I Can’t Let It Go; On Mustafa’s “What good is a heart?”
Editor’s note: We usually write only about Pakistani artists, but Shahmir’s piece felt relevant to our audience. I was moved by its authenticity.
Grief has been inescapable. I lost my Khala & my Nani in 2014 & 2016 respectively. I have not been able to get over their deaths since then. I have written and talked about it so much that it feels repetitive to keep on talking about it but the feeling keeps on coming again and again. I can’t help it. So maybe I can still keep writing about it in hopes to just release
I have found Mustafa’s music to be a very devastating and powerful companion to these feelings. Mustafa is a Sudanese-Canadian artist who originally started out as Mustafa the poet (having started writing poetry at a very young age). He was originally part of a collective called “Halal Gang” which included Smoke Dawg, whose unfortunate death in 2018 led to “When Smoke Rises”.
“When Smoke Rises” drew me in, in so many ways: his beautiful lyrics and the subtle mix of hip-hop, folk and soul music. His exploration of the immediacy of grief. The questions, the anger, the sadness, the rage. His new album “Dunya” doubles down on these feelings in a much more expansive way. As Stephen Kearse put it: “If When Smoke Rises was a funeral, Dunya is the strange days and years afterward, when death settles into the fabric of life”. I would urge anyone to listen to the whole album but I specifically want to talk about the song: “What good is a heart?”
10 years is a long time. I feel their memories decaying. I remember their faces, I remember their laughs but I don't remember the tone of my nani’s voice anymore. That broke my heart the first time I realized that. How can I forget her voice? Her tone? I thought I would never forget that. But something Hanif Abdurraqib said brings me comfort: about it being important to even try to grasp for a memory that may no longer exist. I feel that Mustafa brings this sentiment out in an even stronger way:
“Your skin is not the same, so much has changed
Your voice and your teeth and the way that you pray
I still want you
How you come, how you want to”
This feeling has brought about such desperation within me. I am desperate. Desperate to feel their presence in any way possible. And to not lose these memories. I inherited a ritual from a friend of mine; I have started going to the graveyard every Thursday. To be honest, it just calms the desperation. It makes me feel connected to them for those brief moments. Like I have taken this responsibility just so I can convince myself that they are with me
But the truth is, that time is running its course, my memories are decaying and I am desperately holding on. I would go anywhere to ease the desperation. The graveyard, the place where their home was, any place. The circle is vicious. May the circle be unbroken as I go
“All the fears that you held me with
The years that you held me with
And I’m still wearing the clothes that you held me with, spell the end, spell the end”
A.P.I.D.T.A