Felukah, Arab-Futurist Songstress, Dreams Of Nature’s Feeling

Felukah, as a musician, labors in syntax, philosophy, mathematics, history, sociology, and other bright spots of intellectual genre, brightest of all being her poetry.

She’s made a splash. She’s been covered by the New York TimesNYT
, Complex, Dazed, Esquire Middle East, The National, Time Out, The Drum, Los Angeles Daily News, Ad Age, Wonderland Magazine, Arab News, BrooklynVegan, Egypt Today, Cosmopolitan Middle East, BuzzFeed, CairoScene and endorsed by Equality Now and Coca-Cola.

“I’m going to Egypt for a little bit, which is when the album drops. So, I’m going to have a little album release party, some shows, keep the motherland audience intact,” said Felukah on the phone on an airplane on a tarmac.

“Goodbye,” she said crossing one seat to take her seat. The plane took off, and so did her mind. She fell asleep. In sleep she dreamed, and it may have been the turbulence. But she dreamed with the vivid clarity of fantasy. She dreamed of what she dreamed of in every sense of the words. She was lucid dreaming, awake in her subconscious untied as a cloud, ever-present as the air, singular as your experience.

In her dreaming, the streets of Cairo and Brooklyn were sewn together like the flag a castaway would wave to catch the eyes of a pilot overhead. The best of both and neither were sewn together in green-space and public transit. And the feeling inside was a warmth, nurturing as well. Some of Brooklyn here, a splash of Cairo around. The skyline’s silhouettes smoked against the Great Sphinx and the Chrysler building.

And a woman in green silk and gold tapped Felukah on the shoulders, introducing herself as the leader Galatea. She beckoned Felukah to follow her, making wide sweeping gestures to the hundreds of musicians in the streets dressed in blue veils to perform.

“Where I’m from, Islam was entrenched in music like Zen a long time ago,” said Felukah. “I feel like culture has shifted with the restrictions on womxn and seduction as a concept –seduces you into a different state of mind, they say.”

Crowds were a gift of bounty in a house of hundreds of feasts, and their love was abundant as the sea of yesterday. Poor performers received plump crowds. And they sung songs of universal guilt. Galatea opened her eyes to ask Felukah a question.

“When I was growing up, it was pretty closed up. There weren’t a lot of fresh sounds slash even spaces available for artists to perform, let alone womxn artists, queer artists. Absolutely not happening. Little by little things started opening up. The revolution helped that a lot in 2011,” said Felukah. “I was coming into high school. Fresh thought was everywhere. Everybody was like, I’m gonna’ change the scene. Everybody’s trying to do something different. And now we have huge festivals. Russ was playing at the pyramids. We’ve been busy booking artists, local and international.”

Ruling paradise wants for news of hell. Life is no hell, though it’s as close as it will get, said Galatea without utterance. Galatea dug space for the water of conversation to rush in.

“My favorite color is gold. I don’t even know if you would call it a color. I grew up loving purple ‘cause it’s the color of royalty. But then I guess in my recent understandings of womanhood and growth, I’m like, why am I substituting purple for royalty? Gold is true royalty.”

Galatea made a witty motion. The leader’s gold shimmered like the satin tail of a fish or spirit.

“Every day is a struggle of should I be living in Cairo? Should I be staying in New York? Should I move to the West Coast?” asked Felukah. “Like, what about London? Music is popping everywhere. That’s a worldwide thing. So, it’s nice as much as it is overwhelming sometimes. It’s also so comforting to know you could be anywhere.”

Walking the streets, they passed statues placed in short interval, fountains of clean water that sparkled with minerals beneath the bottom of bronze womxn on horses, sapphire-laden silver womxn in battle, and feathered womxn writing beneath bags of gold on desks of their own. Several used alternative and experimental pronouns on large plaques translated into twelve or so languages – none of which were legible. All of which were casually understood in dreaming. Maple and cinnamon smokes floated through the streets like fireflies.

