Bordered Bodies and Dismantled Hegemonies: Splintered Identities in Mashrou’ Leila’s “Kalam”

The lights dim. You hear the glassy, high-pitched warble of a violin. Suddenly the booming beat of drums is punching out a rhythm. A man in a sparkling black tank top glides onto the stage, grabs the microphone, and begins singing. His voice is at once soft and sonorous, syrupy and smoky. And as he belts out a pop-infused indie song, he moves his body too, hands and hips rippling through the air until soon everyone is doing the same. This is a Mashrou’ Leila concert.

Mashrou’ Leila, which roughly translates to “Overnight Project,” is a four-member Lebanese indie rock band that began in 2008 in Beirut. Their songs, almost all of which are in Arabic, range from gentle ballads to syncopated anthems, and they are most well-known for their lead singer Hamed Sinno, who is openly gay and unafraid to speak out against political issues within the Middle East and beyond. Many taboo topics can be found throughout their discography; songs such as “Shim el Yasmine” (“Smell the Jasmine”) and “Radio Romance” narrate queer love, “Roman” draws attention to feminist movements within the Middle East, and “Lil Watan” (For the Homeland) urges its listeners to eschew political apathy and criticize their governments.

In this paper, I will specifically be analyzing one of Mashrou’ Leila’s most famous songs, “Kalam (S/he),” which means “talking” or “words.” It was released in 2015 on their fourth studio album “Ibn El Leil,” or “Son of the Night,” and is a soulful and slow composition that explores the way language intersects with gender and nationalism. I contend that both “Kalam” and “The Homeland, Aztlán: El otro México” by queer Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa demonstrate that borders are not just external boundaries but also embodied experiences. And, in doing so, they deconstruct the hegemonic categories of identity to which Antonio Gramsci refers in his early 20th-century text Prison Notebooks.

In “The Homeland, Aztlán: El otro México,” Gloria Anzaldúa discusses the concept of borders not just as geographic demarcations but also as intimately embodied experiences. She calls, for example, the U.S.-Mexico border an “herida abierta [open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Anzaldúa 25). In describing this territorial border, Anzaldúa invokes corporal diction; where the United States meets Mexico is not just a location, but a bleeding open wound. And this is because divisions are not just marked lines in the sand—they are realities that Chicanos live and breathe. She poignantly writes: the border between the two countries “[runs] down the length of my body,/staking fence rods in my flesh,/splits me splits me/me raja me raja [cuts me cuts me]” (Anzaldúa 24). Borders are so intimate, so inextricably tied up in Anzaldua’s identity as a queer Chicana, that it is as if they have been painfully beaten into her own body.

Mestizaje, or the racial intermixing that occurred after Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico, is another example of Chicanos’ embodied liminality. “En 1521,” Anzaldúa writes, “nació una nueva raza, el mestizo, el mexicano [in 1521 a new race, a mixed race, the Mexican, was born]...a race that had never existed before” (Anzaldúa 27). Mexican-Americans, who “are the offspring of those first matings” (Anzaldúa 27), are inherently bordered; they are the physical incarnation of two different racial groups. They exist between the “pure-blooded Indians” (Anzaldúa 27) and their invaders, the conquistadors and missionaries.

Anzaldúa also irregularly oscillates between Spanish and English to further emphasize these grinding, clashing dichotomies. Even by simply writing in both languages, Anzaldúa becomes a personification of borderlines between the (presumably) English-speaking United States and Spanish-speaking Mexico.

In the song “Kalam (S/he),” Mashrou’ Leila similarly explore bordered bodies, but fixate on language as the dividing force. After all, the song is called “Kalam,” which means “words” or “talking.” At Mashrou’ Leila’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert in 2016, lead singer Hamed Sinno admits that “Kalam” is about “trying to pick someone up at a bar” (NPR Music). The entire song narrates a verbal interaction between two individuals who are struggling to overcome the barriers that language places both between each other and within themselves.

