Rain Summoning, sonic performance and conversation with Bint Mbareh
Rain summoning goes by many names in Palestinian culture. Bint Mbareh sings iterations of rain summoning music she researched in Palestine through anthropological methods in 2019, and includes in her performance the recordings of the people with whom she recorded, singing the songs, and indeed prompting the rain to precipitate. Bint Mbareh comes from the perspective that rain summoning is not merely a tradition to be preserved but holds the vocalised expression of a Palestinian cosmology where “nature” is there to do more than serve human interest (see: Israeli Settler extractivism) but the singers are there to humbly ask for its collaboration on issues of drought, as one example of many collaborations.
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Bint Mbareh is a sound researcher with a focus on water in Palestine. Her interest in the physical parallel between the water wave and the sound wave leads her into questions of border dissolutions (between bodies, between states, between tenses), and into the possibility of being enveloped by the voice, by sounding communally similar to being enveloped by a water body. She challenges settler colonial epistemology by taking seriously Palestinian ways of knowing, from rain-summoning music to shrine pilgrimage as an instigator to political revolution.