Keeping hope alive: oud composer Rahim AlHaj is writing for a joyous future

by Richard Betts
New Zealand Listener, 8 October 2022

If you ever need to put things into perspective, contemplate that by his early 30s, Rahim AlHaj had twice been imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime, fled his home country, Iraq, in fear for his life, and then fled Jordan, the country he’d escaped to, because Iraq’s secret police were onto him, only to swiftly exit Syria for the same reason. How’s your week going?

Now settled in the US, AlHaj unsurprisingly has complex feelings about the place of his birth. He’s posted some of them into Letters From Iraq, a work for oud – the Middle Eastern lute in which he is an expert – string quintet and percussion, that he performs throughout the country with the New Zealand String Quartet, double bassist Joan Perarnau Garriga, and percussionist Justin DeHart.

The letters are real, eight stories AlHaj has collected and transposed into music about the experiences of everyday people back home. These lamentations are a modern day Tales of the Arabian Nights, each story told to stave off the horror of what might happen tomorrow. But while there’s a lot of violence in the letters – explosions, car bombs, death – you don’t hear that in the music, which is mostly mournful and reflective.

“I wanted to tell the story of the people,” AlHaj explains, on the line from his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “The concentration is not on the violence, it’s the emotion of the people who lived through the event, so the music is always about the story itself, not my virtuosity or how good I am.”

AlHaj is very good indeed. He began playing oud in primary school, fascinated by the sound, and the feeling of the soft wood on an instrument a teacher had brought to class. He’s never lost that sense of enchantment.

“I’m still obsessed. I think if you’re not obsessed about your art, do something else.”

For all the sadness and fear and ache bundled into the music, Letters From Iraq ends on an optimistic note. It’s a vision of the Iraq of the future and it’s joyous. Which better represents AlHaj? The mournfulness of most of the letters, or the hopefulness of the conclusion?

“We have to keep the hope alive,” he says. “Think about your family, your grandkids. You work hard and sacrifice yourself for them. Which kind of world do you want to leave? Hate, discrimination, racism? Or love, peace and compassion? It’s as simple as that.”

Republished with the kind permission of the New Zealand Listener