Interview with Faia Younan

You grew up in Aleppo. Tell me about your city…

I was born in a village called Al-Malikiyah, near the North-East border of Syria, but we moved to Damascus and then Aleppo when I was about 4 years old. So I consider myself a daughter of Aleppo. It gave me so much. It’s a very cultured city, there is interest in music, in art, in sports… and of course food with such a rich diversity. By the way, it is said that the chefs and cooks in the Turkish Sultans castles were all from Aleppo, because of their creativity and ancient food heritage.

In terms of music, during history, Aleppo and Egypt were the two cultural hubs where music used to be produced. When someone wanted to sing in Aleppo, there was a jury to decide that. So from generation to generation music education was refined and it is part of everyday life in Aleppo. I guess that I absorbed as a sponge this kind of good music, meaning tarab (a form of entrancing arab singing) and artists such as Sabah Fakhry, Adîb al-Dayikh, Sabry Mudallal, Shadi Jamil…

I grew up in a house where everybody sings, even though none of them is a professional singer. Dad always sings the songs from Wadih el Safi with a good voice. He made us listen to old songs. My mother used to sing to us before sleeping, and I still think she has the most beautiful voice, it’s emotional.

When we were kids, my sister Rihan and I used to take old tapes and record our own talk shows and programs. We even gave each program a name and a broadcasting time: this was probably the first version of “To Our Countries”! Rihan would present the news and it went something like “Our brothers in Palestine are killed everyday…” and you would hear that she was just a child saddened by the situation (Rihan Younan is now a journalist hosting her own show, “Metro”, on Al-Mayadeen TV). Then she would say:“and now an artistic break”, so I would come in and sing “Tik tik tik yammi Sleiman…” (a popular Fairuz song with a children’s choir) with my little bird voice. These tapes are still in Aleppo. We cannot go to our homes and bring them back.

You know what I also used to do in Aleppo? I would open the interphone and sing, so that the passers-by in the street would hear my voice. It was my first Youtube channel! One day, one of our neighbors was entering the building and I had already been singing for ten minutes, so he hears me and says in the interphone: “what a beautiful voice”! I closed the interphone in a hurry and got scared that he would know who I was.

So I suppose it wasn’t difficult for you to begin singing in public?

Yes and no… in some ways I was a shy kid. But I was very outgoing when singing.

At the scouts, they used to do mini talent competitions which I loved. When I was nine years old, I participated in a national competition in English language and won the first prize. So the following year, I was very confident when I participated in a singing competition.

I was good in school, so my teachers would tell me to participate in this or that subject: they didn’t expect that I wanted to compete in the singing category! I won over 10 schools but did not make it to the national level. This shows that the general standards for 5th graders (10-11 years old) were so high because all participants knew how to sing well: they could sing on key with a strong voice, they were all well trained, many of them doing Quran readings.

I was 10. My first rejection in life (laughs).

The “To our countries” video was such an incredible success. Tell me the story behind it…

It was during the summer of 2014. The atmosphere was loaded and hopeless. At that time Israel was bombing Gaza, in Lebanon ISIS had kidnapped Lebanese soldiers, in Syria the war was continuing in different cities, and in Iraq the citizens of Mosul were leaving their homes. So these four countries were all over the news.

It was suffocating to see the countries we care about the most, ravaged, and we were so far in Sweden and we couldn’t do anything. I was demotivated to go to work. I would write diaries instead of working because I felt so mad, I felt that silence itself was a part of these crimes.

One night I was sitting with my family in the living room watching the news, and all channels were reporting the same things the exact same way. We turned off the TV, there was a moment of silence, then Rihan, my sister, said: “you know I’m going to do my own version of the news…”, and she started: “And in Iraq, it has been the same for 10 years… and in Syria for 3 years…” Instinctively I sang Baghdad (a famous song by Fairuz from the late 1970s), she kept talking and I kept singing, we were overlapping, she talked about Lebanon, I sung Li Beirut (“For Beirut”, another iconic song by Fairuz). It felt good, we felt we had a voice.

The next day, I thought that we needed to share it with others; I told Rihan “we have to do this”. She wasn’t convinced, worrying about how we could execute it.

But at work at Sony music I couldn’t get it out of my mind, so I called a friend, George Hanyrabedian, and asked him if we can borrow his studio at 6pm. I called Rihan, told her she had two hours to write a text. She sent it to me via Facebook (I still have the first draft). She wrote four parts about the four countries, and the hardest was about Syria.

I called my friend Nadine Jazzar; she came to see me at night, at 11pm, asking about this idea. Next day, she got her camera. We were looking for a place to film and remembered that my father — who is an engineer — was constructing a villa. We asked him if we could film there. He accepted because it wasn’t yet painted. The walls were still raw; it suited us. And there were no windows or doors, so the wind was blowing in our hair as if we had put a fan. Everything worked out. I told my friend Rana Torany, who plays on the piano, which parts to take from each song, and which ones work well together in terms of tone. We went to the studio and recorded with the help of Fouad Yaghmour.

Then we travelled for the holidays to the United States and forgot a little about the recording. But Rihan told me we still need to edit it, saying she doesn’t feel like posting it. My mother encouraged us, asking everyday when we were going to post it. So finally we edited it with the help of Samer Wastin and posted it in October.

And we both went back to work. In the evening it was an explosion. The first day, 30.000 views. The third day, 250.000 views... TV stations in Sweden and the Arab world wanted to interview us. It was trending on BBC radio social media… It all happened so quickly, we weren’t ready, we were surprised, not understanding what was happening. Imagine you do something and then you get thousands of views and comments and messages from people you don’t know.