This is a conversation with Hamed Sinno, lead singer of the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila.
We spoke about the September 2017 concert in Cairo, Sarah Hegazi, mental health, and growing up queer in Lebanon – and everything in between.
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Music by Tarabeat. The photo is taken from Mashrou’ Leila’s album Ibn El Leil.
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
The band has had to deal with all sorts of hate from its inception, for the most part because of my sexuality and my politics, but also just because of the kind of music that we play. So I really don’t know how to communicate how exhilarating it was to be on that stage in front of that many people and get that kind of love from an audience.
Joey Ayoub: Hey everyone. This is a conversation with Hamed Sinno. He’s the frontman of the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila. We spoke about a number of things: we touched on the August 4 explosion, and he spoke about Sarah Hegazi, who died by suicide on June 14, 2020, while in exile in Canada. Sarah was one of the audience members at the Cairo concert that Mashrou’ Leila held on September 22, 2017.
We spoke about what it was like for the both of us to grow up in Lebanon, only a few years apart—we went to the same university, have some things in common. We also spoke about the pressures that Hamed faces when it comes to being forced into a position of representation and what that does to someone’s mental health. And we spoke about how he feels different when he’s on stage compared to when he’s off stage. So the underlying theme of this conversation is really mental health; therefore I would urge you as always to be mindful of your own mental health as well while listening to this.
Overall it was just a chill conversation and I think you will enjoy it.
Hamed Sinno: My name is Hamed Zein Sinno. I don’t really know how to identify myself. I’m a Lebanese-American dual citizen, currently living in the States. I am a first-year grad student in an experimental music program at Dartmouth. I am currently living in Philadelphia. I had moved to New York to get away from Beirut, but New York is unreasonably expensive, and the Lebanese economic crisis has taken it’s lovely little toll on me, so now I am here where it’s a lot cheaper. That’s my life in a nutshell.
JA: As a Lebanese currently living in the very expensive city of Geneva, I quite sympathize.
Let’s start with the obvious crap that we all have to deal with right now, which is the August 4 explosion. We’re recording this on September 3, so tomorrow will be the lovely one-month commemoration. Can you talk a bit about that day for you? You mentioned in the pre-recording that your mom was there. How have your folks been affected by it?
HS: I don’t really know how to explain this. My family is not just the people I’m related to; I lived in Beirut for thirty-one years, and the friends I made there are very much my family. Luckily, I don’t directly know anyone who lost their life; I know a lot of people who were very severely injured; pretty much everyone I know lost either their home or their business or both. A lot of these people were already in rather precarious living circumstances because of the economic collapse that preceded all of this.
My mother was there. When the explosion happened, the explosion itself was so loud that everyone thought that the explosion was happening in their neighborhood because of how loud it was. So as soon as it happened, my news feed was littered with different reports about there being two explosions; some thought that they were the kind of explosions that were happening in the 2000s again—they made it sound like there were targeted attacks in their neighborhoods.
So I was reading a lot of conflicting reports about where the explosions were; a lot of those reports were saying that they were in my mother’s neighborhood, and I couldn’t get a hold of her for the first fifteen-twenty minutes. I have no way to communicate the amount of anxiety that produced, and the kind of thoughts that were racing through my head. Luckily she’s fine; she wasn’t injured, and she managed to leave the city two days later to be with my sister in Dubai, so I’m very grateful, all things considered.
JA: It was very similar for me. My family is mostly in Hazmieh, Achrafieh. Achrafieh was very badly affected. My mom and grandmother were in the mountains, so they’re okay, although the building moved. My mother’s stained glass workshop was completely destroyed, and a lot of the stuff that people were seeing, like the Sursock museum and some of the churches—that’s her work, the stained glass. For the next two, three days, she kept getting these videos and photos of her work destroyed. That was the moment it really hit me. That and the story of those fire fighters who were basically sent to their deaths. When I saw that photo and stories, that’s when it really hit me. But I talked about this also on a recent episode with Lina Mounzer a few days after the explosion: I don’t think there is a proper way for me to fully realize what happened, because I’m not physically there. It’s really that simple for me.
The more political side of it is that it feels like a point of no return. The anger that I saw in the days following felt different—and I know this is something that we always say; we said the same about October 17 [2019], but it’s true. This just feels like a different level of anger, the hanging nooses in the streets and that kind of thing. I don’t really know what comes next, to be honest. I am trying to rationalize it, and sometimes I put on my political science hat and try and take some distance—that fails in like five seconds.
