The Harmony of Both Worlds
Music carries stories and those stories often reveal quite a bit about the world’s in which it was created. These stories come through in language and lyrics and in musical phrasing. For many immigrants, music connects them with their ancestral homes. But, what should music of diaspora communities sound like? The music of their traditional family homeland or like the music of the new land that surrounds them?
KCRW producer Arshia Fatima Haq explores this question through a reflection on Nermin Niazi and Feisel Musleh’s 1980’s album Disco Se Aagay. Haq explains that when siblings Nermin Niazi and Feisel Musleh’s, teenagers of Pakistani parents who grew up in Birmingham, England “got their chance to make music, the siblings did something entirely new. They made an album that fused the Pakistani diaspora they belonged to with the British New Wave they loved so much. It was the perfect harmony of both their worlds.”
Listen to Haq’s radio story below.
This podcast can be used as a resource to teach the Moving Stories section of our learning arc and the teaching ideas below can be used to promote several of the key dispositions we highlight in our framework including: perspective-taking and empathy and communication across differences.
Teaching Ideas:
- What stories do migrants bring when them when their families leave their homelands?
- What new stories do they pick up as they and their families acculturate to life in their new land?
- What can we learn from the many visible and invisible stories of migration around us?
- You might ask students to reflect on these guiding questions in pairs or in a journal as a warm up.
- After listening to the podcast and watching the video, incorporating the see-feel-think-wonder Project Zero thinking routine to capture a range of student responses.
- Below are a few comments from Arshia Fatima Haq about relationship between Nermin and Feisel’s music and the theme of acculturation. You might prepare to share them to explore the ways that immigrants and their children learn to adjust to life in a new land.
- “They made an album that fused the Pakistani diaspora they belonged to with the British New Wave they loved so much. It was the perfect harmony of both their worlds.” Do you agree with Haq? In what ways did the album fuse Pakistani and British identities?
- “Nermin had to contend with the opinions of both her peers and the press, her white English audience and her Asian listeners. It was a conflict many people face in diaspora – too western for the east and too eastern for the west.” As you listen to Nermin and Feisel’s story, what do you think it unique about it? In what ways do their stories connect to your families experiences? How does it connect to the stories of other immigrant families?
- Haq writes that the album is “a testament to something lost, something found, and something beyond.” What do you think she means? To what extent is what she says representative of the experience of newcomers trying to make their way in a new community?
- You might conclude the lesson by reflecting on the significance of the story. One way to do that is by using the Three Whys thinking routine.
- What stories do migrants bring when them when their families leave their homelands?
- What new stories do they pick up as they and their families acculturate to life in their new land?
- What can we learn from the many visible and invisible stories of migration around us?