When I received an e-mail form the ROH announcing an upcoming Trio Joubran’s concert, I decided to book tickets and asked my best friend and concert companion Dalia if she’d like to attend.
I knew she’d say yes immediately, as we both missed one of their performances almost a decade back when a sudden hail storm hit Muscat for the first time ever. I still remember talking to her on the phone to cancel while watching my brother from the balcony trying to park our cars in precise angles to miss the hail breaking the windshields.
We never had the chance to attend their later performances and I decided that this time we won’t miss it. Well, we almost did as I didn’t pay attention- as many other attendees – that the performance was in the small theatre and not the main one. We had to take the car again and succeeded in finding it – despite the lack of instructions or signs on how to reach the venue- ten minutes exactly before the show started. I wasn’t prepared for the experience I was about to be immersed in and when Mahmoud Darwish’s deep voice came through the speakers reciting one of his famous poems, my eyes welled up. Mahmoud Darwish – Palestine’s national poet and author of many famous poems known through the Arab world- brought a wave of profound nostalgia to times before the current technological invasion –with its continuous whirlwind of chaos and distractions- when simple things mattered; when the mind was clear and receptive to profound verses written by Darwish during his many years of incarceration in Israeli detention camps, especially his famous poem To My Mother that every Arab knows it’s opening stanza by heart: “ I yearn for my mother’s bread, my mother’s coffee”.
However, the English translation of Darwish’s poems that accompanied his timeless voice was disappointing as it was either direct or redundant which killed the meaning and the spirit of the verses (I really felt sorry for the expat attendees who read the lustreless translation off the screen and wished that it was done by a proper Arabic to English poetry translator).
Nevertheless, the music played by the brothers – especially the duels – and the accompanying cello and percussions made the whole experience captivating. Sameer, the elder of the three brothers introduced himself and his two siblings as third generation of oud makers with a mother who sang Muwash’hat – an art of Arabic singing – which made it hard not to become musicians. His constant smile and sense of humour throughout the show broke the barrier that many felt when he asked us to sing along a Levant classic Hal Asmar El-Loan (this tanned skinned).
Dalia – the natural-born singer– sang along comfortably while I choked over the words feeling the stress of public singing. When the song was over, Dalia leaned towards me with a big frown whispering: “why were we singing a prison song?” What followed then was memorable. The stage got dark and the screen at the back displayed a large moon, while lights above moved in slow motion — as if we were traveling through the stars — accompanying the sombre music of The Hanging Moon.
I open my palm to grasp the brilliance of the lights and raise my head to find the trio’s ouds shining like moons. The genius performance ended with another beloved song: Mawtini (my homeland) by Palestinian poet Ibrahim Tuqan and the trio’s heartfelt wishes for all of us to meet in a liberated Palestine someday. Altogether, The Trio Joubran enchanting experience is a reminder of what unites Arab nations: poetry and music.
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