But the reason I asked you if we can do this in September really is because it will be three years since the Mashrou’ Leila concert in Cairo: September 22, 2017. I’ll start with a basic question just to get the ball rolling. Most people probably already know, but let’s just assume they don’t; I want to be kind to listeners. Can you talk a bit about the concert, the aftermath of the concert, and what the band has been going through ever since? I know that’s not easy.
HS: No, it’s really not. For obvious reasons. It’s been an especially difficult conversation for the last couple months since Sarah died.
We had a concert in Cairo three years ago, and it was the biggest concert we’ve ever played. It was truly magical. There were 35,000 people in the audience. At various points during the concert, we couldn’t even hear ourselves playing on stage because of the audience singing along to everything. It was incredible. I honestly don’t know how to communicate what it feels like for an independent musician from Beirut—the band has had to deal with all sorts of hate from its inception, for the most part because of my sexuality and my politics, but also just because of the kind of music that we play. So I really don’t know how to communicate how exhilarating it was to be on that stage in front of that many people and get that kind of love from an audience.
A couple of people in the audience, whether because they felt emboldened by the band’s rhetoric, or because they were trying to show support for the band’s rhetoric, or for whatever reason, pulled out rainbow flags. Obviously, this wasn’t the first time something like that happened. It’s also a non-issue. But I realized how, symbolically, that was a game-changing moment for a lot of members of the LGBTQI+ community in Egypt. But really, someone pulled out a piece of fabric. Which is not a thing.
The week that followed is where the story happens. Pictures started circulating on social media of the rainbow flag being raised, and that was weaponized by Egyptian media and the state to evoke this moral panic that we’ve seen time and time again as a political tactic across the Middle East. This concert with 35,000 people was turned into a satanic orgy of 35,000 people, and people started posting these weird videos where they would describe what was allegedly happening there, the orgies that were happening, how they saw demons—things that are completely absurd, things that didn’t happen. But the internet is not really a place for truth.
JA: I love how you have to say that this didn’t happen.
HS: You’d think I wouldn’t! But in the years that followed, I’ve had to, time and time again. Obviously, the band got banned from Egypt. We were dragged and destroyed by the press for things that weren’t really true. But that’s an insignificant thing to bring up, because over 275 people were arrested in the month that followed, 75 of them in the first week. People were arrested off of dating apps; they were entrapped by undercover police officers who would go on these gay dating apps and set up fake dates with people to arrest them. Other people were tracked down through social media.
Of the people arrested, a lot of them did manage to get asylum afterwards and leave the country—which is not really a silver lining; we’re talking about people who had to be completely uprooted and have had to renegotiate their lives as immigrants, which is not easy. For simply having attended a concert.
One of those people was Sarah Hegazi. She was imprisoned for three months, during which she was repeatedly tortured. She was electrocuted, she was made to go hungry. She was sexually assaulted by police officers. She was sexually assaulted by other inmates at the police officers’ beckoning. She got the harshest punishment from that concert because of a lot of things: one was that she raised the rainbow flag, but she was also a feminist, she was a communist, she was an anti-racist, and she was involved in various kinds of political organizing. All of these things really scare governments like the Egyptian government, so they punished her disproportionately, and she died by suicide a few months ago while living in Canada.
JA: June 14, for those who don’t know.
When that happened—I had heard of Sarah before, largely because of the aftermath of the concert, and the [2018] article she wrote (in Arabic; Mada Masr just published the translation)—the way I reacted was like most people we know, I suppose. There was the additional personal link, which is you guys, basically, Mashrou’ Leila. For me, Mashrou’ Leila is like my neighborhood band. I know it’s kind of funny to say it this way, but you formed in 2008 at AUB; I started two years later also at AUB. And this is ridiculous, but when I would go to Mashrou’ Leila concerts in London, I would go with some Lebanese friends and some non-Lebanese friends, and we would always be arrogant about it, like, Yeah, those are our guys, from our neighborhood.
I think you’ve talked about this in some other interviews, the pressure of representing. Being openly gay, being from a Muslim background, being Lebanese, Arab, Jordanian, American, all of these boxes to tick. Having the reception that Mashrou’ Leila has—I don’t know how to ask this fucking question—what does that do to a person? How do you deal with the mental health burden? I know you are open about the mental health issues that you’ve been going through, so let’s get into this a bit if that’s okay.
