PHOTO BY BRAXTON WIGNALL
Throughout history, art has been utilized to express powerful messages.
Under Nazi occupation in Belgium, surrealist painter René Magritte believed the surrealist genre had failed. He wrote, “The confusion and panic that Surrealism wanted to create in order to bring everything into question were achieved much better by the Nazi idiots than by us.”
This introspection caused Magritte to shift, and his art changed over time. We now regard him as one of the best surrealist artists of his time. Not just because of his iconic works like The Treachery of Images, The Lovers II, and The Son of Man. But also for his staunch antifascist messaging, particularly during the artist’s “Renoir” period, at a time when fascist movements in Europe were at their peak.
His art, like all good art, reflects all aspects of life. Not just the physical and natural elements but the political and philosophical too. Many artists create in a similar vein to Magritte, no matter their genre or the type of art they produce.
Magritte himself once said,
“There is no choice: no art without life.”
In modern times, music has often been the medium in which these powerful messages are conveyed. There are a plethora of anti-war albums and songs protesting everything from the Vietnam War to the War in Iraq and beyond.
There is no shortage of Arab artists, both in the Middle East and in the diaspora, using their art to raise awareness for the situation in Palestine and, more broadly, the situation in the region as a whole.
Artists like Samer Ajaj…
Samer is a Syrian-born, Toronto-based musician and producer who will be putting on a show with other artists on May 9th.
The purpose of the show is to raise money for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF). The show will be held at Drom Taberna, and tickets will go on sale soon.
For information on when and where to purchase tickets, follow Samer on Instagram @soundslikesamer.
I sat down with Samer, and we talked in great detail about everything. From his music and background to the situation in Gaza and the broader region.
Starting Over
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Samer was born in Syria in a refugee camp near Damascus. “I was actually born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria called Mokhayam Al Yarmouk,” he says.
“I think at the age of four, I moved to Lebanon. But then we kept on going back and forth between Lebanon and Syria because my mom was working as a doctor in Lebanon, which is a good position, and my dad was also a doctor but wanted to travel, and he thought that going abroad and getting money and sending it back home is better. So it was a lot of going back and forth between Lebanon and Syria.”
Samer achieved most of his education in Lebanon. “I went to an evangelical missionary school.” He says the school was “a little bit like a residential school, whereas you need to speak English all the time and you write, ‘I will not speak Arabic’ in computer class 100 times if you speak Arabic. So, looking back at it now, you see a lot of red flags.
However, Samer clarifies, “I enjoyed it. It was a lot of good teachers. The spirit of music was there. So the first time I played an actual drum kit was in school.”
In Lebanon, power is carefully divided amongst Christians, Shi’ite Muslims, Sunnis, and other groups. This division has made Syrian refugees like Samer unable to obtain Lebanese citizenship. “On my ID, it says Syrian, and I can never get Lebanese citizenship. There’s this huge imbalance in the amount of Syrian refugees in Lebanon ever since the war started in 2011. So they made it extremely difficult, basically impossible, for Syrians to legally work in Lebanon.”
He recalls attending university in Lebanon for nursing, “the dean came up to me and said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, but all our students, after the third year, we hire them at the hospital. But because you’re Syrian, we’re not going to be able to do that.’ That was kind of my first introduction into my reality as a refugee in Lebanon.”
Describing the division in Lebanon in greater detail, Samer says, “Depending on which religious sect you are, that’s how you vote. And Lebanon is a very diverse country, so there’s a lot of Christians, there’s Muslims, and Druze. For the most part, we have some sort of equilibrium in government where it’s enough representation from each sect. But the majority of the Syrian people and the majority of the Palestinian people that are coming to Lebanon as refugees are Muslim Sunnis. So, by them getting all the papers and becoming citizens that are able to vote, it would create an imbalance and have more Muslim Sunnis in government. So, a lot of the opposition parties didn’t want that. So, they would always veto any type of decision to give citizenship to the Syrians or Palestinians.”
In 2017, Samer received approval to come to Canada on a student refugee program.
“Out of hundreds of applicants, they chose four to go to York University, four to go to Ryerson, and so on.”
