead, they provocatively utilised the tools of a genre, rap, that had originated from the country responsible for their nation’s predicament. That irony is one reason why satire reigns in Iraqi rap today.

Perhaps the most potent example of this is I-NZ’s This Is Iraq, a version of US rapper Childish Gambino’s This Is America – both of them commentaries on their respective countries’ corruption. The young Iraqi cites Iranian-backed militias (“Corruptin’ the area / Farsi hysteria”), assassinations and censorship (“I might get shot for this / you might get blocked from this”) and, of course, a reference to Bush’s 2003 invasion and oil extraction: “Food for barrels and barrels.” He also notes that irony of using the culture of his oppressor: “The US taught me.”

Aged 23, rapper Hussein Khalifa AKA Khalifa OG is Iraq’s most popular rapper – the Baghdadi’s 2022 song Tapsy has 16m views and cleverly uses a traditional zanbour drum sound heard in traditional Iraqi choubi music alongside a western hip-hop beat. Khalifa, like I-NZ, enjoys poking fun at the hypocrisy of Iraqi leadership, rapping on Tapsy: “This is a democratic country and we have freedom to express, but don’t you speak about them, my brother, of course that’s not allowed” (in Arabic, this has a more biting tone). Last year, he told the National that using playful satire was a way of helping Iraqis process and move past the war. “As Iraqi people, we are upset and depressed all the time,” he said. “We don’t want to listen to sad things about our reality … I try to talk about our problems in a fun way. We cannot keep pestering about the issues. We have to keep it fun. Why else are we living if not?”

But other rappers favour direct storytelling, and relay war trauma with solemnity. “My fate was in the hands of the American soldiers as our streets became dangerous,” raps Vife as he tells an Iraqi story in Qusat Iraqi: “Dead bodies like flower pots / In each corner you’ll find hundreds / Red blood coloured the streets / and we became the victims.” Despite the heaviness of the lyrics dictating the reality of Iraqis since 2003, the track ends with a call to resistance and hope: “My life would be pointless if I let my situation dictate my future … I’ll continue, and I’ll not give up on my rights.”

Outside Iraq, rappers with Iraqi heritage have long been processing the war and while they’re vocal about the situation in contemporary Iraq, their most powerful lyrics focus on the marginalisation they face in the west. The most notable is Narcy Narce, AKA Yassin Alsalman. The Canadian-Iraqi rapper, who is also a professor at Montreal’s University of Concordia and teaches courses on Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, tells me he uses rap for its “potential [to be] both expressive and educational – a person can really find their inner voice and bring it out and then manifest the reality they wish for.”

On tracks like his classic Makoo, he pushes back against Islamophobia through both lyrics and production – sampling a recording of the iconic Souad Abdullah’s choubi track where she claims “there is no one better than us”, Narcy raps: “I’m afraid that if you hate it then you probably fear us.” In the video we see “Fuck Mohamed, return to Iraq” written on a Quebec wall, and Narcy’s vocals then emulate the Muslim call to prayer: a pointed rebuttal. There’s also that Iraqi flair for humour: “Fear, fire, famine / nothing much has changed since the 90s, except maybe the haircuts,” says actor Fajer Al-Kaisi in the introduction of Narcy’s Love Me (Hate Me), a reminder of the still-reverberating effects of the 1991 Gulf war, America’s first invasion of Iraq – and a poke at today’s famously outrageous Iraqi male hairstyles.

Growing up in Quebec, Narcy and his family were labelled as the enemy; he felt others could only perceive him through the lens of the war, which inspired defensiveness and “brought Iraq to the forefront of my identity”, he says. “We are a forgotten people – a people who injustice and war labelled as downtrodden, but I knew how old and rich our cultural heritage is.”

That drive inspired him to tell Iraqi stories from a place of positivity, highlighting the historical significance of Iraq to the world, and to use hip-hop, long an anti-establishment mouthpiece and the perfect medium to castigate what Narcy calls “20 years of puppeteering and violence”. For Narcy, a complete processing of the war can only be accomplished through justice, which Iraqis are yet to receive and not ever likely to. So for Iraqi artists to use the tools of hip-hop to speak the truth of their oppression by “the same colonial system that oppressed Black and brown people in America is only natural”, says Narcy.

The sense of unity between oppressed peoples also distinguishes the music of London-based activist and rapper Lowkey, AKA Kareem Dennis. In Iraq2Chile, like Narcy, Lowkey uses rap to educate listeners about Iraqi realities (“It’s not about pity, handouts or sympathy / It’s about employment, water and electricity”) and draws links between neoliberal US intervention in Iraq and Chile: “Selling state assets for private interests is real treason.” Ghosts of Grenfell hymns those who died in the Grenfell tower fire, most of whom were ethnic minorities from the Wana region, and several of them Iraqi.

The Iraqi rap scene continues to respond to the war and challenge the corruption which settled in the country’s leadership since the invasion, but it’s also evolving to celebrate Iraqi joy and culture beyond conflict. The established Saudi producer Big Hass recently brought together nine domestic and diaspora Iraqi rappers, such as Odd Khalid and Nayomi, for the Iraq Cypher freestyle track which racked up half a million views on YouTube, rapping about everything from immigrant-parent struggle to double-meaning wordplay. Sweden-based Nayomi is also diversifying a male-dominated scene, referencing her Iraqi culture by using the oud in her track OMG. A new era of bravery and playfulness among young musicians means that Iraq is “finally finding its voice on the ground”, Narcy argues, refashioning an Iraqi identity on their own terms: “It’s time for our brothers and sisters to shine.”