There’s something fascinating about the experience of having left-leaning politics in the Arab world: regardless of what someone’s sexuality is, they get a taste of what it feels like to grow up queer.
HS: Sure. To be honest, I have not been very good about dealing with my mental health for the last year and a half. Since I moved to the States, the economic requirements for having a healthy mental health routine are very different than they would be back home.
But it’s a lot. It’s definitely a lot. I don’t know, I was trying to explain this to a friend the other day, and I couldn’t find an adequate metaphor. But one way of looking at it is that if you have a plant, and you pour poison into the soil, the plant dies. And if you have a plant and you pour vitamins into the soil, the plant thrives. And if you take the same plant and you pour both poison and vitamins into the soil, the plant is still fucked. It doesn’t matter how much good stuff you put in there, once the poison is in there, it really takes its toll.
Life in the public eye, especially as a queer, gender-atypical person—I don’t know what the language is—has been a constant battle. Recognizing the amount of love that the band has, appreciating all of that, appreciating our support network or fanbase (I hate using the word fanbase, because I don’t think that’s our relationship to our audience), really appreciating how they show up for us, the kind of love that they give us—at the same time, the amount of hate is incredible. And there’s no two ways about it, that shit will fuck you up.
It’s insane. How do you even begin to talk about approaching a constant influx of hatred and death threats and satirical comments and being turned into a meme by homophobes thirty times a day? How do you look at these things and begin to think of a way to deal with it “healthily”? It’s insane. Looking at what happened to Sarah, a big part of it, I think, was her having to deal with the constant bullying and harassment that she was subjected to.
There’s this unfair expectation that we should find a way to deal with these things, when we really shouldn’t. We have such a disgusting cultural problem in the Arab world that we’re still okay with this kind of bullying. It’s terrible. It’s one of those things where, as is fairly common, a mental health problem isn’t strictly a personal problem, it’s a structural social problem. I really don’t know how to begin talking about bullying in the Arab world, or online harassment and homophobia and sexism in the Arab world. What has worked in other places has been to educate people on the repercussions of bullying: to show society how bullying can really destroy people, how it can lead to suicide, how it can lead to unspeakable, permanent hardship and trauma and complexes. But what we saw after Sarah Hegazi’s death was that there was no remorse. People celebrated that she died. People celebrated that she died as though it were a victory for them, because in a lot of ways, that’s what they wanted.
So representation is not something that I try to think about too seriously. It’s not something that I want. I don’t want to represent people other than myself. But I am in this position and stuck with it, so the audience is gonna have to deal with me and I’m gonna have to deal with them, and I hope we continue to show up for each other.
JA: I went so far as to delete my Facebook account. I don’t remember how long it’s been—two years ago? Part of why I did was that I’m fairly involved in Syria stuff.
For those who don’t know, there’s this imagery of the green buses: the green bus is what the regime would send, after some negotiation with rebels or whatever, to forcibly displace people, and it became a symbol. And an Assadist photoshopped my face on one of those buses, alongside three other pretty random people who I don’t really know; the only thing we had in common was being vocally anti-Assad. None of the four of us were even Syrians, which adds to the weirdness of it all.
And it had this effect—my mind goes in weird places: I pictured myself in that bus and what that would mean. It came at this moment right after the fall of Aleppo, mid-2017. I was already out of Lebanon—I had moved to London at the time, and then Edinburgh and now Geneva, following an academia route—and I was dealing with the concept of leaving home, and feeling a kind of survivor’s guilt that I have a second passport. I’m an Argentinian citizen, which allows me some mobility that friends who only have a Lebanese passport (let alone Palestinian or Syrian friends) don’t have, and that accentuated my survivor’s guilt. Here I am, I can travel—I do have issues with borders, I have some problems, but for the most part, I’m exempt from it. And this photo placed me in the single worst thing that I could imagine at the time, which is these green buses.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I have myself had that question that I just posed to you, How do you deal with it? And the answer sometimes is I don’t. There are tools and tricks and stuff; I know myself a bit more, and I know how to stop myself in certain situations rather than go into the wormholes of online hate bait. I do a better job at it now; I don’t get into them at all these days. I don’t know if that’s a coping mechanism. What I’m trying to say is, people need to understand that this comes out of exhaustion. It doesn’t come out of—it’s not like I felt that I was some hero in a story. I’m very hard with attention. I’m someone who likes to keep to myself. My audience, if I had the choice, would just be my dogs and that’s about it.
