Ziad Rahbani: Son by Choice, Father Despite Himself, Youthful Forever

Son by Choice, Father Despite Himself, Youthful Forever

By Nael el Toukhy

Translated by Rahma Bavelaar

 

My mother loved Fairuz, or rather, she loved my love for her. It was as if this quality reassured her; a sign that my taste in art was still in check. It made me want to gift her a tape of the album Ma3rifty feek (Knowing You), to introduce her to the “Fairuz of Ziad,” who I had only recently discovered.

Back then, I tried to draw her toward my taste, and she had made it perfectly clear that she didn’t appreciate it.

I played the tape and watched her face tighten as she listened to the tracks. This was not the Fairuz she knew, this unrefined woman, complaining in the common vernacular of her “annoyance” with her lover. She scolded me, the bearer of the tape, but kept stealing glances at the recorder, at the Fairuz inside it. Hers was the sneering look of a person who had allowed her son to draw her toward his taste, or maybe the puzzled look of someone who wondered how it could have come to this.

^^

I began my story among family, because his story doesn’t make sense outside of that context. Or, more specifically, it can’t be separated from the bond between mother and son.

In Egypt, people commonly referred to him as “that boy, Fairuz’s son,” given that his mother was his first source of legitimacy. She was the anointed queen, yet here she was, welcoming him as he shuffled her off her throne. A perilous shuffle that would, in the end, lay the foundation for a new throne. And so the plot thickens and a new character emerges. In retrospect, we notice a boy striking out from home, suitcase in hand, abandoning a golden legacy. He chose to choose, to cultivate his own taste and finally to return to his mother many years later to draw her toward his taste.

His sonhood would continue to be his best-known feature, but only after he transformed its meaning–out of choice, not fate–the way a man becomes himself despite being a son, the way he becomes very much himself despite being very much a son.

His sonhood guaranteed that we would remember him as a young man, even as he aged. We called him “Ziad” rather than “Rahbani,” and “Rahbani” rather than “al-Rahbani,” as if we wanted to shield him from titles that might afflict him, and from any fatherhoods he might have had a right to, but that neither he nor we wanted for him. As if we conspired to remove his surname; happy with him simply being “the comrade.”

^^

From 2000 to 2006 were my weaning years. My mother passed away, I graduated from university, and I started blogging. I also decided to listen to him only on his own, to have him motherless like me. Around the same time, my brother excitedly told me about a music video he’d watched. Most of the song was in French, but, throughout the song, the singers urgently repeat a Lebanese “Shoo?” I also watched the song “Wuli’at keteer‘”(Burned a Lot). At first, I didn’t understand a thing, but I turned the words over until each one was revealed to me, like a small miracle. I bought one of his records, and from the moment I put on the first track, “al-‘Aql zayna” (Beautiful Mind) his voice came to me in all its intensity; heavy with meaning, sweet and cultured, witty and politicized, a playful mix of stammering and self-confidence.

Innu midry lesh. ‘Because, I don’t know why’, he says–I say. Then we talk about whatever else.

It’s true that he’ll refuse to be a father, but his seed will germinate in countless young people. I stand in line at the state-subsidized bakery. The baker dawdles and the customers protest loudly, but I keep my cool, puffing on my cigarette in silence for a moment before saying casually: “nevermind, folks, because, ya know, he’ll be punished if he sees to his work.” The customers, men with mustache, crack up, and I, gloomy as I am, marvel at my snark’s success.

In that moment, I was dimly aware that I was imitating him, that his influence on me ran deep, and I didn’t feel in the least embarrassed by it. To the contrary, I sought him out. Through him, I learned how to joke, to enjoy experimentation, to dare to sing. I wrote my first blog post in his style, or what I understood to be his style. I drew on the topography of his world, or what I believed to be his world. I made use of his tropes in my first novel, The Two Thousand and Six, in which, according to some, I “found my own voice”. Suffice it to say that the first chapter opened with the song lyric “isma’ ya Reda“: Listen, Reda. Suffice it to say that “isma’ ya Reda”  were my first words “in my own voice”.

I wrote about and robbed him in equal measure, offering no compensation except in metaphor; in two moments of pleasure, he appeared to me in two consecutive dreams. In the first, I told him his own jokes, and he laughed. In the second, I showed him his video clips, and he smiled. Both times we boarded a bus together, as if my subconscious insists that he is my comrade; my comrade in transit, or for life.

^^

I postponed mentioning this in the beginning to avoid confusion: It’s true that the album Ma’rifty Feek frustrated my mother. But its final track, ‘Udak rannan (Your lute echoes), reconciled her. Her features relaxed and she said something like, “ah, here we finally return to oriental tarab.”

I’m not the one responsible for the confusion in the story. The man himself belonged equally to the east and the west. He wrote in French and Arabic, loved jazz as much as the quarter tone and Zakariyya Ahmed. He was frivolous and radical, uninterested at times; at others, as he put it, kteer hshoury, as nosy as can be. He listened to the Qur’an, composed for the church, and gathered within himself all things blasphemous.

Unlike his parents, he was defined by his vitality. By his refusal to conform to an external model and by doing what he loved, no matter the contradictions. For half a century, he produced art that blurred the line between rehearsal and recital, an art rooted in improvisation—not in beauty, perhaps, and certainly not in perfection. For half a century, his cunning gaze never dimmed and his mouse-like features never filled out. For half a century, and into his seventies, Ziad retained the spontaneity of a child—blunt, brazen and annoying. This is the second, and I believe the more important reason he stayed young in our eyes.

^^

Yet old age remains a reality that cannot be retired by metaphors. With advancing age, he continued to be him, only with a weaker voice, longer pauses, and more muddled enunciation. He dozed off during rehearsals, isolated himself at home. His output dwindled and he was mentioned only for his political opinions. I heard him talk about his financial need and felt frustrated for him. I felt his frustration with his fading stardom, and I felt frustrated with him, too.

Sometimes the elderly fade from memory more quickly than the deceased. Ziad was forgotten. Still worse, I forgot him. Until a few months ago, as I was cycling with my headphones on. SoundCloud chose him for me, and I found myself willing to tune in. Not as a party to his work, but as an objective arbiter. “Fuck”, I hummed to myself, “this man is actually cool”. I congratulated my younger self’s taste: I had been right to fall in love with him.

I wish I could pat him on the back, I often say. Don’t be upset, I want to tell him. I say this to Zeina, to Khaled, to Hany and Wa’el. Hany responds with an old clip in which the famous Lebanese singer Mulhim Barakat is asked, “Who is today’s master?” His answer, “Ziad al-Rahbani, of course” is offered with resignation, because “you can’t hide the truth”. I sigh in relief, as if Truth itself  were bestowing the gift of “mastery” upon him. As if God had patted his back in my place. A swift pat, to be followed in death by one much greater. Ironically, this manifests as a gloom unlike any other I’ve known—it darkens the mood, puts a rasp in the voice—and turns into a stubborn, childish refusal to listen to his music.

The intense grief over his death was strangely individual; a multifaceted mourning, since each of us has a different Ziad. There are thousands of them, a response to his multiplicity, born from his resistance to being trapped by form. It seems like a recompense in kind, or evidence of justice prevailing, or even–God only knows–of the existence of God.

The Arabic original of this essay appears in Rusted Radishes; read it on their website.

Nael Eltoukhy is a forty-six-year-old Egyptian writer. He published his first story in 1998, and in 2024, his sixth novel, “Roosters and Chicks,” was published by Dar Al-Mahrousa. He also translates from Hebrew.

Rahma Bavelaar is an anthropologist based in the Netherlands.