In my childhood and teenage years, especially during weekend trips, whenever I arrived with my family at the village from our home in Haret Hreik, I could hear the sound of arrival, more precisely, the sound of arriving at the village house.
To reach the house, my father would take the coastal road, because the highway had not yet been built. He would gradually slow down at the village turnoff, preparing for the steep uphill climb that required not speed, but force from our modest car in order to overcome it. The sound of the car would change as it strained with all its power to make it through the hardest part of the ascent, before changing again once we reached the top. The car would finally relax, and my father would drive slowly because we had arrived in the neighborhood.
A few meters after the end of the climb, my father would stop the car in front of our house, which was also my maternal grandfather’s home, and my mother would say, “Come on kids, get out.”
We would step out of the car, embraced by the sound of stillness, by birdsong and roosters crowing, while the car itself fell silent.
Sometimes now, while driving my own car, the same circumstances and sounds come together, though not necessarily in the same place: the sound of the car shifting speed, the slowing down, the parking after a few slow meters of driving, the sound of the engine turning off, the quiet eagerness to step out into the street, and the birds singing. I turn to my sister sitting beside me and ask, already certain of her answer, “What sound is this?” She replies without hesitation: “The sound of arriving at the village.”
As for the songs of Hany Shaker, they were the sounds of staying in the village.
Even though I was born and raised in Haret Hreik, and spent much of my adolescence there, while my time in the village was limited to weekends, when the weather allowed, and summer vacations, Hany Shaker remains more deeply tied, in my memory, to the village itself.
Adolescence in the village carried countless details, not all of them directly tied to adolescence itself, nor even to the love and longing sung about in Hany Shaker’s songs. Yet those songs held an overwhelming place within all those memories.
Hany Shaker’s songs were the soundtrack to the daily chores our mothers assigned us, before late afternoon arrived and we were finally allowed out to meet the others who had also been “released” from their homes and the suffocating summer heat.
During the daytime, specifically in the hours between breakfast and lunch, came the daily ritual of cleaning the house. Throughout that time, Hany Shaker’s songs would echo from every home, alongside the songs of George Wassouf, Mostafa Amar, Ehab Tawfik, Amr Diab, and many others.
The irony is that although this remains the same part of the day when houses are still cleaned, I have not heard these songs drifting from neighboring homes in years, except on very rare occasions.
Hany Shaker’s songs were companions to cleaning and washing down the house. I do not remember that we, my neighborhood friends and cousins, particularly loved these chores. But I also do not remember us complaining about them.
It was simply something that had to be done, the tasks assigned to us, carried out under our mothers’ supervision and instructions, so that we could move on with the rest of the day. As though we could not get past those hours unless we completed what was expected of us, or as though we would not be allowed lunch if we did not wash the floors.
And perhaps what comforted us was that we were all doing these chores together, at the same time. We would mop the floors with water: dipping the rag into a bucket mixed with cleaning liquid, wrapping it around the mop handle, and dragging it across the room. Then we would pull the water across the tiles with a floor squeegee before wiping the floors again with a dry cloth.
As for washing down the house, that was not a daily ritual, but perhaps every other day. It required large amounts of water that we poured from buckets onto the tiles, or sprayed directly from the hose, before sweeping it away with a broom, while Hany Shaker washed the house alongside us.
When I remember, or listen now to a song like “Meshtryki Ma Tbeish”, I also hear the sound of the broom scrubbing soap and its foam again and again across the tiles, the sound of the floor squeegee pushing water away, and the splashing of water as we sprayed it in every direction, washing our feet while we rinsed the house down.
And I hear the sounds coming from the kitchen, where lunch was usually being prepared, along with the sounds drifting from nearby houses, most likely the sounds of rinsing floors, cooking lunch, and Ashab Meen playing in the background. I hear the voices of vegetable vendors and the women buying from them when they stop in front of our homes. And I hear the call to prayer, the sound that announced noon had arrived.
Hany Shaker’s songs were the sound of those moments when we would sit on the tiles after they had become clean and cool, drinking Pepsi from a tall glass packed with ice as our reward after washing down the house.
Hany Shaker was also the background sound of those afternoon hours spent lying down, when going outside was impossible because of the heat. So we would all retreat to reading Abir Series novels.
There was a box filled with countless editions of the series that we passed among ourselves, inherited from the girls older than us. Novels handed down from one generation to another, from one house to the next, from one girl to another… helping us, together with Hany Shaker’s songs, get through yet another stretch of the day.
When I listen to Hany Shaker’s songs now, I listen to revisit those years. Even while hearing his saddest songs, I find myself smiling. His music opens a door that cannot be unlocked with ordinary keys.
“Ana Mesh Baateb Aleik”, “Maak”, “Ashab Meen”, “Ali El Dahkaya Ali”… these songs, and many others, are not love songs to me, nor are they sad songs. They are the sound of a time-and-place era that cannot be revisited without them.
We did not just memorize the songs, we memorized their order on the cassette tapes, the chronological order of the tape releases, and the way each cassette became tied to the people we loved when it came out. Every cassette reminded us of someone.
After the late afternoon hours faded and the heat of the sun finally softened, we would gather at one another’s houses to choose what we would wear for the evening stroll through the village. That ritual was an activity in itself: “Come over to my house, I need to get dressed.”
That invitation meant the girl hosting would stand in front of the mirror for quite a while, trying on clothes while we helped her choose, deciding together what she should wear and how it matched what the rest of us were wearing, before we went out to hang out along a stretch no longer than 300 meters, walking it back and forth while cracking sunflower seeds between our teeth.
Meanwhile, Hany Shaker’s songs would blast from passing cars, usually driven by young men who repeated their own endless back-and-forth drives for as long as our stroll lasted. Then our ordinary day would end, and we would wait with extraordinary excitement to meet again the next equally ordinary day.
It is not only scents that unlock the doors of memory; sounds do too.
And with these memories, which swept through collectively like a soft breeze after the news of Hany Shaker’s death, we realize even more clearly that songs once occupied a far greater space in our daily lives. They held space for joy, even when the songs themselves were sad, or served as the backdrop to ordinary household chores.
It was an ordinary kind of happiness, one with sounds that drifted gently out of open windows.
The nostalgia and smiles stirred by Hany Shaker’s songs are an expression of longing for ordinary days filled with music, and of our wish that we never stop washing down the homes of our southern villages.
