‘Turning Saint Laurent into Saint Levant’: Reclaiming Narratives of the Middle East

Cover photo is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

It was the evening before my friend Jana and I were due to fly back to Dubai from our first ever term at Cambridge. Jana had some leftover food she wanted to cook before leaving the country for six weeks; this included a rather random but delightful assortment of a HelloFresh meal, some baby potatoes, bell peppers and canned dolmades.

It was an admittedly ambitious project to be undertaking the night before our early flight, but at this point it felt like a celebration of having made it through our very first Michaelmas and being closer than we’d let ourselves believe to flying back home. I think for both of us this meant more than reuniting with our families and with the balmy Dubai weather: it meant reuniting with our roots and our culture; it meant speaking Arabic more than through the pixelated void of FaceTime. Our excitement and nostalgia at this prospect prompted us to turn on some Arabic music. Boiling rice and chopping vegetables with Fairouz’s sweet voice filling the increasingly humid kitchen, occasionally interspersed with the odd Amr Diab or Nancy Ajram song, we could not help but feel like a pair of Arab grandmas, in the best way possible.

At one point I remember Jana turning around and asking me if I’d heard of Saint Levant. After replying that I hadn’t, she explained he was a new artist who sang in Arabic, French and English. I was instantly intrigued, and even more so to discover he was of Palestinian origins and not French with Maghrebin origins as the language combination had made me assume. As she sampled a few of his songs, I was taken aback by how new and unfamiliar the soundscapes were to me, but how simultaneously nostalgic and familiar they felt as well. I think this is what makes his music special: it exists in that odd space between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between past and future.

Saint Levant was born Marwan Abdelhamid in Jerusalem to an Algerian-French mother and a Palestinian-Serbian father. He is an emerging artist whose music has gone viral on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which have played a large part in the promotion of his career. Born during the Second Intifada, a series of Palestinian uprisings following the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit, he would spend his childhood years in Gaza before eventually moving to Jordan with his family due to the civil conflict which erupted in 2007. His music is largely shaped by these early childhood experiences, and is indeed an ode to the time he spent in Gaza, to ‘the warmth, and the smell of…and the taste of food and just the odd feeling of soil,’ as he put it in an interview.

What makes Saint Levant’s music so captivating is not just the trilingual rap but the genre-bending cocktail of instruments and sounds, including but not limited to guitar, saxophone and percussion. I do not think there is one word to describe the genre, which draws from rap, hip hop, R&B and even early 2000s Arabic pop music as inspiration. Some of his songs also include snippets of audio from interviews with legends such as Edward Said and Nelson Mandela, which adds to both the soundscape of fuzzy nostalgia and to the depth and importance of the messages behind his music. His music, therefore, doesn’t simply sound good but is at the same time important, which in my eyes (and ears) is a pretty sweet combination.

One theme which Abdelhamid explores through his music is the experience of being a third culture kid. In Caged Birds Sing, he longs for the days when all his friends were in the same time zone, of not knowing he was living in a war zone. Here and There offers a meditation on the melancholy feeling of returning to a place you once called home only to feel like a stranger. A collaboration with Egyptian artist Bayou and American band PLAYYARD, it is slow and purposeful, soulful and contemplative.

However, what strikes me the most is the positive take Abdelhamid offers, reclaiming the experience of a third culture kid as being incredibly special, a blessing even. In Here and There, some of my favourite lyrics capture this perfectly:

‘Third culture kid, the world and God gave me options/One way flight I’m taking the nonstop trip/Which city do I wanna go and get lost in?’

He presents the world of the third culture kid as one brimming with opportunity and potential, of endless cities to get lost in. This is also a theme of Haifa in a Tesla, which, as the name suggests, is one of the songs which lie most boldly at the frontier where futuristic meets nostalgic. Taking us with him on a road trip to Haifa with Edward Said riding shotgun and Bella Hadid in the backseat, Abdelhamid produces a lazy, ambling rhythm which gives the impression of actually being in a car on a bumpy sandy road on the way to Haifa. The song gets faster, gaining in energy, with Abdelhamid explaining:

‘I wanna invest in my people/I wanna invest in the land/I wanna go back to Gaza/And I wanna lay in the sand.’

He paints the experience of being a third culture kid as an overwhelmingly positive one, singing in Arabic how he will enter Palestine with his French passport in hand.

As well as exploring his third culture identity, Saint Levant’s songs reframe the narrative of what it means to be Palestinian today, and in doing so challenge pervasive stigmas and stereotypes of Arabs more generally. According to his official YouTube channel’s bio, his stage name Saint Levant ‘symbolises a reclamation of the orientalist fantasies that the Levant has historically been a victim of.’

In Caged Birds Sing, he addresses the stigma around mental health and therapy in Arab society: ‘Arab men don’t really talk ‘bout what they’re going through.’ Ultimately, however, it is a hopeful song, laced with the recurring assertion that All the caged birds sing in the wintertime.

1001 Nights challenges stereotypes of Arabs, opening up with the conversation:

‘What do you think of when you think of an Arab? Somebody with a towel on their head. A camel, and maybe some sand. Wanna throw a pyramid in there?’

Abdelhamid takes these comically exaggerated caricatures and symbols of the Middle East and turns them on their head. In challenging these orientalist fantasies, Abdelhamid includes audio from an interview with the very man who established and developed the concept of Orientalism himself: the one and only Edward Said.

‘Dr Said’, crackles the voice of an interviewer in the middle of the song, ‘in what important ways are Arabs different from the stereotypes we’ve heard about?’ To which Said replies: ‘Arabs are the inheritors of an extraordinary civilization.’

Ultimately what Saint Levant manages to do through his music is combine the spotlighting of issues pertinent to the Middle East with a more light-hearted sense of wonder for the world, for waking up in Paris one day and Beirut the next. He does this through a delightful mixture of sounds which feel simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic. All of this is rooted, of course, in his identity and personal experiences as an Arab and a Palestinian. I think this is why when I first heard his music in the cramped, humid kitchen of my college accommodation the night before my flight home, it stuck with me.