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The Address of Harmony
The Address of Harmony
Sarah Abdalla
Professor Cerri-Morgan
The melodies playing through the desolate street, I walk alongside the wind, my
seemingly only friend nowadays. The diaspora is politically the answer to our problems,
but is it the most humane? My parents and my relatives are looking high and low for a
place to call our own, but I feel it in my bones my sense of belonging when I am with
them, listening to the harmonies of Jerusalem. When we were being displaced after the
war started, my mother and father would wreck their brains to find an explanation for
this behavior. One minute you’re here in the comfort of your family and friends, and the
next you are in a different city with no person to share this experience with. How can
you explain to your parents that home isn’t a place, but a sound?
myself. There are multiple aspects that comprise my sense of self, such as my interests,
within my bones, the timbre ringing throughout these empty streets of broken dreams.
The political turmoil; that has consumed my relatives have taken a toll on their health.
Day and night, they toss and turning to grasp the end result of this madness. I feel
empathetic, but sometimes I don’t understand why they can’t find solace in the family
Abdalla 2
they have in front of themselves. Music can be used as a symbolic identifier of a social
group, both by the group's members but also by the surroundings (its non-members).
Music not only functions to express and maintain pre-existing identities, it also provides
resources for contesting and negotiating identities and constructing new ones (Role of
Music, 3).
The thing about music is that it’s not just a one and done, after those 3 minutes of
music is over, it’s not over. The ideas that it expresses stay in the air, lingering over your
doubts and clouding any worries you had in yourself or your life. It can facilitate the
Music has the ability to negotiate its identity, but it may also be a resource for
controlling space and pushing groups into the periphery (Role of Music, 2). We as a
population have been conditioned to fit our ideas, our identities, ourselves into these
listener. Instead, it is a dynamic process involving context and culture, thereby creating,
my home, or even the struggles I have burdened. Who I am is a choice that I make every
moment of every day, and if I choose to lead myself into a whirlwind of music and joy,
Works Cited
Lidskog, Rolf. “The role of music in ethnic identity formation in diaspora: a research
review.” International Social Science Journal, Wiley Online Library , 7 Apr. 2017,
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/issj.12091/full.