Umm Kulthum - The Mother of All Ecstasy

I

When Umm Kulthum died, it was as though the Mother herself had died, the one and only, the one who never existed: the one who knows every heart, the most important of all.

That day in February 1975, around three million people flooded the streets of Cairo to witness the funeral procession. Waving handkerchiefs, wreaths of flowers, weeping, wailing, a white sky that seemed almost streaked by the tears of the crowd: at a certain point, it was as if none of this was enough to contain people's emotion. The crowd gathered along the route then overflowed like a river that, overcome by longing, forgets itself just to return to the sea.

Like a flood that sweeps everything away and carries it along, millions of people knocked down the barriers and took the coffin from the shoulders of its official bearers, passing it from hand to hand. For three hours the procession, roughly ten kilometers long and by then uncontrollable, moved through the city. The coffin, draped in a crinkled silk cloth of cream and pale green, lay like a lamb stretched out amid a swarming black mass of screaming, frenzied, grieving insects. Everyone wept for the voice that had caressed their heart, everyone wanted to touch that green veil separating them from her, the woman whose singing bestowed rapture. The mother of all ecstasy had died, a humble peasant girl born in a village in the Nile Delta at the turn of the century.

II

In the orally-transmitted song traditions typical of all the cultures that live along the shores of the Mediterranean, one recurring structural feature is a rich ornamental component that also functions as a stylistic marker: sung poetry (qasida), Qur'anic cantillation (tajwid), the Egyptian mawwal. Egyptian musical practice follows the monodic, modal line of Arabic music, allowing for a great variety of vocal timbres and emissions, in which improvisation plays a fundamental role.

In the songs that made up Umm Kulthum's repertoire, the melody itself generally lasted no more than twenty minutes, but unlike other singers she had the ability to develop every phrase, reshaping it again and again: so the song could end up lasting an hour.

The Arabic language is rich in implication: a single word can carry ten meanings, and every inflection corresponds to a particular ethos — every time she repeated a word, she revealed a different sense of it. One evening, during a concert in Morocco, Umm performed forty-seven variations on the same theme: in the Bayyati mode, or without so much as a breath, as in the Hijaz mode. She was sixty-four years old.

To the quality and beauty of her singing, Umm added a masterful technique of "ghina" — a voice that was controlled, resonant, melodious, pleasing, with impeccable diction — and a boundless capacity for improvisation. When Umm Kulthum let herself be overtaken by ecstasy, the musicians called this state "saltana". Her art then carried her into a kind of trance: she became literally intoxicated by music, and the "saltana" fired her creative imagination. This was "tarab", ecstasy, the beauty that unleashes excitement and energy, empathy with others, and union. A motionless trance, in which the music wedded the breath of poetry, enchanting the listener until a lucid rapture carried them far from solid ground.

Arabs call this rapture "tarab". One lives the melody, dreams through the words, and the meanings are amplified. The verb "tariba", from which the term "tarab" derives, means "to be moved by joy or by sorrow", "to feel emotions of pleasure or sadness", "to fall into ecstasy, to be enchanted, stirred, shaken, overwhelmed".

Live, her audiences would fall into sync with her almost instantly, swept along by the modulations that expanded the meaning of the verses she sang. There were spontaneous bursts of applause, shouts, people rising to their feet at the end of each single variation; and she, having just finished a particularly beautiful and daring improvisation, would take a step back and lower her eyes, smiling, embarrassed yet proud of her own rapture. It was impossible to resist her: her hieratic gestures seemed to contain the very ecstasy that possessed her body, turning it into a formidable instrument of emotional connection.

Like the dervishes of Upper Egypt, when the trance of the dhikr is about to begin, the ecstasy of "saltana" would seize her. Then she would surrender herself to the song: like a lover leaping into the void.

III

It almost seems that Umm Kulthum, from childhood, had been faithful only to her Voice, just as one is devoted to the heart of the Beloved. "The only path is a perpetual state of rapture", the Sufi poet Omar Khayyam had written eight centuries earlier.

Umm began performing in the villages of the Delta first by chanting the Qur'an, then by singing religious songs during celebrations and festivals, in a rural style that called for nothing more than two-voice accompaniment: that of her father and her brother. Her young age, and the power and beauty of the enchantment she managed to create — first and foremost on herself — quickly made her the star attraction of the small choir. But in Qur'anic tradition, singing had always been considered an unseemly activity, especially for women: the girl risked becoming a source of dishonor for her father, the sheikh of her native village (1).