Galatea didn’t say anything, yet she communicated, “and nowhere” to acknowledge where they weren’t together for that short while. They passed only two people with any sadness about themselves. There was a young man with broken wings singing about sand and foam. His heart was displayed in a glass bottle in his chest for all to see the many shards of his heart’s longing’s song. It was a mechanistic thing, his chest. A clock was set to reset the song, remaster and amplify in May of 1942. There was an old man, too. He was a poet, penniless and kicked from Manhattan, singing “Mannahata, mannahata, mannahata,” several strokes into his life with only one left for himself to endure before the free hands of death set him to euphoria and inscription.

“If I could be anywhere, it’d be Egypt, just because I feel very needed there. That’s my people. That’s my womxn, specifically my girls, to uplift,” said Felukah. “Because we’re talking about culture and not just Egyptian, but Arab culture, Muslim culture in general, which has been patriarchy in the worst ways, which is crazy ‘cause this entire culture began as matriarchy. So, to have that switch and never have experienced the matriarch, I’m like, no, I want to bring it back.”

None of the people they passed were on their phones, though some of them were missing teeth.

“That’s my futurism,” said Felukah, “diving into the past, to ancient times, where we were ruling – advocating for a queer revolution, too. A queer freedom is important, an integral part of freedom for all.”

Felukah said, “we can find peace. The pharaohs had a more open and deeper understanding of gender.”

“Modern day Egyptians do for sure,” said Felukah. “There’s so much that we lost touch of that I want to bring back, liquidity of being.”

“It’s so much easier said than done. It doesn’t faze me. I only accept love. Of course, I want to be on that wavelength,” said Felukah. “But I do see the comments. I do see the messages. If it’s really aggressive and negative for no reason, they just trolling. It’s just pointless to me, and it makes me sad.”

“I started with poetry, so this felt natural. I wanted to prove to my parents and everyone, that I could elevate the game by contributing to it,” said Felukah. “I’m not just going to do this for fun; this is my line of work. This is what I do for a living, and I care about it. It’s my passion. So, all things considered, they finally hopped aboard the Felukah boat, and they are like my number one supporter now.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s really, really special. My mom is a huge inspiration to me. She’s a professor, of a course that she created in the Islamic Arts department. It’s called Beauty & Reason in the Arab/Islamic Civilization. She’s trying to change our understanding of Islam to something beautiful, something which we both believe in – that the whole family believes is the root of Islam.”

Felukah said, “and it’s just been corrupted by the image and by society and by many things. But through her I was, and I am able, still humble every day, to tap into like a higher frequency of, of love and not letting anybody’s perception of me change who I am at the core – just love. We’re all composed of love.”

“The more I lean into that, the more everything feels natural, the best thing anybody can experience – feeling natural in their own body and their own day to day, not questioning things so much about themselves,” said Felukah.

They walked past workshops lively into darkest hours. The smoke and fires of their forges and the sounds of their benches mirrored the sounds and sights of the night sky – smaller and just as delicate, reversed and equalized in essence by proximity. Distance makes things delicate. And delicacy makes bonds stronger.

“My mom writes about giving and living for the sake of giving to yourself, to others, to the community. It’s just this idea that we will be constantly replenished by that love and that energy with the more we give it,” said Felukah.

“This entire metric system we’ve placed ourselves in is really weird – the numbers, the money. I’m just like in my roots and my ethos about this idea of living for a unity of souls of spirit,” said Felukah. “And that’s what I’m trying to tap and sweep – the music and the word. We need Bob Marley’s. We need free spirits, Lauryn Hill’s, Erykah Badu’s, and Raveena’s.”

“I have dreams and plans to go back to Egypt, to the Middle East and put the money into the actual things that the songs are about, which is therapy for the homies,” said Felukah.

Felukah said, “people are very critical; I paid money, dance. They’re very critical of people’s performances. Doja Cat had to come out and apologize. That’s what I’m thinking. I’m like, what world are we living in? Well, what am I doing? I’ve had low notes.”

Galatea lit a cigarette. She didn’t finish before putting it out and into a bin.

Felukah said, “it’s a beautiful time to exist – weirdly enough, for better, for worse. There’s a lot of difficult elements of being consistently more online in this world – forgetting about the real world and coming back to it and being like, da*n, I love this place.”

And with that Felukah returned to her waking reality. She woke up. You can follow her on Instagram here, TikTok here. And you can listen to the growing and already immense catalogue of music by the Felukah, here.