“It was tough at first because I was looking around, and it was like feeling like a 25-year-old having to start all over.”
Samer describes the program in further detail, saying, “I didn’t really have an option as to which program I’m put in. I told them I would love to pursue my nursing because I have a full nursing degree. And then, if that’s not possible, I would love to do something in the music field, and it was kind of ignored. They just put me in health and society, and they’re like, ‘we’re just going to cut two years from the program. So you only have two years; you graduate and get a degree from a Canadian university.’ So I figured I might as well do it.”
Discussing how it felt to come to Canada, Samer says, “I’m finally in a country where I’m able to do whatever I want if I just work hard enough. That was a mentality.”
After graduating, Samer found a job working with adults with autism. He also began building a music studio in his home and working with other artists from Toronto.
Syrian Civil War
PHOTO BY AFP
Samer was in Syria when the Civil War broke out in 2011.
“My dad had a clinic in Syria. So the neighbour calls my dad, and he’s like, ‘The Syrian army is looking for doctors, and the resistance is looking for doctors.’ So they’re literally targeting. And they went into the clinic, and they destroyed the clinic. So, the neighbour was like, ‘do not come back go straight to Lebanon.’ Like, okay, we can’t go back to Syria.”
However, it was not Samer’s last time setting foot in the country.
“I think we applied for the student refugee program in 2015,” he says. “So, I was already in Lebanon. I was finishing off my nursing program, and in the application form, we had to provide any documentation from our country. One of the documents that they ask for is — like a soldier’s book. They give you a book where you have to go renew it every now and then to let them know that you’re still an only child. So it’s like a draft book. If you have any brothers now, you’re drafted to the Syrian military, or if your parents are over the age of 50, you’re exempt from the draft.”
In order to update this document, he and his family had to travel back to Syria in 2015.
“On the way to the sort of area where all the government offices are and shit like that, we had to pass 18 military checkpoints, and the driver had a different pack of smokes… he had a different one for each checkpoint. He was like, ‘These guys, these are the serious ones. You give them like a Marlboros. The other ones, you give them the cheap shit.’ It was insane. And that was just getting there. Once we got there, we got all the paperwork in order, and we had to go back. And the night before we went back, a friend of my dad who works in government, he’s like, ‘Your name got flagged when you entered Syria, and the army is in desperate need of doctors.’ So you need to get out tonight because I think by the morning, your name is going to be on the border.’”
Samer and his family left then and there and have not been back since.
Arab Spring
PHOTO BY YASIN AKGUL/AFP
For many in the West, Arab Spring is often seen as a moment in time where regular people all over the Middle East stood up to authoritarian regimes in order to establish democratic societies.
However, for those who lived through it, Arab Spring is now widely viewed as another attempt by the U.S. and its allies to intervene in the affairs of Middle Eastern countries in order to benefit themselves.
Arab Spring led to competitive authoritarian regimes in places like Egypt, brutal insurgencies in Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria, and the return of chattel slavery in Libya.
Samer was always skeptical of Arab Spring. His skepticism stems from when the former U.S. Secretary of State under President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, said, “It is time for a new Middle East,” in 2006.
“You started seeing it gradually happen,” Samer says.
“It was such a strong correlation. She said this is going to happen, and then one by one, all the resistance is suddenly being pushed and money thrown there, and Western influence in our countries has been our detriment ever since I can remember. So we saw it happen. We knew it was going to happen.”
Samer mentions that the influence does not only come from the West, “There are equally shitty forces playing with us from the East, and that is Russia and Iran. They also want control over this region.”
Describing the situation in Lebanon, Samer says, “Western money comes with Western influence… the Lebanese forces really sell the people for the money and give the influence to the Western companies. And then, on the other hand, you have Hezbollah, for example. Hezbollah is very right-wing, ‘We’re here. We’re conservative. We have our values. And one of our values is to fight the zionist agenda.’ So, these two factions are tearing the country apart. Iran keeps backing up Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia keeps backing up the Muslim Sunnis in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia has great relations with the U.S.”
