the hum / By Bob Doran

Peace and Love from Comoros

(May 31, 2007)  Unless your knowledge of geography is far greater than mine, it’s likely you have no idea where the Comoros Islands are, and thus would also have no clue what it means when the singer Nawal is described as “the voice of Comoros.”

First the geography: The Union of the Comoros is a collection of islands in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Mozambique, a former French colony that’s a crossroads of cultures.

Nawal

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As Nawal explained when I talked with her last week, “They are little islands. We are mixed with Arabic, Indonesian, Malaysian, African Bantu, French, Portuguese, all together.” She describes her sound as “identity music” drawing on all her roots, adding, “and coming from Comoros my roots are really wide.”

Listening to her album Aman, you hear a strong Arab influence, something easy to understand when you look at Comorian history: Arab traders settled on the islands a thousand years ago. Comoros did not become a French colony until the 19th century.

The islands’ recent history is somewhat troubled. Independence from France in 1975 was followed by one coup d’état after another. Because of the political strife, Nawal’s folks decided to take the family to France when she was just 11, so she has not lived a typical Comorian life. “I am also Parisian,” she says, a fact that offered her opportunities she would have missed if she had stayed on the islands. “You know, I am the first woman [from Comoros] playing an instrument in public,” she points out. “Women played instruments at home, but never in public. The island is Muslim, and even in Bantu [culture] the woman’s place is closely defined. In a family bourgeois, a woman had to live in a kind of closet. She could see out, but nobody can see her. You just wait to be married and nobody can see you before that. It is changed now, but we still have a long way before women of Comoros are free.”

Her sound is truly international with flavors from all over. Her primary instrument is the gambusi, an ancestor of the Arab oud, but also akin to the banjo — she also plays guitar and a hand drum. Her trio includes a standup bass and a woman who plays mbira, the Zimbabwean thumb piano. You can hear that mix of cultures she mentions with the Arabic strains coming through strongest, particularly on “Salama,” the opening track on her new album, Aman. The word salama translates as “peace.”

“The song Salama,' I wrote after the 11 September," she says. "I begin the song with a quote from the Prophet Mohammed, not from the *Koran* but from the *Hadith*. He says,God is beauty and he loves beauty.’ You don’t have the right to use God as a reason to kill people.”

The song itself is a thing of beauty, Nawal’s voice floating over strummed chords and a gentle rhythm. The Arabic lyrics were beyond me, but she shifts into English at the end to sum things up with a sentiment I grasped instantly singing, “What we need is peace and love. What we need is peace and love.”

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