Maryam Mursal — who makes her Chicago debut next week — is a woman who does not scare easily. The greatest female singer Somalia has ever produced, she’s also among the first: a Muslim woman who, as a teenager in the 1960s, defied centuries of tradition by becoming a professional vocalist. She pioneered a style known as Somali jazz — a highly danceable hybrid of Western pop and native music — and, in the mid-’80s, she was performing antigovernment songs such as “Uliimada” (The Professors), a thinly veiled swipe at the country’s dictatorship. Interrogated by the secret police and banned from performing, to support her family she became Somalia’s first female taxi driver.
“I am the words on the mouth of the people,” she says of her insistence on performing “Uliimada.” “I knew I would probably get in trouble for it, but I was not afraid.”
But in 1991, Mursal was forced to flee the country with her five children, ranging in age from 4 to 13. Her country had just freed itself from the autocracy that “Uliimada” had protested, only to collapse into bloody clan warfare.
“The clans were turning rocket launchers into horizontal weapons and shooting anything that moved in the streets,” Mursal says, through her interpreter, Soren Jensen, also her producer and manager. “I remember looking out one morning and seeing cats, dogs and chickens picking at the corpses of my neighbors. I feared for my life and for my children’s lives.”
She began a journey that took her around the Horn of Africa; during the trip, moments of solace broke up long stretches of fear and isolation: She remembers a rare opportunity to sing in the woods around a campfire in Ethiopia; she also describes how she had to flee a refugee camp in Kenya when her young daughters were threatened with rape. All the while, she wrote in her journal, the sole remaining link to her history in Somalia.
“I wrote to remember things, my life, so that I would have something of my past,” she says, her house and all her possessions, including her music, destroyed in the strife back home. “And the songs were growing in me like a child. I could barely sleep at night. When I would awake, I would write the lyrics.”
The singer finally found a measure of security in Denmark, where Jensen saw her perform at a party for Somali expatriates. “I had been in Somalia years before as a photographer and had taped this extraordinary voice being broadcast on short-wave radio — it turned out to be Maryam’s,” Jensen says. The audience’s tearful reaction to her performance compelled him to help Mursal reignite her singing career any way he could.
Jensen sent a tape of two songs he had her record to English rock star Peter Gabriel, whose Real World record label includes a cross-section of international performers. Gabriel signed Mursal to a deal in 1994, and Jensen went to work organizing two distinct records: a traditional recording, “New Dawn,” released last year, and “The Journey,” a newly released disc that frames Mursal’s extraordinary alto voice inside an array of musical textures created by strings, horn samples from old mambo records, wah-wah guitars, accordions and traditional instruments.
It includes a pair of songs for which Mursal wrote the lyrics while she was fleeing Somalia: “Somali Udiida Ceb” (Somalia, Don’t Shame Yourself) and “Qax” (Refugee).
“Somali Udiida Ceb” is based on a traditional song that celebrates the country’s natural beauty. Mursal changed the lyrics into a warning, essentially scolding Somalia for allowing violence to overtake the land.
“Qax” is a diary of Mursal’s odyssey: “I stumble, I stagger, I ramble on/ The day I leave Mogadishu/ The air is full of gunfire/ All over you see dead bodies/ And blood is on the hands/ Some atrocities I must cover/ My eyes not to see/ I stumble, I stagger, I ramble on.”
Though the lyrics are dire, the music is ebullient, the voice rich and robust, tinged by sadness but drenched in unconquerable attitude. It is a worldly voice; Mursal heard vocalists ranging from Etta James and Ray Charles to Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley when she was growing up, in addition to her native music, and their influence remains with her. “I like music with a good beat and a good story,” she says. “I do not divide music into groups or categories, so for me Dolly Parton’s `Jolene’ is as meaningful as Michael Jackson’s `Black and White.’ “
As Mursal crosses America for the first time, the triumph of how far she has come is mitigated by the sadness of knowing what she has left behind. “I would return to Somalia in a minute if I knew I could be safe there,” says Mursal. “I feel safe in Denmark, but life is different in Europe than it is in Africa, and it is difficult for me. In Somalia, if there were a light on in the house at 3 in the morning, a neighbor would show up at the door and come sit and talk with me. In Europe, the light might be on but you are left on your own.”
Mursal will be part of an exceptional bill of artists as part of the Africa Fete 1998 tour Wednesday at the House of Blues. She will be joined by the legendary Salif Keita of Mali, whose Chicago debut performance was one of the central musical events of 1994; Papa Wmeba of Zaire; and Cheikh Lo of Senegal.