One of the themes on this podcast is that the personal is political—it’s a way of inviting people in to talk about this kind of thing. And I thought of you personally, because in some ways the story of Mashrou’ Leila parallels my own, sometimes, in a weird way. I was seventeen when you guys started; I’m twenty-nine now. The ups and downs, and the way it exploded at some point (in a good way—there’s no metaphor that’s good), the way it came into the scene and became well-known was in some ways a point of pride. Not a patriotic or nationalistic pride, just a recognition that my world was actually represented through these songs. And that other people in the Arab world, especially young people, were actually resonating with it never stopped being weird (again, in a good way).
HS: I get that. That feeling has always been there for me as well: not understanding how we managed to have an audience. Maybe this is some sort of internalized Orientalism, but the representation that we have of the Arab world, even and especially from Arab media, makes it so that all of us have a bit of difficulty believing that there are progressives in our societies. We always feel isolated and alienated, because all we see in the media is what our political regimes want us to see, which is conservatives and traditionalists on the news and on talk shows talking as though we all live in a Scheherazade fantasy.
It’s funny: obviously a big part of my job, because of touring in Europe and America, has been to try to respond to how Americans and Europeans represent the Arab world as being regressive and conservative, but that’s also the representation that we get from our own people. Because there’s a political investment in producing that kind of image to then silence all progressive voices. Everything progressive becomes dismissed as “Western,” because We are not like that, this is not our way. Which is bullshit.
In that sense there’s something fascinating about the experience of having left-leaning politics in the Arab world: regardless of what someone’s sexuality is, they get a taste of what it feels like to grow up queer. I’m not saying they’re the same, they’re not at all. But that sense of like, Oh shit, I think I’m alone in these views, and in what I tolerate and expect, and in how I want the world to function—there’s something inherently queer about that sense of loneliness. That so many people who are not queer or trans can experience that in the Arab world is remarkable.
Unfortunately it still doesn’t produce the kind of solidarity with non-heterosexual communities that you would expect to come out of that, but that’s another story.
JA: I definitely relate to this. I’m straight and cis, and I never really understood why I was attracted towards queer writers growing up. By now it’s well known to people who follow me that I have an obsession with James Baldwin. Everything about him makes me happy. Some background here: I took a class on Baldwin in London at a black cultural center; once a week we had to read something or watch something—it was after that documentary I Am Not Your Negro, so there was increased attention toward his world. And even before getting into his books, when I started watching his videos—there are so many of them on YouTube—I was entranced by the way he talks. I don’t know how to describe James Baldwin.
I discovered Baldwin later on, but I still had this sense growing up that I’m different. The difference was accentuated at school, and I was bullied a lot. I can’t roll my R‘s, which is hilarious in Arabic. Anything will make you stand out as a kid, and that was something that people would pick up on. I guess it marked me in some ways—I don’t want to do a therapy session here, but it ended up being this thing where by the time I reached university, when Mashrou’ Leila started becoming a thing in the local scene (I’m saying I knew you guys before it was cool), it just clicked.
I actually remember, when I started listening to the music, part of me didn’t believe it, because it doesn’t fit. As you said, we’re actually made to believe that there is only one way of being Arab, of being Lebanese, growing up in that part of the world. There’s only one way of being, or at best there are a few ways of being that are really just one way of being: Christian or Muslim or maybe Druze, that’s as far as it goes. When I started hearing Mashrou’ Leila songs and reading the lyrics, and I started discovering some other indie bands that either came out of Mashrou’ Leila or at the same time as Mashrou’ Leila—there was this aesthetic that I started really being attached to.
But I never stopped (until fairly recently when I matured a bit) feeling like this is an exception. This is the problem, really. As you said, we grew up to feel like we might accept some diversity here and there, but only as exceptions.There’s that band and that singer and that model; they’re just individual acts, and we tolerate them because we’re a liberal society (as we like to tell ourselves in Lebanon), but that’s really the extent of it. At the government level, we tolerate it in order to show this image of Lebanon.
When that stops being useful—last summer is a great example. When the Byblos thing happened, August 9, 2019.
I grew up hearing about the war and being led to believe that “fixing the country” is my responsibility, and could be done.
HS: I had left a couple of months before the concert in Byblos. But to be honest, it had been building for a long time. Before that concert cancellation happened, there was a lot of harassment. I had a couple of incidents where I’d be walking down the street and someone would spit on me because they recognized who I was, or I’d get cursed at by a total stranger at the bar (back when I was still drinking). It was starting to be a lot.
