Episode: 49 · Guest: Muslim Hdeib · Full Episode #49
Muslim Hdeib, a Palestinian-Jordanian rapper based in Moscow, wrote a track titled "Edward Said" — named after the Palestinian-American literary theorist whose work on orientalism, exile, and the construction of identity remains foundational in postcolonial studies.
The track includes the line: "Don't pretend you belong to the land when all we've seen is concrete." The statement operates on multiple levels. It addresses the diaspora Palestinian experience — the gap between a declared attachment to a homeland and the material reality of lives lived entirely in exile, in cities, in concrete. It also engages with Said's own intellectual project: the examination of how identities are performed, how belonging is constructed, and how the narratives people tell about themselves often obscure rather than reveal the truth of their condition.
Muslim's use of Said as a title and reference point is deliberate. Said was himself a figure of displacement — born in Jerusalem, raised in Cairo, educated and working in New York, writing in English about an Arab world he had left. His identity was not rooted in a single place but distributed across languages, cities, and intellectual traditions. Muslim, a Palestinian-Jordanian rapper working in Russian and Arabic from Moscow, occupies a comparable position: too many coordinates to be reduced to one.
The track does not romanticise Palestine or Palestinian identity. It interrogates the performance of belonging — the social expectation that Palestinians in the diaspora should express an attachment to a land many of them have never visited. Muslim's question is uncomfortable: what does it mean to claim a homeland you know only through inheritance, photographs, and political rhetoric? The answer the track offers is not cynical but honest. The attachment is real. The land is real. But the concrete is also real, and pretending otherwise is its own form of displacement.