Nemahsis is for the people

Nemah Hasan, known to most of the world as the musician Nemahsis, joins our Zoom meeting from her car, parked outside Mississauga’s Ridgeway Plaza. “My favourite plaza,” she tells me, her face brightening at the mention of it, “have you heard about it? It’s kind of famous,” before launching into an excited description of the sprawling, Muslim-owned plaza full of halal restaurants. There’s a mosque nearby and Friday prayers are letting out soon, and most of that crowd will head straight to Ridgeway Plaza afterwards; it’ll be nearly impossible to find parking in the rush. There are multiple prayer areas in the plaza itself, too – “it’s almost, like, the biggest mosque in the world,” she says, hands clasped earnestly by her face, her eyes animated behind rectangular glasses. “It’s literally my only happy place.”  

Originally published in Dazed MENA issue 00 | Order here

 Nemah grew up in Milton, Ontario, just 20 minutes west of where Ridgeway Plaza sits today, but without the safe haven it offers – the plaza only opened a couple of years ago. The area where she spent her coming of age was nearly entirely white, her own family being the exception. The closest mosque was a 40-minute drive away, which they made every weekend for 11 years so Nemah could attend weekly Islamic school there. Her grandfather first arrived in Milton in the 1940s with a wave of Portuguese migrants on a ship from Germany, where he was thought to be Portuguese as well. We joke about Nemah being “second-generation Milton”, since her father was born there as well, though he was raised in Amman, Jordan. Both her grandfather and her father went back to Palestine when it was time to marry, bringing their new brides back to Milton. “We’re second generation technically, but, like, very Palestinian,” she laughs, raised by a mother who’d spent her whole life before marriage living in Palestine, returning frequently afterwards to visit.

 “The intensity of how active I am online and how passionate I am about human rights and equality shows how Palestinian I am,” Nemah explains. The singer was reportedly dropped by her label last October, given the explanation that she was too polarising a figure in the wake of newly awakened global attention to the Palestinian cause. “I go through and read what people say about me on Reddit – they’re like, ‘what she’s saying is very intense but, like, nothing worth dropping an artist for.’” Her delivery is very intense, but she’s Palestinian, what do you expect? She feels betrayed by the music industry, and throughout our conversation I watch the push and pull between her deep love for music, for performing and the ways in which the industry has made her feel unsafe and unwelcome, despite initially championing her. “I think, before October [2023], I had full support from the industry – investors, labels, getting into rooms and sessions. [It felt like] the industry really believed in me, really thought I was going to be someone influential that was making really great music.” So great was the institutional support at that time for a relatively new artist that Nemah admits “people were a little sceptical because the industry loved me so much. It was very much, like, ‘oh, industry plant’, even though I was independent.” We share a laugh at the idea of a Palestinian, Muslim, hijabi industry plant: “In what world?”

“And then I think after October, it was like, full switch. The industry didn’t want to put money behind me, the industry didn’t love me, the industry would downplay my artistry, and then people were like, oh, she’s a real artist. I would get so many messages from people [about the EP eleven achers] being like, ‘I listened to your music before and I just didn’t get it.’ I hear that a lot from people – not apologising, but saying, like,‘I get it now’, and that feels good. If I’d lost the support of the industry, and I didn’t have the people, what am I writing about? I’d feel like I related to nobody.”

Nemah has a poet’s sense of extended metaphor. A newly attentive audience that previously paid no attention to Palestine is “the football player that bullied you all throughout school and now wants you after your glow-up.” Her first project, eleven achers, is “like a first date, there’s things you want to get off your chest before you pursue this relationship.” She describes that EP as “a disclaimer”, an expression of her “duty and responsibility as an artist to address certain things about myself and about my community before I went on and just created music for the sake of creating it.” Her latest project and first full-length album, Verbathim, released this past September, has a lighter quality to it, a more upbeat sound. “We added drums,” she shares by way of explanation of the vibe shift, but part of it is also this feeling of having fulfilled a responsibility to the larger, loftier, identity-based subject matter in eleven achers. “And I was kind of hoping [that responsibility] was in the past, I didn’t think October [2023] was going to happen, so I started writing music as a free person, sort of. I thought the disclaimer was, ‘hey I’m a hijabi, we’re treated unequally, hey I’m an immigrant’. I thought all of my identities were covered in eleven achers, but after October, I realised it wasn’t, and that’s where the visuals for Stick of Gum came in, where I could be like, okay, let’s spin back, I’m a freedom fighter.” She says this last part simultaneously earnestly and sarcastically, raising a fist and casting her eyes down coyly. “Like, free Palestine, you know what I mean?”