And then when Egypt happened—it’s one thing to live in a place and have experiences in a place, but there’s also the part that exists entirely in your head. There is your lived experience in Beirut, and then there’s the part of your lived experience that has to do with how you imagine yourself and how you imagine the rest of the city. Something about what happened in Egypt made me want to leave the entirety of the Arab world for a little bit. I felt like I just needed to be in a place where I wasn’t going to have to fight the same fight every day. It’s not that it’s boring, it’s that it’s exhausting to have to keep talking about LGBT rights every single day, for the most frivolous of reasons.
It was starting to be too much, and I just wanted to leave and try to take some distance to get better. To be honest, my mental state by the end of my time in Beirut—I don’t even know how to begin to explain to you what that was like. There are things about it that are probably hard to believe for anyone who hears this. For two or three years, I literally did nothing. I would wake up and stay in my pajamas all day. On a good day, I would exercise; that would be my accomplishment, and that was it. I wasn’t writing. It wasn’t standard anxiety; I am someone who has lived with generalized anxiety disorder my entire life, but this was a whole other ballgame. It was constant fear of impending doom and being completely immobile. I was at home doing nothing, for years, unless I was on stage. That was the only time I felt okay. It was my only happy place.
I didn’t want to live like that anymore, so I moved to New York. And within months of me leaving, that stuff happened in Beirut. That cemented it. There’s this conceit that we are raised with about Lebanon, that most of us don’t believe, and we will state that it’s not true: this Lebanese myth that Lebanon is more open than the rest of the region, and that we are better-off and luckier, that our political system is not as tyrannical as our neighboring countries’. There’s all this bullshit that we believe, and even if you unpack that intellectually and recognize that it’s false, a part of it stays there in your head for the mere fact that you grew up with it. The first thing you learned about Lebanon is the bullshit about the Paris of the Middle East and East-meets-West, whatever the fuck that means. This myth of Lebanese-ness not being like other Arab-ness.
And [Byblos] did away with the remaining parts of that mythology that I didn’t even know I still had. Apparently I did, and they were destroyed in the month that whole debacle took place in.
JA: I know exactly what you mean.
I’ll ask about the stage being your happy place in a sec. But just to add on what you just said, I initially left Lebanon in September 2015 to do my studies. That was in the middle of the #YouStink movement, and I was one of the organizers (if only low-level), so I felt very guilty leaving. I had told myself when I left that it’s just a one-year masters in London at SOAS; I’ll finish what I have to do and then I go back. That was genuinely the plan. But halfway through, experiencing London—this might sound ridiculous to some people, but what was really different for me about London compared to Beirut wasn’t even the London-ness of it, not even the diversity. That was amazing, that was cool, and that definitely brought some joy in my life. But for me, what was really different about London is just the fact that there were benches that you can sit somewhere.
For those who don’t know, the UK has this weird thing about cemeteries: they can be quite nice, and there are benches, and people sometimes picnic there. And there was this small cemetery next to the dorms I was staying in next to King’s Cross, and I would just stay there and do nothing for hours. It’s almost like I was compensating for twenty-four years of not having that. As a fellow AUBite (or whatever the fuck we’re called), when we think of a bench we think of the AUB “bench,” and that’s the extent of it.
Now we’re obviously five years in since I initially left and what I’ve realized recently is that I’ve been leaving for five years. It’s not that I necessarily tell myself that I will never go back. I just know that I had to take a step back because I had reached my limit. It was really that simple.
I had told myself the story of how useful I can be: I can do some media journalism! and I can report on the ground and talk about underlying issues in society that other people may not want to. There was this purpose. Until I realized at some point that I can still do this from abroad. The thing that I was not getting, the thing that I was sacrificing, essentially, was the thing that I actually needed, which was just—the bench.
It’s so stupid!
HS: It’s really not stupid at all, Joey. The similarities that you and I have with each other have a lot to do with—I hate saying this—a generational cultural shift. I’m not someone who inherently believes in these things as cross-generational, but there’s something to be said about people who grew up in Lebanon and didn’t have to live any part of the actual civil war. I grew up hearing about the war and being led to believe that “fixing the country” is my responsibility and could be done. There’s something about being in these spaces where there’s a bare minimum of institutional support for your life that is necessary when you’re dedicating your life to fighting these things. If you spend your life writing about society and politics, and government failure and social failure, at some point it becomes exhausting that you don’t see anything actually changing.
