When Palestinian music artists create music, there is always an added layer of responsibility.
Not only is their music an art form to be listened to and enjoyed by the masses, or a means of storytelling and an act of resilience, but it is also an act of cultural preservation.
For Karam Khalaf, aka Kokym, who has lived his entire life in occupied Palestine, his music is not just music; it is an act of language preservation.
Kokym’s friends believe he is the only Palestinian Fallahi pop singer in the world.
“Am I the only one? I hope not!” he laughs, speaking to The New Arab from Berlin, where he has been living for the past two months.
Not to be confused with folk music, Fallahi is simply the dialect that he and the residents of Jat, his hometown which borders Jenin, have spoken for generations, descending from the farmers who spoke in this particular Palestinian dialect.
Coming from a family of “amazing singers,” it was no surprise to anyone when Kokym began to take his music seriously.
He began singing at the age of 10, taught himself how to play the keyboard at 13, and in 2015, Kokym moved to Istanbul to study Arabic music at the Arab Music Institute, where he learned to play the baglama, ukulele, guitar, and piano.
While he has always written songs, it was only quite recently that Kokym discovered his singing voice.
“I scored my first song in the Fallahi dialect in March 2017,” he shares. “Everybody around me liked it and said, ‘This is the real you. This is how you speak to us. And this is authentic.’”
“I would say my voice is ranked lower than the others in my family!” he jokes. “I didn’t know I had a good voice until my father told me.”
Shifting sounds after 7 October
What’s unique about the 30-year-old Palestinian singer-songwriter’s musical style is its combination of poppy, quirky tunes with upbeat lyrics about love, life, and everything in between, paired with innovative music videos — such as his portrayal of a thobe and shemagh-wearing astronaut in the video for 3 Shoroot — while his sampling of Palestinian melodies creates a sound that resonates with both Gen Z-ers and older generations alike
More importantly, Kokym says that although his songs are fun and meant to spark joy, they come from a place of personal experience, living and loving as a young man in occupied Palestine.
“Everything I write is from the perspective of someone like me, who was born, raised, and lived almost their whole life in that area and who is living under occupation,” he explains. “Sometimes I sing about love, about travelling, about loss, and mental health. But they are all connected by the one thing, which is the Palestinian struggle.”
There is a noticeable shift between the bubbly, funny, and eccentric tracks made before 7 October 2023 and the music Kokym has created over the past year and a half.
The upbeat ukulele and synthesiser-heavy music gives way to emotional ballads accompanied by Kokym’s soulful playing of the piano, such as Hizam Nar and Nam Ya Hob (Gaza Lullaby).
Two days before 7 October, Kokym says he was performing in Jerusalem, and it was almost as if he had a premonition. Things felt off.
He adds that things had been bad in Palestine for a long time; it was just that the media did not care to report on it back then. Then 7 October happened, and he says he felt his whole world crashing down around him.
“For the first month, things were blurry. All I know was that I wasn’t sleeping and I was reconsidering everything I know about myself, the world, music, and what I’m doing,” he shares. “I was making an album at that point and I just threw it all [away] because it didn’t feel relevant to who I was. I felt a shift in my growth. I felt like something happened inside my brain and my soul. I felt older, and all the quirky, bubbly stuff did not make sense to me.”
He continues, “We were all stuck inside. It reminded me of the COVID-19 pandemic. I had nothing to do and no tools to do anything about the situation. So, I started randomly making music.
“Two weeks after that, I discovered I had made a mini album with six songs. It was different from what I do normally. It was dark and deep.
“I was just expressing my thoughts and questions at that point because I needed answers. And it was therapeutic, but of course, it didn’t solve anything because what came after that was much worse.”
Humanising Palestinians
At first, Kokym was hesitant about releasing the body of music he had created in the first few months of Gaza’s genocide; he says that for him, it had been his way of documenting what had happened during that period of time.
However, spurred on by his friends, he carefully released Nam Ya Hob (Gaza Lullaby). He had such a massive reception to it from his followers in Palestine and around the world that he decided to turn the six tracks into an album.
“I did a photo shoot with my sister in the backyard. It was simple and low-key, but it was one of my all-time favourite projects because it was so intimate. I recorded the whole album while lying in bed in my room, hearing sounds outside. It was dystopian,” he shares.
While much of his people’s existence has been that of war, struggle, and suffering, Kokym emphasises that he doesn’t want himself, nor other Palestinian music artists, to be defined by that.
On social media, he often speaks about what it is like to be a Palestinian artist, juggling the expectations of those who are only interested in his music when it is about trauma and suffering, and those who criticise him when he sings about joy.
He explains, “I’m trying to get out of the box and show you different aspects of Palestinian art and how it shouldn’t always be misery.
“I’m working on an album right now, and it’s filled with the different sides to us. I think it’s overdone to make sad Palestinian music because music reflects on the people and their feelings.
“When you keep singing about how weak and miserable we are for many decades, eventually we’ll become that.”
One of his songs that fits the bill of exploring the many different sides to being Palestinian is his popular 2021 track Zaffit El Tahrer, which has a remarkable backstory.
Kokym was at the epicentre of the ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah in 2021 when he was having iftar at his friends Mohammed and Muna Al Kurd’s house, and the war broke out right then and there. He released Zaffit El Tahrer soon afterwards, inspired by the plight of the residents of Sheikh Jarrah, and the track blew up on social media.
“The reaction I got guided me into feeling like I need to do this. I need to do this type of thing because people are thirsty for this kind of feeling in Palestinian songs,” he says.
He adds, “What I’m trying to do is humanise us, inspire strength and power to the people through music, and make them feel the way I feel: that we are actually very cool, strong, and trendy.
“I am really into the idea of making Palestinians, both back home and in the diaspora, feel hope.
“So, I like to sing Palestinian songs that feel like a hug and that say, ‘Hold on, it’s coming.’”
Listen to Kokym on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music and all major streaming platforms.
Yousra Samir Imran is a British Egyptian writer and author based in Yorkshire. She is the author of Hijab and Red Lipstick, published by Hashtag Press
Follow her on X: @UNDERYOURABAYA
