Reportage
Music and resilience: Refugees find happiness in Lebanese camps
Where isolation and violence might drive people to silence, the antidote is to name things aloud and draw up new ways of making meaning together, slipping free of the structures that impose expulsion, apartheid, occupation, genocide.
“Let’s swap armed resistance for musical resistance. That is my choice: I have no wish to fight with a rifle – I want to fight with a guitar in my hands.” Mohammad Al-Yousif is certain his life would have taken a different course had he not crossed paths with Music and Resilience, the international cooperation program created 12 years ago by Henry Brown and Deborah Parker together with the Italian NGO Prima Materia and the Lebanese NGO Beit Atfal Assomoud, which works to break down the ghettoization of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon through schooling, health care and social assistance.
“Music lets us break out of our situation and gives us an alternative to the armed factions that are being radicalized inside the camp,” he continues. Mohammad was born and raised in Ain al-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian camp in Lebanon, just south of Saida.
He is glad to be reunited with people who have shared his nine-year journey – and he knows it is no small thing that so many of them are still alive. “A lot of young men headed south, joined Hamas and are now fighting the Israeli army. Some never came back,” adds a resident of Beddawi camp, where alley walls bear the faces of their martyrs.
It is the first week of May. Outside the camp, just a few blocks away from one of the entrances, around a hundred Palestinian, Kurdish, Syrian and Lebanese girls and boys file into an Assomoud building. The gathering happens three times a year thanks to Music and Resilience; the summer session lasts a full week. The participants learn an instrument, sing, take part in individual and group music therapy and explore the points of contact among communities and cultures. There is room for everyone in the orchestra, even just to play a single note: some are picking up an instrument for the first time, others have a few months of practice, and some – like Mohammad, who is now teaching guitar in Tyre and Saida – have become professionals.
All the floors of the building, painted in the colors of Palestine and Lebanon, soon fill up with the beat of drums, the keening of violins, the airy call of the ney, the classical Middle-Eastern flute. One can hear keyboards, ouds, guitars, daraboukas, qanuns and more.
Where isolation and violence might drive people to silence, the antidote is to name things aloud and draw up new ways of making meaning together, slipping free of the structures that impose expulsion, apartheid, occupation, genocide. That is why it matters so much for these young people to step outside the camp, physically and mentally. “Before, we lived inside and that was it; it’s still like that in many ways, but thanks to the project we also go out, meet new people, see new cities, try to open our minds. A lot has changed,” Mohammad says.
Roughly 489,000 Palestinian refugees inhabit Lebanon’s 12 official camps, according to UNRWA’s March 2023 estimate, while the Lebanese government – citing a 2017 census – puts the figure at 175,000. Registration with UNRWA is voluntary and may undercount the real number of refugees in the country; however, as anthropologist and Prima Materia member Dario Gentili points out, “the Lebanese authorities need to understate the number.” This is ”for political reasons”: Palestinians in Lebanon are allowed to reach the highest levels of education, but registering with a professional order is impossible.
That restriction forces most to practice their profession only in the camps themselves or with accredited Palestinian associations, which are suffering acute financial hardship. Mohammad doesn’t know how he could manage to build a career outside the camp’s walls or secure a degree recognized by the Lebanese government and abroad. Still, “you don’t need any passport to enter this community,” says Marco Lolli – psychologist, music therapist and coordinator of the Italian branch of the project – referring to ensemble or “community” music. “The cliché says you can’t be happy in wartime; I think that’s wrong. You must give yourself permission to feel happiness, and if you can’t manage alone, others should bring that energy. I’m tired of the Western idea that following one’s own passions and dreams is easy, yet real political engagement is hard.”
While in war and captivity music is still being used as a tool of torture, it can also wield a gentler, non-destructive, “wild” power of resistance, Lolli says – with the lesson that nature itself offers, that we are not all-powerful, that we should feel fear. “Fear is a necessary condition: it reminds us of what we are, fragile beings among fragile beings.”
“At a basic level, every one of us has encountered very authoritarian music education,” pianist Francesca Lico, a member of Music and Resilience, tells il manifesto. There is an overbearing idea of music built “on what is innate, on ‘talent’ – useless, harmful notions that a teacher can choose whether to pass on or not.” For that reason, the repertoire the orchestra performs each summer is put together from proposals by Assomoud and the Italian team: Arabic pieces, European folk tunes, contemporary pop, songs in dialect. “If a verse doesn’t speak for us, we delete it or rewrite it; we translate values and cultures to send a message in which everyone feels seen,” explains Chiara Trapanese, music therapist, musician and instructor.
It's not only about playing an instrument. “Music helps us process emotion; we learn more about our identities and our lives,” says Jana Al-Yousif, Mohammad’s sister, now a university student in Milan. Through the project, she found her own voice – the piano. “I think I feel the Palestinian cause more intensely than my brother or others. One evening at my first summer camp, in 2016, we were sitting on some steps talking; the subject of Palestine came up and I told our story, starting with my grandparents’ expulsion in the Nakba. Someone began singing Amara terra mia. I couldn’t understand the words back then, yet all of us started dancing and crying.”
Today she feels an even closer bond with a song the “resistance orchestra” learned last summer, Nino Rota’s Canzone Arrabbiata: “I think of so many people in darkness / of the loneliness of the city / I think of humanity’s illusions / all the words it will repeat.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-permesso-della-felicita-musica-nei-campi-del-libano on 2025-06-08