There’s so much value in being in a place with something as basic as park benches, or just a public park or any kind of public space, just being able to access these things for the mere fact that you are a human being and that’s what humans need (and you also happen to pay taxes to this institution that’s supposed to be producing these spaces and this infrastructure for you to survive).
The absurdity for me, for example, with New York (this is hilarious), is that a lot of New Yorkers constantly complain about the New York subway. And it is trash. It is filthy, it is a privatized institution like everything in the US because of this country’s bullshit economy. It is ill tended-to. But as a Lebanese person, part of what you pay taxes for is money that goes to a fictitious “railway company” for a train system that hasn’t been in operation for decades. They still get so much money! I don’t remember the exact number of employees they have, but a bunch of people get monthly salaries for a company that doesn’t actually exist. That’s something! I count my blessings every time I’m on the New York subway, and all I can smell is urine on this filthy train that hasn’t been cleaned in god knows how long. It’s just like, Okay, cool, we didn’t have that back home, so this is a fucking blessing.
JA: Londoners complain about the Tube a lot as well. It’s a nightmare. But for the most part I never cared if it was seven minutes or fifteen minutes late. I was like, Well, you guys have a metro! I don’t care. Its very existence, to me, is something that’s good. It became a joke between friends—I did make quite a lot of Lebanese friends in London, and we would take the Tube and we would have non-Lebanese friends with us going to university, and it was always this thing. They would always be surprised, until they just got to know us and why this mattered.
But just to go back, you mentioned the stage being a happy place. Can you talk a bit about this? I have zero experience with the stage; the most I’ve done is panels for an audience of students, maybe a hundred people at most, and I would very rarely be the only person talking. So I’ll just ask it this way: What’s that like? Are you just different onstage compared to offstage?
HS: In my offstage life, I am not very confident. I’m extremely insecure to a fault; it’s something that I was trying to work through in therapy, and then I stopped. I’m a mess. I grew up feeling very inadequate and being told that I was inadequate at every corner. I also grew up with severe ADHD that was not understood by my educational system, so I was made to feel even more inadequate.
But when I’m on stage, it works on multiple levels. The first is that no one is in the audience to see me. They’re there to see some idea of what a “rock star” is like, and it’s a fantasy. I get to pretend to be someone that honestly, in a lot of ways, I wish I could be. I wish I could be that kind of person! I would never be able to sing at a dinner party. I would never be able to sing at a park. I would never be able to sing in these places where I’m supposed to just be my social self. I would be mortified. Honestly, I’d probably start crying out of fear. It’s happened before, I’m not going to lie. But when you’re on stage, that’s not social, and I’m not being myself. I’m being the singer from this band who is putting on this performance. I’m performing being a rock star.
You get the relief of doing everything that a therapist tells you you shouldn’t do. I get to spend two hours not being myself! I don’t know if you’ve ever had this feeling, but when my depression is at its worst, all I want is to be able to pause my self and to just not be for a bit. I just want everything to pause. I want life to stop; I want my self to stop; I just need a break. And being on stage gives me that for two hours, it’s incredible.
The other way that it works is that I suck at a lot of things. I really do, I’m terrible at a lot of things. I can’t do science, I can’t deal with abstract math. There’s so much that I can’t do, but I know how to do stage. And on some level (I think everyone has this), you get pleasure from knowing that you’re doing something right. It’s strictly an ego pleasure. But for people who struggle with self-esteem, being able to engage with something that you know you’re good at is incredible.
And you get to forge these connections with an audience. There’s a few thousand people in front of you, and you somehow need to find a way to create a bond with them within the first ten minutes of a concert. They need to understand a bunch of things about you, and a bunch of things about what it means for them to be in that space, and you try to win them over. And once you win them over, that’s it. The rest of the concert is just love in both directions. You fall more in love with the audience as the concert progresses, and the audience falls more in love with you as the concert progresses, and it’s magic. Honestly, I don’t know how to explain it, it’s absolute magic.
It’s a break from the social contract, it’s a break from your own subjectivity, it’s a break from your sense of inadequacy, it’s a break from your paranoia. Because your paranoia becomes completely justified! All that fear that you have walking down the street about, Oh shit, are these people looking at me? and you’re punishing yourself for thinking that people are looking at you when it’s clearly just your own paranoia: when you’re on stage, it’s true! A few thousand people are staring at you. So as horrific as that is, as mortifying as that is, there’s a pleasure in knowing that it’s real. Everything you’re paranoid about is actually happening! And for some reason that makes me feel safe.
