Lebanese - Musician | 1976 -
When the public doesn't understand me, it's a battle. So when I choose words, I choose them for their musicality, rhythm, and sense, and I choose the right dialect to express that.
Yasmine Hamdan
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When I started, I didn't know how to sing in Arabic - it's a very complex and sophisticated music full of codes and modes and quarter-tones.
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I always had this crisis: where do I come from? I was never an insider, never an outsider; I was always in the middle. But it means I never have borders in my head.
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With Soapkills, we were lucky. We started at a time of transition where things were not ready, nothing was available.
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Maybe I was blessed that my main drive was purely selfish. I needed to make something, make my life better, wider, have poetry in my life, have something that gives me hope on an everyday basis. That was my main drive all along, really.
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All of the Arabic women I grew up listening to or watching had a very strong character.
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Imagine a singer with the virtuosity of Joan Sutherland or Ella Fitzgerald, the public persona of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the audience of Elvis, and you have Umm Kulthum.
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It's normal; Arab women have always been very active at the forefront of culture - as film producers since the 1920s; as singers, dancers, choreographers, writers for much longer than that.
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Because of the Lebanese civil war, I had a scattered childhood. I had to build my own connections to each country we moved to.
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A lot of Arabic composers such as Mohammed Abdel Wahab mixed sounds and instruments from all over the world. It's important to be able to propose new ways and new sounds without being stigmatised, censored or put aside.
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There should be no borders, race, colours, or ethnical considerations when it comes to music and creativity.
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I'm bored, normally, when I travel.
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