When asked if Middle Eastern countries are worse off since Arab Spring, Samer says, “Definitely worse off, because war is expensive and the destruction is there, and a lot of these countries were already in a bad situation… then all the destruction happens from the war, and you’re going to need to borrow a whole lot of money to pay to rebuild. Money comes with influence.”
ISIS
PHOTO BY REUTERS
It is difficult to discuss the situation in Syria without discussing the rise of ISIS.
Twenty years ago, in February of 2004, U.S. troops arrested a man named Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry and brought him to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq before being transferred to another U.S. prison called Camp Bucca.
Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry is better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the former leader of ISIS who, died detonating a suicide vest during a U.S. Special Operations raid in 2019.
Places like Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca were dubbed “Jihadist Universities” because these prisons served as somewhat of recruiting grounds for hard-line extremists to indoctrinate the less extreme inmates.
Camp Bucca is suspected to be the place where nine of ISIS’ top commanders initially organized.
In March 2009, hundreds of Camp Bucca detainees were freed as the U.S. dismantled the prison.
“You create the boogeyman so you can justify any crime that you do,” Samer says in reference to ISIS.
“ISIS was terrible to the people of the countries they were in more than they were to the outside world… They would stop truckers and ask them to recite verses from the Qur’an. If they can’t recite the verses, they’re just going to kill them on the spot. It was our people that were being fucking terrorized by these guys. And again, our people realize that [ISIS] aren’t our people. These guys are foreign players that are here to create a ruckus and make us look vilified.”
Samer draws a parallel between U.S. foreign policy and Israeli policy. “We’ve seen Israel do the same thing, handle everything politically in the same way that the U.S. did. This is our 9/11, right?”
Israeli Occupation of Palestinians
PHOTO BY HATEM ALI/AP
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which took the lives of approximately 1,200 Israelis.
Since then, Israel has launched a siege and bombardment of the Gaza Strip, killing 28,340 Palestinians.
When sharing his perspective on the events of October 7, Samer says, “When you kill somebody’s whole family and this person is a child, and then this child grows up and wants to fight you with every fiber of his being, how is anybody surprised that this child would do anything to avenge it’s not surprising. It’s understandable how people get to this.”
He quantifies, “Does that mean you can go and kill people left, right, and center? Hell, no. I hate the Islamist ideology being tied to politics. It shouldn’t be this way. Religion and politics should be two different things. And you should vote for somebody based on the merits of their propositions or whatever.”
Samer discusses where he was when he heard the news of October 7 and what his initial reaction was.
“I was at work. I had just gotten to work. And then my coworker is like, ‘the war is blowing up.’ I’m like, what are you talking about? He tells me about it. And then I spent the next, like 2 hours just watching the videos, looking into the thing. I reached out to my friend, to my Jewish friend, because she had just come here from Israel like a week before this happened. And I don’t know. It was horror, man. It was horror.”
“on one end, you’re like, okay, they’re fighting back, but at what expense? But then again, do you not fight back? So you just sit there,” Samer adds.
“How do you do it? How do you revolt without hurting innocent people? And I don’t know, man, even saying that sentence feels weird because it’s never okay to kill innocent people, and it’s really not okay to kill 30,000 of them.”
When asked about the West’s ignorance of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Samer says, “I can’t really judge Western people’s ignorance to the matter because I see how they got to this point, especially being here and seeing the type of news that is kind of pumped out and the wording, and you see the patterns as clear as day.”
Samer provides an example of the type of reporting he is referring to. “This beautiful Palestinian kid just found dead today. The title of the news article was ‘Mysteriously Found Dead’ or something like that. And then you go to a Ukrainian news article, and it’s ‘Babies Killed.’ So again, seeing all this, seeing how people are raised here and the types of things that they’re exposed to, I can’t judge them at this point.”
Samer encourages everyone to do their own research on the topic, saying, “Now is your opportunity to go look really deep into this. And it’s not as complicated as people say it is.”
“The core ideology that the West was built on is an amazing ideology. The fact that everybody has a right, you’re able to vote for representation. Representation isn’t correlated to what religious sect you are. These are amazing core values that the West has. It’s just terrible that on the back end of that, they go, and they violate all these values outside,” Samer adds.