I’ve been sober for a few years now, and honestly it is a constant battle trying to learn how to be present when shit goes down, how to actually confront problems.
JA: I actually get that. Maybe it’s not the same, but I muted myself while you were talking because I was laughing at remembering this thing. I was on a panel a couple of years ago to talk about masculinity in the Arab world, a very light-hearted topic. It was in London, and there was an audience of maybe eighty people, not that big. Some of them knew me from Hummus For Thought or my online presence, and others didn’t, it didn’t really matter. And I was fine; I’m usually fine in these situations because I know what to expect. I knew what the rules of the game were. When I know them in advance, I’m more comfortable with it.
After that, the same evening, I was invited to the other panelist’s house along with some other people, and essentially was asked to redo the panel, or just talk about it again—and I just froze. I don’t know what to do. I had to stand, and I don’t like standing; I’m a bit tall, and I’m self-conscious about it in a small space. And my mind goes into sensory overload and I don’t know what to do. I forget which language I’m supposed to speak even though it’s London and everyone is speaking English.
There’s COVID-19 going on, but when was the last concert? And do you have any idea when the next one will be?
HS: I have no idea when the next concert will be. The last concert, if I’m not mistaken, must have been around Christmas time. December, I’m gonna say. We have not played since. I don’t think concerts will resume any time soon. And I’m starting school in a couple of weeks, so touring is going to be a little difficult for me. I think the whole band at this point just really needs to chill for a bit. It’s been so rough, Joey. It’s been so fucking hard for the band for the last four years. It’s just been one fucking crisis after the other. I think the only healthy thing for us to do right now would be to go on hiatus for a bit, but we’ll see.
JA: Where are the other three members?
HS: [Violinist] Haig [Papazian] is in New York as well.
Actually speaking of Haig, I should say, we were supposed to have a concert in Zurich a week ago, and the concert organizers did this thing: since everything is canceled because of COVID, people are organizing listening parties, where instead of us doing a performance, we curate a setlist of our songs and recordings of other live performances, and we put them together with a lot of talking in between the songs, about our life, where we’re at, what we’re doing, what the band’s history is, what the crisis in Lebanon has been like, what the songs are about.
So they play these things in public spaces where (let’s say) three hundred people can get together and be socially distanced and listen to the same thing together at the same time, which is kind of an interesting approach to music after COVID. I don’t know if that recording is going be available online at any point, but I really hope so, because Haig was talking about the stage as a happy place, and he said the most incredible stuff. I’m not gonna paraphrase it, but it was incredible.
That’s a bit off topic. But [keyboardist and guitarist] Firas [Abou Fakher] and [drummer] Carl [Gerges] are still in Beirut.
JA: Is there anything you feel we could have talked about that I haven’t approached, or something you just wanted to get off your mind? We talked a bit about how growing up in Lebanon there was this sense of unease, to put it very mildly. What helped me, what I escaped to, was a few books and some movies that I would obsessively rewatch growing up: basically Lord of the Rings. The fantasy/sci-fi world helped a lot for me personally. I still do a bit of that, but when I discovered the Baldwin world, let’s say, that helped a lot as well. For you, was it books? Was it music? Was it both? Let’s talk a bit about that to wrap up.
HS: It was both and other things, if I’m being honest. I am a compulsive escapist, so growing up it was books and music. I think I’m still like that. I can be a little unhealthy about it; I will go on a TV bender for a week and not do anything but watch TV and eat cereal, honestly. The shitty part about being a musician is you’re self-employed and you’re on your own time, so you can make time disappear sometimes. And I do that.
I’m still very much into fantasy film. I will watch anything with any kind of superhero or anything with witches. When I was seventeen, I came across Rabih Alameddine and escaped into his world. Even though he was writing very realistically about my real world, what his books offered me was the ability to escape into the presence of his voice—I don’t know how else explain it. But there were no queer role models around me at the time, and even though he was writing about the world that I was trying to escape, he was writing as someone who felt like they resemble me. That kind of escapism was just incredible, and I devoured (and continue to devour) anything he produces.