 The video for Stick of Gum, filmed during her time visiting family in Jericho this past spring, is a stunning visual love letter, both expansive and intimate. Think: clothing drying on a laundry line, including a neat row of white tube socks, against a cloudless sky and the spiky silhouettes of palm trees. The video is constantly in motion: children running, people on bicycles and scooters, a passenger-eye view of someone driving a car. The shaky, handheld quality of the camera gives the impression that the person holding it is also in motion, also maybe running or riding a bicycle. The movement, the sky, the subjects smiling and waving at the camera – it’s exuberant, celebratory, free. When asked about her process around visuals – her music videos are consistently striking, always original – Nemah reveals that she’d initially wanted to go to university to study film, but it was too expensive.

I’m also consistently struck by the way she sings and writes the word ‘you’ in the lyrics throughout her work, which feels so intimate, so plaintive, so full of open pleading, that I feel like an intruder or an eavesdropper in witnessing such vulnerability, such hurt and want. So much longing in that direct address that it feels startling to listen in. “Now I’m not going to use the word because you told me,” she jokes, covering her face. Though she describes herself as “chronically online”, she is very intentional about her exposure, sometimes taking down a video for going what she refers to as “too viral”. It’s important to her to maintain that quality of intimacy. “When someone feels like your little secret, there’s more of a fan relationship between you and them. I think when you’re for the masses, people are less likely to like you or like your music. And it’s not about forcing an indie thing, it’s just based on how humans are. And we want exclusivity. I don’t want to be too oversaturated. I don’t want people to know my face too well.”

 A lot of people she’d considered mentor figures and guides within the industry disappeared from her life after last October, but new community has emerged since. “Marwan [the rapper Saint Levant] has been such a great friend and ally through everything, from [last] October until now, he checks in on me all the time, helps me out. Like truly, he has been such a great Palestinian friend and brother. Or Elyanna reaching out and asking if I wanted to open for her on tour – it didn’t align with our schedules, but to see people who are still with labels, that are Palestinian, be like ‘hey, I may not be able to do much, but come open for me’, or ‘there are these investors that were interested in me that would probably be interested in you’. I do feel like I have a little bit of a family now.” 

I ask how she hopes her work and her living will be received by future generations, and she quickly replies, “I hope they think I’m overrated.” Her face is serious, the smile from our mostly jokey conversation now vanished as she furrows her brow and a new seriousness enters her voice. “I hope they look back and are like, what she said wasn’t even that controversial, because I want it to get to a point where we’re so liberated that [what I’m saying] feels so lukewarm. I’m hoping that my tweets, what I say, even shooting Stick of Gum in Falasteen, I hope that they don’t relate to it and they don’t get it because it’ll mean that we’re probably free.” The smile returns to her face. “Yeah, I can’t wait.”

Originally published in Dazed MENA issue 00 | Order Here

Talent stylist LILYANA KHOSHABA, talent stylist assistants JENNAH KHALIL and TOLEEN ABDULHAMID, make-up LISA KOLMAKOVA, producer FATIMA MOURAD for DAZED MENA, production PIQUE, producer IMAD ELSHEIKH, production manager MICHAEL FALCO, production coordinator AWAZI ANGBALAGA, camera assistants MIKAEL COSMO and JO PANASIUK, set decorator QUINN FLECK, art assistant CHANTAL GRACE, extras JELINA and ABRAHAM BAYOUMI, WILLIAMS KALU, SARA ELGAMAL, YOUSIF MUSTAFA, HAJER MUSTAFA, ABDU ALJAHMA, MASHAL, and YASMINE OMAR.