The US troops might have left Iraq but this Iraqi Canadian artist says the pain remains

posted on: Jul 11, 2015

By SHIRIN JAAFARI
PRI

Yassin Alsalman considers the word hip-hop an acronym. For him, it stands for “Highly Intelligent People Hover Over Politics.”

And being a hip-hop artist, he has “hovered over politics.”
Alsalman was born in Dubai to Iraqi parents. He was raised in the United Arab Emirates and in Canada.

“The ability to live in both the East and the West … it allowed me to see the world in a different way and be a lot more accepting of cultural differences,” he says.

As the US invasion of Iraq began, Alsalman watched the news and read about the devastation his country was undergoing. Relatives described life in a war zone.

So not surprisingly, politics started to seep into his music.

“It wasn’t really a choice for me,” he says, “being where I’m from and what I’ve experienced in my life and seeing the injustices that are happening in the world, it just sort of seeps into my work and the narrative of my life.”

He the narrative of his life has always had some tie to war.

“We’ve seen war be projected on our motherland for over three decades now — since I was a baby,” he says. “The feeling never changed, it just became more and more clear to us that these patterns of violence that exist are bigger than just two political figures disagreeing with each other.”

Read more at: http://wvxu.org/post/us-troops-might-have-left-iraq-iraqi-canadian-artist-says-pain-remains#stream/0