JA: I get that. As I mentioned, Lord of the Rings was my big thing. I did get into the Harry Potter books when I was younger, we all did. At some point, I had a David Attenborough phase, and would watch a lot of wildlife documentaries. Also, like you said, it never really went away. I wouldn’t say that I found a system that’s necessarily better. Sometimes I have a system that functions for some time, and then it stops and I find another one. In between two systems is when the chaos happens in my mind.
HS: Right. That’s the thing with escapism: sometimes it’s the only way to process things, but sometimes it can also be very unhealthy, the immediate reflex to escape an uncomfortable situation. Obviously, there are situations that you can’t resolve, at which point escapism can offer temporary relief while you figure out what your next steps are. But for me, especially when the band started to get famous, the stress was so much that I wanted to excessively escape every second of my life, so I started drinking and partying a lot, and that became a problem.
I think honestly there was a direct line for me between Harry Potter and a drinking problem. Seriously! I’ve been sober for a few years now, and honestly it is a constant battle trying to learn how to be present when shit goes down, how to actually confront problems. I still have a tendency, whenever my boyfriend and I fight, for example, to shut down. I just need to be quiet and not talk to anyone for twenty-four hours before I can deal with a problem. It’s not healthy.
JA: There are certain things I tried that I know don’t work anymore. I mentioned I left Lebanon in 2015, but I would still go back a lot. In October [2019], I was there; I came to Geneva in January. Those four months—for me, being in Lebanon can be so overwhelming that I would just smoke a lot. And I’m not a smoker, I actually hate it! And I hate it even more when people around me are smoking. But it became this thing, it became my escape, essentially because that’s what many people do. I don’t do that when I’m here, for example, in Switzerland. And I don’t do that when I’m with friends, or if I’m doing something, if I’m immersed in the moment.
And I think I won’t anymore. It’s one of those things that doesn’t really stick anymore. When I would go into these moments where I would be smoking hash, I would feel guilty about it. And that would kind of defeat the purpose: you’re supposed to be escaping and you’re feeling guilty while escaping. It was this vicious circle until I got to the point where I just told myself (literally talking to myself): Listen, it’s fine, you’re clearly doing this because you don’t feel good. And I’m not a proponent of drugs by the way, but at that time, it was something that I felt was helping me. But I had gotten to a point where I knew that this will be temporary. And I told myself, Listen, this is temporary. It’s fine for now. Allow yourself to not be perfect all the time. Because that obviously was part of the guilt.
It got to an equilibrium where I just accepted it, and through that acceptance of my flaws, I actually smoked less. I just got to the point where I was progressively phasing it out, really, until I replaced it with other things that are healthier, like just watching sci-fi. Star Trek is something I’m into; it works for me.
HS: That is fascinating. The point of escapism on some level is that it offers you a way to deal with a problem without actually dealing with a problem. It’s not always like, Oh cool, I’m gonna do this thing that makes me happy. Sometimes you do something that makes you feel like shit, but you’re dealing with what you’re actually feeling, just doing it by proxy. So you feel guilty about smoking, but it’s easier to deal with that guilt then to deal with your other feelings, and if you just accept your sense of inadequacy about something, or cut yourself some slack, like, Okay cool, this isn’t gonna be perfect, then you’re kind of dealing with whatever else is giving you anxiety, you know what I mean?
JA: Absolutely. I went through ups and downs. For me, 2015—for Americans, 2016 would be the Trump stuff, and Brexit stuff for the Brits. I was in London when Brexit happened.
HS: I was in London when Trump won. I was staying with a friend of mine who is originally American; I was staying with him and his partners. It was surreal, because when we went to bed, it was still early, they were still counting, and we were under the impression that Clinton was gonna win. I would have been unhappy either way with that election, so I was complaining about Hillary, and then we woke up to Trump winning, and it was surreal. I was walking through east London, not believing what the fuck just happened. It was terrible.
JA: I stayed up because I’m an idiot, and our flatmate, this nice Hungarian guy, went down to smoke, and I went down with him (without smoking). I was on my phone and they announced it—it was like four a.m. in the UK. And we just looked at each other and just said, Fuck. It’s the only thing we said.
That’s veering a bit off-topic, but that’s what this podcast is.
HS: Well, thank you so much for having me, it’s been lovely.
JA: My pleasure. We’ll just end on the fun note of Trump and Brexit. That’s always a good note to end on.
HS: It’s so real that that is a light note at this point.
JA: Yeah. Thank you for your time. Good luck on what’s next. Stay in touch, and take care.
HS: Cool, thanks. You too, man.
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