Abdalla 1

Sarah Abdalla

Professor Cerri-Morgan

Narrative Essay- Race and Ethnicity

English Composition 1302

23 February 2018/ Week 6

The Address of Harmony

The melodies playing through the desolate street, I walk alongside the wind, my

seemingly only friend nowadays. The diaspora is politically the answer to our problems,

but is it the most humane? My parents and my relatives are looking high and low for a

place to call our own, but I feel it in my bones my sense of belonging when I am with

them, listening to the harmonies of Jerusalem. When we were being displaced after the

war started, my mother and father would wreck their brains to find an explanation for

this behavior. One minute you’re here in the comfort of your family and friends, and the

next you are in a different city with no person to share this experience with. How can

you explain to your parents that home isn’t a place, but a sound?

The music is part of my identity, it is fundamentally apart of how I identify

myself. There are multiple aspects that comprise my sense of self, such as my interests,

my hobbies, my friends, and my culture. The melodies of my people resonate deep

within my bones, the timbre ringing throughout these empty streets of broken dreams.

The political turmoil; that has consumed my relatives have taken a toll on their health.

Day and night, they toss and turning to grasp the end result of this madness. I feel

empathetic, but sometimes I don’t understand why they can’t find solace in the family
 Abdalla 2

they have in front of themselves. Music can be used as a symbolic identifier of a social

group, both by the group's members but also by the surroundings (its non-members).

Music not only functions to express and maintain pre-existing identities, it also provides

resources for contesting and negotiating identities and constructing new ones (Role of

Music, 3).

The thing about music is that it’s not just a one and done, after those 3 minutes of

music is over, it’s not over. The ideas that it expresses stay in the air, lingering over your

doubts and clouding any worries you had in yourself or your life. It can facilitate the

reproduction and transformation of established social identities (Role of Music, 1).

Music has the ability to negotiate its identity, but it may also be a resource for

controlling space and pushing groups into the periphery (Role of Music, 2). We as a

population have been conditioned to fit our ideas, our identities, ourselves into these

cramped coffins of despondency. This activity is not unidirectional, from musician to

listener. Instead, it is a dynamic process involving context and culture, thereby creating,

maintaining, and changing meanings (Roles of Music, 2).

Who I am isn’t dictated by the physical limitations of my family, the address to

my home, or even the struggles I have burdened. Who I am is a choice that I make every

moment of every day, and if I choose to lead myself into a whirlwind of music and joy,

then that is just how the music goes.

 Abdalla 3

Works Cited

Lidskog, Rolf. “The role of music in ethnic identity formation in diaspora: a research

review.” International Social Science Journal, Wiley Online Library , 7 Apr. 2017,

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/issj.12091/full.