Un-(W)Rapping Trauma: Analyzing struggles of British-Asian Muslim Diaspora in Riz Ahmed’s Rap Album The Long Goodbye (2020)

Abstract

Riz Ahmed’s album titles “The Long Goodbye” is a commentary on the present day racial and religious dynamics in the British society at grass-root level. The album looks at the British-Asian struggles of co-existence, made worse due to the growing islamophobia in the west. Riz Ahmed’s pens down this rampant racism, xenophobia and islamophobia, and gives voice to it through the popular mode of Rap Music due to its wider appeal to the teens and adolescents. The narrator is a British Muslim person going through breakup with a girl named Brittany (pointing at Britain). The narrative parallels the historical relation of Britain and South Asia, from colonization, two world wars, and India-Pakistan partition to current day events.

In the first song, titled ‘The Breakup (Shikwa), the narrator/rapper is hurt as the Brittany has left him, and taken with her his money, which according to him was ‘a quarter of the cash in the word’, despite narrator’s constant sacrifices and labor. Brittany even refuses to acknowledge their kids, referring British-Asian Muslim diaspora. The parallels drawn works effectively to invoke the historical imageries of the equally abusive conduct by the British Empire in the Indian subcontinent and the contemporary treatment of the immigrants. Other parallels drawn are ‘Cashmere jumper’s still stained red’ to the Kashmir Violence, ‘Scar down the middle’ to the Partition, ‘Beef with some German next man’ to World Wars and many more. Other songs are laden with similar parallel imageries as well.

I will be studying the metaphors present in the lyrics and analyzing the latent messages of racism, xenophobia and islamophobia and how they aid the narrative. I aim to map the collective tropes of trauma, violence, memory and intersectional concerns in the lyrics. I expect to find instances of struggles of the belonging faced by British Asian Muslim diaspora in the lyrics.