11th February has never been the same again after the day I spent in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011. You might like to look out the post I wrote for my original blog: http://reemkelani.com/page_media_blog.asp It was the most uplifting day, the day Hosni Mubarak was forced from office by the will of the Egyptian …
For 33 years, I’ve lived in the UK. Having been born here does not make one British – whatever ‘British’ means. I was born in Manchester, yes, but I spent my formative years in Kuwait. Despite personal and collective ‘teething problems’ in the scorching heat of what was then a relatively progressive Arab Muslim country, …
After considerable thought during this COVID era, I’ve decided that I should update my Blog more regularly, to stay in touch with you all. I have my wonderful Syrian niece, Dara Dandashi, on board, and she’s been working very hard at designing the site. The last time I performed live was November 2019. Since then, …
Farewell To A Saudi Animal Rights Activist In late August, Twitter was awash with grief and disbelief at the gut-wrenching news of the passing of a man known only by the pseudonym Barg ou Ra�d (“Lightning & Thunder”). Reem Kelani says farewell to a popular Saudi animal rights activist whose identity was revealed only after …
Bragging where bragging is due. Yes, I knew Jeremy Hardy, as a fellow performer and a fellow activist. I had the privilege of first getting to know him through listening to BBC Radio 4 in the 1990s. His off-key voice singing the wrong lyrics to the right tune, or the right lyrics to the wrong …
2016 saw the release of my second album Reem Kelani: Live at the Tabernacle, almost exactly ten years after the issue of my first Sprinting Gazelle: Palestinian Songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora. Both albums represented the fruit of much hard work over many years, and I am proud of them, as statements of cultural identity …
Reem contributed these opening remarks to a panel discussion My parents fled from Palestine in the early 1950s, soon after the establishment of the state of Israel. I was born in Manchester, where my father studied to become a doctor, and I grew up in Kuwait. It was in Kuwait that I learned to be …
WOW BRADFORD, SAT 5TH NOV 2016: HOW TO TURN LOCAL ACTIVISM INTO GLOBAL SOLIDARITY Read More »
68 years ago today, many from the generation of my parents and grandparents were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland. We refer to this date as the Nakba, the Catastrophe, of our expulsion from our roots and our collective memory. Years later, this classic “The Flower of all Cities” [Jerusalem] was released by Lebanese legend …