Slingshot Hiphop Review by Maureen Clare Murphy, Electronic Intifada
Jackie Salloum's invigorating new documentary Slingshot Hiphop portrays the story of three aspiring Palestinian musicians from the rap group DAM as they develop their talent in their bedrooms and take it to standing-room-only crowds throughout historic Palestine.
Though the DAM crew may hold Israeli passports, their lyrics about discrimination, resisting oppression and pride in a common heritage ring true with young Palestinians everywhere. Indeed, the musicians from Lyd might find a feeling of familiarity in the southern Gaza Strip, where Mohammed al-Farra from the group Palestinian Rapperz (PR) lives. Whether in the Gaza Strip, or in Lyd, Palestinians are subject to Israel's racist policies of house demolitions and arbitrary arrest. "It's like a refugee camp in Israel," DAM member Tamer Nafar says of Lyd, where a lack of community services, unemployment, and poverty bred by systemic state discrimination makes drug use an attractive escape for many young people.
DAM's work inside their own community is especially significant. The group visits a camp for children (called Camp Return, referring to Palestinian Refugees' right of return) in Lyd. After Tamer performs an unaccompanied rap describing his pride in being Palestinian ("Remove the word self-pity from your mind... raise our heads high"), one of the children in the audience asks with genuine surprise, "I'm a Palestinian?"
When the rappers gently ask him what he thought he was, he replies, "Just Arab." - indicating the internalisation of Israel's attempts to strip Palestinians inside Israel [e.g. annexed Palestine] of their national identity.
Salloum's film shows the audience how these artists are using a cultural medium to unite Palestinian youth who have grown up not knowing their peers in other arts of the Palestinian Diaspora, and how their themes of repression and subjugation communicate their common story of injustice. In Gaza, PR's Mohammed al-Farra echoes Tamer Nafar and his comrades when he explains that he and his crew turned to rapping as a form of release and resistance following Israel's brutal repression of the second Palestinian intifada which broke out in 2000. In November of that year, Mohammed narrowly escaped death when he turned his body just in time for an Isreali fired bullet to penetrate his arm instead of his heart. Filled with despair, Mohammed struggled to find rap CDs in Gaza's music stores, and was riveted when a friend brought back an Eminem CD from Canada. But he found his direction when he heard DAM on the internet. Now, he says, his dream is to meet his "brothers in '48". referring to the part of historic Palestine that is now considered to be Israel proper and to which Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are prohibited from freely visiting.
Look and listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIo6lyP9tTE
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