In the chorus, Hamed mourns melodically: “They wrote the country’s borders/Upon my body, upon your body/in flesh-ligatured words” (“Kalam”). Language is a fragmenting force; borders have been written onto the bodies of the two people mentioned in the song. These divisions, as in “The Homeland,” are strikingly physical, bound into the flesh, and hinder the two individuals from kindling a connection. Perhaps the speaker is Hamed himself, who is Lebanese, and the listener is American. The West has maintained an unequivocally hostile relationship with the Middle East for centuries, dating back to Orientalism-perpetuated colonization in the 19th century that has given way to violent attacks, brutal occupations, and bloody wars. Simply by speaking Arabic, as Hamed does in this song, the speaker might be invoking these fraught Arab-American relations. And by doing so, he affects how his body moves through space in relation to his lover. Suddenly, with language, these barbed borders become real.

In “Kalam,” language does not just parse nationalisms; it bisects gender, as well. At the Tiny Desk Concert, Hamed further explains that in Arabic, “all the words are necessarily either feminine or masculine.” But “Kalam” is about “being in between” (NPR Music). The title of the song itself has the split word “s/he” in parentheses, a combination of “she” and “he.” Hamed has been is very vocal about being a queer man, and is “one of the only openly gay celebrities in the Arab world” (New York Times). He is known for sporting sleeveless, sequined shirts and not being afraid to twirl and spin in almost ballet-like movements during his concerts. But he, or whoever the speaker is in “Kalam,” cannot express their fluid gender identity in Arabic. In fact, speaking the Arabic language forces him (or her/them) to conform to a stringent binary to which they do not fit. Rather than a racial border that Anzaldua delineates, this “Kalam” explores a gendered one. Language once again cleaves, and towards the end of the song, Hamed repeatedly sings: “Your language separates/Your body separates/Your language conjugates/Your body conjugates” (“Kalam”). The speaker is in a state of unease, unsure of how to reconcile their embodied gender identity with the language they speak.

And just as Anzaldúa reiterates her personified liminality by writing in both Spanish and English, Mashrou’ Leila incorporate different musical styles into their songs. “Kalam,” like many of the other tracks on their album, amalgamates a distinctly American sound with Arabic words. Journalist Jad Salfiti, for example, describes Mashrou’ Leila’s music as being heavily influenced by the “indie guitar music” of American bands such as “the Arctic Monkeys, the Strokes and Radiohead” (Salfiti). And “Kalam” is no exception; slow drum beats and smooth bass riffs play over one another for the song’s four-minute duration. But all of the lyrics are in Arabic and listeners can even hear the rich melismatic style characteristic of Arab singers like Fairuz and Umm Kulthum woven throughout the composition.It is not a coincidence that Mashrou’ Leila choose to focus on language as an action which creates the bordered body. Language is inherently physical; we must make our vocal cords vibrate to speak, we must hold a pencil in our hand and press it to paper to write. And as we use our bodies to communicate, we may also be dismembering them, splintering our very senses of selves as the speaker does in “Kalam.”

By acknowledging the existence of the liminal body, which occupies space between races, genders, and nationalities, “Kalam” and “The Homeland, Aztlán: El otro México” dismantle the hegemonies mentioned in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Both Mashrou’ Leila and Gloria Anzaldúa undertake exactly what the Italian Marxist philosopher exhorts his readers to do: to “work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and...take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one’s personality” (Gramsci 323-324). Hegemonies, Gramsci elucidates, are ideologies, or sets of ideas, beliefs, and values, to which we consent. By refusing to consent to these dominant principles, one can achieve a “higher level of one’s own conception of reality” (Gramsci 333). 

Neither Mashrou’ Leila nor Gloria Anzaldúa passively accept the labels that the “outside” imposes on their bodies. They refuse to acquiesce to the discrete categories that society has mandated for them and instead actively confront these violently instated borders.. “Why all the shame?” the speaker in “Kalam” gingerly asks their lover. “Just feel what you feel” (“Kalam”). Similarly, Anzaldúa tells her readers: “This is my home/this thin edge of/barbwire” (Anzaldua 25). “I am constantly straddling borders, living within two seemingly dichotomous identities. Liminality is my norm,” she seems to say. For Mashrou’ Leila and Anzaldúa, the stiff classifications of Mexican and American, man and woman, Arab and American, are simply not sufficient. And by expressing their intersectionality as embodied experiences, they carve out new spaces for themselves — new spaces for their bordered bodies.