As soon as Umm reached puberty, the head of the family made her dress as a boy in order to keep singing in public, thus securing that source of income from the takings of the performances. Her voice, her interpretive gifts — the ecstasy that possessed her — overwhelmed anyone who heard her: musicians from Cairo who came to listen to her invited her to move to the capital. In those years, the city was the cultural and artistic center of much of the Arab world.

In 1923, barely past twenty and after years of struggle, Umm finally managed to persuade her family to move to Cairo. When the singer arrived in the city, her repertoire consisted largely of songs based on a genre that was by then considered rustic and outdated, which kept her from achieving the success she had hoped for right away: other trends dominated the capital in those years. The young woman realized that in order to establish herself she needed a new repertoire, a style of her own. Within just three years of arriving in the capital, the singer was able to replace her father and brother with professional musicians, surround herself with composers and poets who wrote for her, and be welcomed into the salons of the powerful, eventually gaining entry to the courts of Kings Fuad and Farouk. The little peasant girl from the Delta had become Umm Kulthum, the Diva.

"The Voice of Cairo", launched in 1934 by the singer herself, was at the time the only Arabic-language radio station that could be heard from the Gulf to the Ocean: thanks to this, it immediately became an instrument for the cultural unification of the Arab world. From then on, almost without interruption until the early 1970s, Kulthum's concert, broadcast on the radio on the first Thursday of every month, would be an ever more unmissable event for millions of people. On those evenings, everyone would stop to listen to her: in that moment, she, a woman without children, became like the mother — Umm, in Arabic — of everyone.

With Nasser, who after seizing power in 1952 would turn it into the "Voice of the Arabs", the radio and Kulthum's voice became an important tool for promoting the regime of the colonels. A hundred and twenty million people glued to the radio, ready to halt whatever they were doing to savor the enchantment of Umm's voice. And to follow the speeches of the Colonel.

The singer would appear in six films between the Thirties and Forties, recording ever better-selling records and performing concerts across every Arab country. She would use the media with growing awareness, always keeping them away from her private life. Her interviews, even her publicity photos, would all be shaped to recall her origins; she would always take care to present herself with the simplicity of someone who knows where she comes from, and with the pride of someone who became what she is, far from the mud she was born into.

Umm would sing of independence, patriotic anthems and the verses of lovestruck poets; she would chant the Qur'an, bind herself to the royal family and exalt the revolution of the colonels; she would sing of the Aswan Dam, the fedayeen and the Suez Canal. In promoting the idea of pan-Arabism so widespread in the dreams of those years, she became the true ambassador of a nation that did not exist. Her singing worked as an emotional bond between power and the people, the millions of peasants and poor who loved her: her voice became the Homeland of the Arabs. "Tawhid": "To unite" — this had been Nasser's obsession. Umm's singing had achieved it like nothing else. To those who accused her of becoming an instrument of propaganda, she always replied, insisting that she had remained faithful only to her Voice.

Still today the best-selling record from Casablanca to Baghdad, Inta Omri, is hers; still today, at ten o'clock in the evening on the first Thursday of every month, Egyptian radio broadcasts her music; still today her singing resounds across a geographic space stretching from the Gulf to the Ocean. Still today her name sets alight the hearts of those who listen to her.

IV

When Umm Kulthum died, it was as if a Pyramid had died: the fourth one, the one that doesn't exist, the most important of all.

That day in February, over Cairo there hung something like a black sky of birds of prey, pierced by the sirens of police cars. Kings, emirs, colonels, heads of government arrived in their official cars; around them, bodyguards, soldiers, dark glasses concealing icy stares. The ritual began: handshakes, embraces, declarations of friendship, weighed reflections, knives in the back. And all around, the funeral drums of military bands and the armored cars of the regime. Turning the funeral into a state ceremony, power once again took possession of the Diva's body and voice. But the human flood that for three hours tore Umm Kulthum's body away from its official bearers was like a surge that, breaking every bank, swept everything along with it down to the delta and its peasant villages; and after that, the ecstasy of the sea.

(1) In Islamic culture, a well-known hadith (saying of the Prophet) often cited to discredit female singers is sawt al mar'a 'awra, "the voice of a woman is a shameful thing." A stake at which to burn that pairs well with mulier taceat in ecclesia, "let the woman keep silent in church" (Saint Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians, 14, 34), the Christian hadith of the persecutor of Tarsus.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google