It would be difficult to sum up Aysha Musa Ahmad Idris, known as Aysha al-Falatiyyah, because her memory is revived in the minds of the Sudanese whenever their circumstances change, for better or for worse. Today, at a time when Sudan is being torn apart by violent fighting, Al-Falatiyyah’ssongs take on new meanings, ones that may not have crossed our minds if we had not been hurtling into the abyss. For example, Al-Falatiyyah’s ‘simsimal-Gadarif‘, now brings back memories of a diminishing way of life.

According to the researcher, Ustaz Muawia Yasin, Aysha Musa was born in Kassala although the precise year is unknown, and died in February 1974 in Omdurman. Al-Falatiyya was brought up in a household surrounded by religious and scientific knowledge. Her father, Haj Musa Ahmad, was a scholar of the Koran who taught students at the khalwa. Several researchers have mentioned that Aysha would sneak into houses where wedding occasions were being held to eavesdrop on the popular songs at the time which she would promptly learn by heart and later preform in front of her girlfriends. In a touching observation, Ustaza Khalidah al-Jinayd pointed out how Aysha’s little friends were her number one fans (1). This observation makes us think of the things we lose without realising; the foolish, unofficial dates that become invalidated when success, in its capitalist sense, is recorded by history.  

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In 1936 Al-Falatiyyah’s talent encountered that of the great musician Ismail Abd-al-Muin in Cairo when she recorded the first ten records all of which were composed Abd-al-Muin, however, many of her songs were lost save some which were salvaged by the poet Muhammad Awad-al-Karim al-Qurashiincluding ‘khadari al-ma badari’, ‘habaytu ma habani’, and ‘al-zuhurwal wardi’, one of Al-Falatiyyah’s earlier songs, later performed by the musician Uthman al-Shafi. Abd-al-Muin was an important part of AyshaAl-Falatiyyah’s life as he once again collaborated with her in 1941 and together they produced five more songs (2). It appears that Abd-al-Muin, whose work was inspired by his close relationship with his family’s womenfolk and female neighbours, found the perfect partner in Aysha, in his pursuit of creating art grounded in culture. His stepmother’s mother, Sayda Fatima Fur, a midwife at the time of the Sultan Ali Dinar, taught him the song ‘ya umgargiday’ in Maqam Zanjaran, along the tetrachords of Maqam Hijaz, and his ‘kandarumandaru’ was taken from Um al-Fugara Haboba Zaytuna who he spent time with as a child of seven as she sat weaving baskets in Mangala in southern Sudan (3). According to the researcher Awad Babikir, Abd-al-Muin acquired his sayrah [traditional wedding song] rhythm from the sayrah singers Sharifah bit Bilal, Najaf,Qatat al-Khushum and Bit al-Agab. Meanwhile, the tum-tum rhythm he took from Rabha Khojali, who in turn had taken it from the signing of lorry attendants(4).

Aysha al-Falatiyyah adopted the rhythm of the tum-tum in her early songs which is why her earlier production was free and joyous, filled with earthy undertones. Her later pieces, possibly due to market forces, took on a masculine rhetoric that has influenced female poets to this day, singing to rhythms and verse that negotiate modernity from a position of hesitation.Aysha was restless, and together with the poet Mahmud al-Tingari her work ranged from the early eloquence of ‘anni malum sadhu awtaru’ and the aspirations of a growing middle class in ‘alhan al-rabi’ and other neat compositions.  

One of the key moments in Al-Falatiyyah’s life was her involvement in negotiations of Sudanese nationalism and the creation of a unifying sentiment through her songs that entertained the Sudanese public in most parts of Sudan over the airwaves of Omdurman Radio. Embodied in these songs, that entered homes and captured people’s imagination, were features of the mystical part that is necessary in the process of imagining the community as one united entity, a process that is necessarily difficult and violent. Political scientist Benedict Anderson remarked that the imagined community was only created when it was possible for all the people of Europe to read the daily newspaper at the same time thus creating a unifying, spiritual language through this material ritual. Al-Falatiyyah’s share in unearthing this conscience is greater than that contributed by many who described themselves as part of the ‘nationalist movement’. For while the affandiyyah [educated elites] were busy denouncing culture on the pages of magazines, berating their relatives for, what they termed, their retrograde customs and traditions, Al-Falatiyyah took the side of the people and through culture negotiated their injustices through music and a strong will. Muawia Yasin explains that Al-Falatiyyah’s father had, for a long time, been angered by his daughter’s association with the singing milieu. He was in Al-Halawin where, Jadiya Musa, Aysha’s sister, remembers they heard her voice for the first time being played on a record. Her father’s anger completed subsided when he returned to Omdurman and found out how famous his daughter had become and he gave her his blessings (5).

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Aysha became part of nationalist history by going on musical tours supporting the war effort of the Sudan Defence Forces who were obliged, as part of the armies under the British Crown, to fight against the Axis powers on the eastern and western front during World War II. Omitted from the history of the victors of this war was recognition of the sacrifices made by the colonies. Indian, Sudanese, Senegalese, Moroccan, Nigerian, Ghanaian and Caribbean forces fought on the side of France and Britain while the colonies financed the war effort as they were considered part of the economies of the two empires at the time. However, a small portion of this rich history is preserved in the songs of Aysha al-Falatiyyah such as when she sung for the soldiers of the SudanDefence Force in Khashm al-Girba and the border town of Karen, calling for their safe return. Aysha called Hitler and Mussolini, who never seemingly recovered afterwards,  riyalanbarraniyan [foreign Riyal] or useless currency.  

Nevertheless, Sudan’s women’s movement did not do justice to Ayash al-Falatiyyah and did not make her into a feminist icon. Al-Falatiyyah had in fact achieved the movement’s ambitions even before it was created. From the mid-1930s ‘Ashosh’ undertook professional trips and received pay for her work and, as her art matured, she continued to travel freely between the Sudanese towns performing at occasions and travelling to other countries representing Sudan at artistic events. She further took part in establishing the society of Sudanese artists, an organisation defending the interests of artists and negotiating the protection of their wages and their material and moral rights in the same way as a union would. Al-Falatiyyah, who could be clearly heard and seen in the public sphere, was an artistic icon and a dear part of our nationalist memory, how then has she been ignored by this movement?

(1) Interview with Khaldah al-Jinayd, Blue Nile TV (YouTube)

(2) Personal interview with the researcher Ustaz MuawiaYasin

(3) Interview with Ismail Abd-al-Muin, Sudan TV channel

(4) Interview with Ustaz Awad Babikir, Sudan TV (YouTube)

(5) Translation by Muawia Yasin of the section on Aysahal-Falatiyyah in the first edition of the publication ‘A History of Song andMusic in Sudan’

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