I love listening to field recordings of folk music. Especially with older specimens, the quaint crackle of someone’s relatively recent ancestor is comforting. I love pouring over libraries of songs, dances and rituals, each moment of time a page turn for the book in front of me. Except much of this work has been done by descendants of European settler-colonialists, and I don’t love that. Suddenly these beautiful timeless recordings stop feeling like books and more like large mantises jarred in formaldehyde. The subject object relationship is palpable and I can’t help but feel that if I was fortunate enough to be making music a hundred years ago in the land of my ancestry I would have fallen to a similar fate. That is to say my songs would be preserved for their dwindling exoticism by a well meaning European while the members of their extended family massacre mine. And yet, the research I’ve been able to do in this present moment that has led me to these conclusions is due in part to the existence of these voyeuristic recordings that are so near and dear to my heart; a paradox. A possible solution is to address this paradox with multiverse theory, a classic tenet of the Afrofuturist tool kit. I simply imagine that Europe does not exist and in doing so, have to define what Europe actually is, and in tangitizing renegotiate my relationship to it.

Clearly, Europe is not the continent, but the name of the continent. One proof is that we don’t segment a part of Pangea in paleontology and refer to it as Europe, meaning Europe had to be invented in the same way Africa did. Africa is the word used by Romans to refer the landmass we now understand as a continent but they had not, and still we use it due to its deep integration in our colonized psyche, adorning it lovingly with meaning to empower the people who hail from that region. Neither is Europe the animals, vegetables, or minerals that compose its physicality. Since trade has been recorded, non-indigenous animals, vegetables, and minerals have been shifted around and rerooted through necessity (eg: citrus from Asia). It’s not truly a stretch of the imagination to selectively decide that Europe doesn’t exist and in the case of the subject object issue of field recordings, I find solace in changing a definition of the world in a way that doesn’t conflict with our collective understanding of geography. Similarly, the Egyptian identity I am forced to navigate is not as timeless as one might think. Egypt as a country only existed after the Berlin conference and became galvanized in part through the advent of Pan-Arabism which severely diminished the nation’s African heritage component. The Caucus mountains are closer to the “middle-east” and still it may be attributed to all of Europe (Caucasians). These words have always been flexible and redetermined by those in power, a possibility for those of us in the global majority is to continue the work of our recent ancestors and boldly forge new understandings of the world that are of use to us as the subject, not imposed on us as an object.