by Moe Mustafa
This reflective essay explores the relationship between sound, diaspora, and queer identity through personal memory and listening practices. It introduces Float as a conceptual and embodied condition shaped by displacement and sonic experience.
I woke up one day singing a melody from a song I used to listen to when I was a child. I couldn’t remember the lyrics nor the name of the song. However, all I could recall was the name of the artist, the melody, and the grainy late 80s video clip, where the artist appears with a group of friends sitting in a setting that resembles a bar, holding an acoustic guitar in his hand and singing.
After weeks of searching online, I finally found the song on YouTube. Listening to it again Thirty-three years after its release awakened a sense of missing childhood and absence of family around me in the current host country – Finland. I began to dig deeper into my memory to excavate other songs that reminded me of the parties my family used to host, the time before the Gulf War, despite me being very young back then.
Without realizing it, I noticed whenever I visited home in Amman, I brought cassette tapes back with me to Helsinki. I did not stop at bringing the cassettes that I found at home; I began searching online for a specific cassette or a discography of an artist that I liked and admired when I was young.
For the past six years, I have listened to nothing but 80s Arabic music on tapes, and every time I listen to these songs I float in time, only to realize that these songs don’t bring similar joy anymore, almost as if the memory is there, the music is the same but my experience to it is blurred, altered, and transformed by a period of past and present.
Through these washed memories, my focus shifts to the lyrics where many songs address the theme of migration and diaspora. I looked around me and I understood how far I am from my home country, family, and everything I’m familiar with, or was familiar with. For example, the songs of The Nubian/Egyptian singer Mohammed Munir become the core foundation for my current state of Float. Many of his songs reflect on his own experience of migration to Cairo.
One of his songs that keeps playing back in my memory is ( للغريب قول ), which means Tell the Stranger. The stranger here means the one who emigrated to a new country (the diasporic body). The song has very ritualistic and hypnotic Nubian beats, and the lyrics convey the notion of being welcomed in a place where you are most likely to be oppressed because of your background, which resonates with my state of being in Europe. The following excerpt of the song resonates with me due to the subtext these words carry.
" عالم صغير بضمني يرسم ويمحى اسمنا
نتلقى فيه من غير ميعاد ونصير بعاد من غير بلاد"
A rough translation.
“A small world holds us; it remembers and wipes our names.
We meet there without a time or an appointment, then we get separated, without a home”
The subtext of these lines is the separation of the body from its root, where an individual reimagines a world that carries that body. This notion resonates with the Arab queer experience, where detachment from both origin and host country becomes a defining condition. On one hand, the Arab diaspora begins by losing the concept of homeland, on the other hand, the Arab queer diaspora begins from the moment of detachment from their home country and their integration in the host country.
The constant displacement shifts one’s identity. It conflicts with what the body knows and challenges it to inhabit a new identity. In my case, I am a war child who immigrated from Kuwait to Amman, from an already immigrated Palestinian parent, and currently living in Helsinki. Throughout these geographical changes, the memory of the sound is altered and modified by the accumulation of body experience; what was once a sound of joy becomes a diasporic sound, a sound of longing for oneself.
I began to ask myself: what sound truly resonates with me? What are the environmental sounds that my queer body has accumulated through migration, through displacement, through time? These sounds are not neutral; they carry social codes, expectations, and violence.
In attempting to understand my Arab queer diasporic identity through sound, I found that listening is never (مجرد) mere listening. It is influenced and shaped by language, by the street, by who is allowed to speak and who is silenced. In Arabic, language itself can become a site of exclusion. Certain words used to describe queerness carry aggression, shame, or ridicule. They mark the queer body as (الخارج) the outsider. Yet, within this hostility, Arab queers continuously invent new vocabularies, subtle shifts in tone, coded expressions, small sonic shelters where another form of belonging can emerge.
The city, too, speaks. Amman is loud in comparison to Helsinki. Not just in volume, but in density. Car horns, overlapping conversations, construction, music leaking from shops; these sounds accumulate into a constant pressure. In this congestion, certain voices disappear. There is no space for softness, for ambiguity, for the fragile frequencies of queer expression. And so, queer bodies begin to carve out their own acoustic territories through intimacy, through withdrawal, through selective listening.
Sound, then, is not only something we hear; it is something that organizes us. Building on Brandon LaBelle’s understanding of how sound shapes the way we inhabit space, how we relate to others, and how we understand ourselves. I approach listening as a way of negotiating displacement. If LaBelle maps the trajectory of sound structure in social space, I am interested in how this structure shifts within unstable geographies, where listening becomes a political act entangled with displacement, fear, and desire.
Listening within instability becomes a survival act, where my body negotiates itself constantly. Between what I hear and how I respond, between what I suppress and what I allow to emerge. Gender, voice, tone; these are not fixed. They are performed, adjusted, recalibrated depending on the sonic conditions around me. In this way, my queer diasporic identity is not only seen, but heard, misheard, and sometimes, deliberately silenced.
Similarly, Barry Truax’s notion of acoustic communication emphasizes how sound carries meaning through context. What is heard is never detached from where it is heard. Extending this, the relationship between soundscape, migration, and queer identity reveals a field of tension shaped by sensory experience. This experience is mediated by emotion, by memory, and the conditions under which listening takes place. In this sense, sound becomes a continuous negotiation between familiarity and estrangement.
Living in a host country, I find myself returning to the environmental sounds of the country of origin; the texture of the street, the rhythm of spoken dialects, the tonalities of everyday interactions, the music that once surrounded me. These sounds become materials through which the body attempts to bridge temporal and spatial distance. In this act of return, listening becomes a method of anchoring, an effort to stabilize a body that is otherwise suspended between multiple contexts.
Within this framework, environmental sound can also operate as a form of transgression. In contexts where queer existence is regulated or silenced, sound becomes a subtle but persistent tool for reasserting presence. It allows for the emergence of alternative narratives that resist dominant structures without necessarily confronting them directly. Yet, this resistance is never fully secure; it remains entangled with systems that continue to marginalize and contain it. It is within this unstable sonic terrain that I begin to understand the condition I describe as Float.
Float is a diasporic and queer condition of suspension, where the body exists between memory and present time, between language and its loss, between home and its absence. It describes a terrain where the dissonance of detachment intertwines with the resonance of reclaiming, and where sound becomes both anchor and drift.
As both process and praxis, Float describes the act of reconstructing diasporic narratives through sound, where queerness and subjectivity are shaped within environment instability.
After 16 years of living in Finland, I noticed that my communication is reduced to two languages: Finnish and English, both of which sound foreign to me. I rarely speak Arabic, my mother tongue. At one point, I struggled to write a full text in Arabic. This is where I felt most alienated from both societies. I felt that I could not connect with either the host country nor the country of origin. I felt as if there’s no solid ground under my feet, and that I’m floating within time.
Through the hypothesis of Float, and the abrupt habit of listening to cassette tapes, I realized that cassette tapes are not only associated with childhood nostalgia and memories but also are rooted in migration and the concept of identity. Cassette tapes become a sonic vessel through which I access an environment I no longer inhabit, an anchor for my floating body, and listening becomes a reminder of time, which my diasporic body is floating through.
References
- LaBelle, Acoustic Territories (2019)
- Truax, Acoustic Communication (1984)