SongWriter Season 6 Continues with Hala Alyan & H. Sinno

SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Joyce Carol Oates, Steve Earle, David Sedaris, Susan Orlean, Craig Finn (The Hold Steady), and Questlove.

Hala Alyan thought her parents changed her name to “Holly” when she was in first grade. The family lived in Oklahoma at the time, and she figured that her parents were afraid the other children couldn’t pronounce her name. Years later Hala wrote an essay about identity and the anglicization of names, and asked her father about the decision.

“He just looked at me and was like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Hala recalls. “‘You asked us to. You said there was a girl in your class named Holly and you didn’t want to be called Hala anymore. You begged us to rename you Holly.’”

Now an author and a clinical psychologist, Hala continues to consider identity, place, and belonging. For a new episode of SongWriter she reads the poem “Dear Gaza.” The piece uses a repeating form, connecting precision-guided moments of humanity to the horror in Gaza. In an interview about the poem, Hala acknowledges that witnessing this suffering can be numbing and overwhelming, but argues that it is also essential.

“Witnessing is the conduit for empathy,” Hala says. And also: “If what you’re witnessing is so massive and destructive in scale, your brain and your body are going to shut down to protect you, because we are not intended to be witnessing things like this.”

Social scientist Dr. Salma Mousa researches empathy, and recently did a large-scale analysis of what journalists called “The Salah Effect.” This study was initiated after there were reports of Liverpool soccer fans chanting enthusiastically about local super star Mo Salah.

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“These fans were at an away game in Portugal or something,” Dr. Mousa recalls, “and they were singing this chant, saying ‘If he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim, too.’”

Dr. Mousa and her colleagues set about analyzing anti-Muslim behavior in Liverpool since the Egyptian forward’s rise to prominence, and comparing it to similar locales. By examining vast tranches of crime statistics and social media mentions, her team was able to demonstrate a statistically significant drop in Anti-Muslim hate speech and violence in Liverpool. Counterintuitively, Dr. Mousa attributes this in part to the fact that Salah generally avoids politics. Though she is quick to point out that political speech, action, and protest are important, Dr. Mousa thinks there is a lot of power simply in Salah’s identity.

“He doesn’t take any polarizing positions,” Dr. Mousa says, “which by definition would divide the fan base, and maybe alienate some fans.”

H.Sinno is the singer of a wildly popular Lebanese band, Mashrou’ Leila, and is an old friend of Hala Alyan’s. The two attended college together in Lebanon, and H.Sinno loves Hala’s work so much that they sometimes feel jealous.
“Truly, Hala could write about things that I would never experience in the same way and it would still resonate with me,” H.Sinno says. “I know work is good when I am so green with envy that I wish I wrote something.”

H. Sinno says that they struggle with their own sense of belonging, having come to New York City after being temporarily banned from Beirut. For them, “Dear Gaza” describes a dislocation that feels intimately familiar.

“Personhood is framed in relation to these geographic anchors but it happens in so many places that it almost obliterates itself,” H.Sinno says. “There are so many tethers here that the center is nowhere, and it truly is devastating.”

H.Sinno’s brand new song is called “Re-Arson,” and is only available on SongWriter.

Season six of SongWriter is made possible by a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation.