One evening in Tunis, my father’s friends were gathered in a haze of cigarette smoke and laughter. I remember sitting on a low couch, more interested in the plates of olives than in whatever was being debated about music or politics. Then she appeared, a woman with kohl-rimmed eyes, her hair caught in the faint orange light. Around her neck hung a small chain linking two enamel flags: one Tunisian, one Palestinian. She caught me staring, smiled, and leaned down so I could touch it.
“Ana Falastounisia,” she said, a word stitched together from Falasteen and Tunis. Half homeland, half home.
At the time, I didn’t know her name. To me she was just another adult passing through the blur of my father’s world, a friend of a friend. Years later, walking in a protest in western France, her voice returned. It came through a loudspeaker, folded into a chant for Gaza, her words ricocheting between brick walls.
Before Rim Banna became a symbol, she was a schoolgirl in Nazareth, called each morning to perform the tahleel falastini, traditional Palestinian ululations, during school ceremonies. Her mother, the poet Zouhaira Sabbagh, filled their home with verse.
At eleven, Rim was already singing the national memory before she even knew what nationhood meant. She later studied at the Conservatory in Moscow, where she trained under Vladimir Karaboka, who taught her that the voice was not a muscle but a mirror.
“Working on your voice is addictive, tiring and hurtful. It’s not an instrument; you have to look inside yourself and your humanness to sculpt it.”
Her earliest albums, Dumu’ek Ya Ummi (Tears of My Mother, 1986) and Al Helm (The Dream, 1993), wove fragments of folk songs with poems of exile. Her 2005 album Maraya Al Ruh (Mirrors of the Soul) carried her to a wider Arab audience, but she never became a pop star; she became something rarer, a folk futurist.
Listening to her now feels like touching something still breathing. Her reinterpretation of Palestinian folklore was a living process of renewal. Her songs held gestures of survival, every trill a stitch against disappearance.
Then came George W. Bush. In 2001, standing before Congress with the gravitas of a man convinced of his own myth, he declared Iran, Iraq and North Korea part of the “Axis of Evil.” Palestine wasn’t even on the list; it was the shadow in the room, the unspoken fourth member.
A year later, Rim Banna joined a group of Scandinavian musicians to reclaim the phrase, turning it inside out: Axis of Evil – Lullabies for the 21st Century (2003). The project gathered artists and poets from the very regions named or implied as threats, and asked what kind of lullaby could emerge from such misnaming.
The result is a strange, intelligent collage: folk timbres intertwined with electronic dissonance, nursery rhymes warped by radio noise and field recordings. On one track, Rim’s voice rises over a fractured beat:
“Ya leel ma atwalak… machitni hafi.”
Oh night, how long you are… I walked barefoot.
It’s both lullaby and lament, bedtime and battlefield.
In a 2007 interview with filmmaker Ronny Dahdal, she admitted she was hesitant at first.
“So many projects were labeled pro-Palestine but served other purposes. They were detoured from what they sold to the artists at first.”
Still, she took part, not out of naïveté but precision. She wanted to infiltrate the global soundscape on her own terms, to slip Palestine into the circuitry of international art without letting it become a logo.
When Dahdal asked if devoting her music to the Palestinian cause ever felt limiting, she answered:
“I was born in Palestine. I am Palestinian. I’m not born in Paris or Los Angeles… what else is there for me to talk about if my whole existence is at stake of dissolving?”
That clarity resists sentimentality. In an industry obsessed with abstraction and “universality,” Rim Banna insisted on specificity – not as a boundary but as a method. For her, universality wasn’t about erasing origins; it was what happened when truth travelled intact.
She once said she wanted people to listen to a song and “wonder who is Sara Abdelhak, shot in the forehead in October 2000.” Music, for her, was an invitation to curiosity, to discomfort. The tracklist itself reads like a geography of grief turned into notation.
One year before the album’s release, several of the artists were blacklisted. The “axis” had extended beyond metaphor; it had become administrative reality.
In 2015, when doctors told Rim Banna her vocal cords were partially paralysed, she refused to stop composing. With the Palestinian–Tunisian–French collective Checkpoint 303, she translated her digital medical scans into sound. Frequencies from her own MRI images became rhythm; the body itself entered the score.
Her final album, Voice of Resistance (2018), recorded with Norwegian jazz pianist Bugge Wesseltoft, is almost a whisper – spoken poems, spare piano, air and ache. Two months before her death, she was still producing.
“Even if my voice is gone, I will keep singing through others.”
That line feels prophetic: her voice continues to appear, remixed in protest footage, circulating through the same technologies that once ignored her.
Revisiting Axis of Evil Lullabies two decades later, I hear an album that understood global absurdity before we did. The irony of turning an imperial slogan into a cradle song. It asks what kind of world demands lullabies for its own violence.
In 2025, as playlists overflow with songs-for-Gaza and every streaming platform offers a momentary conscience, Rim Banna’s work still refuses simplification. She sought texture rather than slogan, endurance rather than exposure. She didn’t want to be a symbol; she wanted to be a sound wave precise enough to make you stay awake.
Amid the playlists of portable grief and frictionless conscience, her voice remains an interruption, too precise to fade. Like that night in Tunis when she leaned down and said Ana Falastounisia, handing me her necklace: two tiny flags bound by a chain, an entire geography condensed between her fingers.
