The Music Industry Can’t Silence Nemahsis

In March, Nemah Hasan booked a flight from her home outside Toronto to go see her grandmother in Palestine. Israel was five months into bombing Gaza following Hamas’ October 7 assault, and the unrelenting images of Palestinian death had plunged the singer into despair. “I was like a robot; I was so depressed. I didn’t feel human,” she says. “I felt like a fraud not stepping foot over there.”

She says she had been dropped by her record label in the immediate wake of Hamas’ ambush, and she was contemplating what to do with Verbathim, her nearly-completed debut album as Nemahsis. One option, she thought, was to never release it at all. Yet the 30-year-old musician just kept working, spending her savings on making music videos at a fever pitch—refusing to let the music industry beat her. A few days after those shoots were done, Hasan and her mother and sister were on a plane bound for Jordan, through which they had to travel by foot for two days to reach Jericho, in the West Bank. 

The West Bank is run by the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas. But Israeli military and settlers have been attacking cities there, too, under the rationale of targeting armed militants. In Jericho, amid strife and peril, Hasan felt a healing solidarity. “Even with the dangerous moments that were happening—bombs being sent over, or kids being shot in the street, it was like I was experiencing that with them,” she recalls. “My life was no better than theirs.” When her grandmother was too afraid to go to the market, Hasan picked up the groceries for her. “I was scared,” she says, “but what if those are our last few hours, and we didn’t get to eat the meal we wanted to eat?”

Hasan hadn’t intended to film a video while she was in Jericho—the trip was meant to recalibrate herself, to revel in the love of family—but her manager, Chass Bryan, encouraged her to do it. She was reluctant, and challenged him to find her a director of photography in Palestine within 48 hours. Even though Bryan doesn’t speak Arabic, he rang her back 25 minutes later, with a filmmaker named Aram ready to go.

The concept for the “Stick of Gum” video is to show Hasan’s family and other Palestinians as they live—a counter to the dehumanization of Islamophobia and of genocide. Her grandmother makes a cameo; giggling neighborhood kids run alongside Hasan in the street, a posse of joy. The mere fact of these images—soundtracked by her exultant song about all the times she was told she’d have a hit if someone less Palestinian, less Muslim, less hijabi were delivering it—is enough to make you cry.

“I just want to show you what I saw there is beauty,” Hasan says. “Some people didn’t know about Palestine before last October, and all they’ve ever seen us is under the rubble. They didn’t see that we could just be on scooters, that we could just be enjoying some food with family. I wanted to show that part and humanize them—us—for a couple minutes.”

At the end of the daylong shoot, Aram returned home through the maze of checkpoints that separate towns in the West Bank, accidentally taking the Super 8 footage with him. Hasan, who was going back to Canada the next day, embarked with her mother on a desperate journey to retrieve the film. While they were at Aram’s office, news came that Iran was sending over rockets into Israel, and they had to return to Jericho immediately. 

The border line was long, and the Israelis guarding it were pointing their guns at drivers and passengers. But eventually, they made it back to Jericho, where the family was kept awake by the sound of bombs. Hasan’s mother worried the border to Jordan would be closed, and they’d be stuck—it had happened to her before, for eight months, when she was pregnant with Nemah’s sister. But when they set out the next morning, everything was normal. It was like nothing had happened.