Al-Haked is a Moroccan rapper, a working class kid from the city of Casablanca. During the early days of the Arab Spring protests in Morocco, Al-Haked, or Muadh Balghawat as his mother calls him, dropped science on the revolution. Only a few days after the February 20 start of the country’s protests, Al-Haked, which means “the spiteful” in Arabic, posted a rap on YouTube which took on the weight of an anthem. Read the rest of this entry »
I first wrote a version of this as a comment on a Facebook page I follow, but I thought it was worth reposting and expanding here on my blog.
Years ago, I hung out at a squat (a “besetztes Haus”) in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of West Berlin, back when Berlin had a West and an East. I met and talked with the ex-cons, Turks, junkies and radical kids who lived there. A guy we had met hitchhiking (who dressed in women’s cloths) took us up to the roof of the apartment house they occupied. If you had slipped off that roof you would have landed in the no-man’s land, the killing zone, with its mines and razor wire and guard towers. The Wall, in other words, was their wall. Read the rest of this entry »