When asked about how he sees the conflict ending, Samer states, “How I would love for it to end is one democratic state, not an ethnostate, a democratic state, where Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights, where they can vote for representation, and they can have proper representation in government. I don’t know how much of a far-fetched dream that is, but that is what I would love to see.”
However, Samer also acknowledges the way in which the situation is currently unfolding.
“How do I see it ending right now? Just following the patterns, I guess. They kept on pushing the Palestinians down and down and down, further and further down. Now they are right at the Rafah border, and they’re bombing the fuck out of the Rafah border now… I pray for something different, but the way it’s going, they’re going to keep doing it until either Egypt opens up their border, and I don’t think that’s going to happen until the number of Palestinians significantly shrinks, so the burden on the government is less. Complete ethnic cleansing. That is pessimistic, realistic sort of.”
Music
PHOTO BY BRAXTON WIGNALL
Sitting in Samer’s living room, it is clear how important music is to him. From the guitars hanging on the walls, to the drumset in front of the sliding glass door, and the soundboard sitting on top of his desk. Music is his passion.
“Music has been a huge part of my life growing up, playing all sorts of instruments or whatever, and it was specifically hip hop that I gravitated towards. My first hip hop record was Tupac. It was Ghetto Gospel,” Samer says.
“So before coming to Canada, I went to school for sound design and music production. That was after the nursing. I did two years at college, and I got my diploma, and I still remember doing my final test. And then the following month, I was supposed to leave.”
Samer talks about what its been like to pursue music in Canada. “I was on government assistance for a year. They would pay me $733. I rented a room in the village here next to York University for $750 a month. So I was already short $20… I’m applying left, right and center, I even applied to be a janitor. I have four fucking degrees. Not even a callback… So for two years, what I did was I had a much humbler set up, much more humble set up than this. I would have people come over to my room, record their music. I would mix master their songs, and that’s how I just made my money.”
Over time Samer saved up money and accumulated more gear.
“The whole point was, I need to tell my story, right? So I released a debut album in 2018. This was a year after I came here. Debut album went, started performing, sort of got a feel for the city and then, yeah, just building the studio, meeting more people… Now I know a whole lot of people in the community. I love the community here. I don’t know what a lot of artists talk shit about, but a lot of them would tell you the Toronto scene is shit and people hate on each other, whatever. That’s definitely not the vibe I got here. When I would invite somebody over to the studio. A lot of times it’s just here on love. Let’s make something, let’s create.”
Samer describes how it felt to perform to a sold-out crowd at the Drake Underground.
“I was the headliner. Sold out at 150. It was insane. It was great… and then October 7 happened. That show was on August 27.”
October 7 brought everything to a halt for Samer.
“How the hell am I going to go and sing and play music and whatever, and there’s a fucking genocide happening? I would see people, again, I don’t want to judge people, but they will post something about Palestine and then post a video of them in the club. I don’t know. It felt weird. I couldn’t do anything. Most of the energy was going towards watching all these horrific videos, sharing as much as I can share, talking about it as much as I can with whoever listens.”
According to Human Rights Watch, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has “been silencing voices in support of Palestine…”
“I’ve had posts that have been taken down, I’ve had warnings that they’re going to demonetize my Instagram, and I’ve been called a terrorist multiple times… It was a low. Even talking about it now, who am I to fucking complain, you know what I mean?”
During this low period, Samer had the idea to put on a show in support of Palestine.
“The idea came up of, let’s put on a show where we just fundraise, and whatever money we make, we just put it towards an organization that’s helping the Palestinian people. A friend of mine, Erin Marie, she’s a great singer, me and her started working on it. I started bringing in more people. I wanted some sort of Palestinian representation, so we brought in a poet. Her name is Rahaf, an amazing poet… She’s going to host, and she’s going to perform as well for us… I have a cousin who’s in the UK, and he does a lot of marketing stuff there. When I told him about my idea, he said, let’s go live, and then people can donate there.”
The show will take place at the Drom Taberna on May 9, 2024, and will be live-streamed as well, with proceeds going to the PCRF.
For information on when and where to purchase tickets, follow Samer on Instagram @soundslikesamer.