Review of Elyanna's Latest Album: Woledto
Words by Kiko Gomersall
Via Genius
“This is the closest I’ve been to where I come from,” writes Elyanna on April 4th, eight days before the release of her most recent album, Woledto. The caption accompanies a clip of spoken poetry written by her mother that concludes the album. “The only feature on my album is my grandfather,” she adds. Elyanna is a third-generation Palestinian-Chilean artist. Both her mother and maternal grandfather were poets and singers.
Revolving at its core around distance and disorientation, this album shines in its celebration of Elyanna’s Arab heritage. Whilst paying homage to this rich tradition, she merges it with her distinct artistic style, which itself is a sort of creole of influences from the Middle East to Latin America. The result is an album that’s as complex and culturally expansive as the artist.
In Woledto, we see a continuation and development in the artist’s style, namely in how she interacts with genre, combining cultural influences to create hybridized pieces of music where tradition and contemporaneity are placed beside one another, motioning us towards questions of where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
At first glance, the album highlights an elevation in her artistry but, more importantly, it signals a return:
“أسأل نفسي بعد الغياب بكل إنكسارٍ .. لماذا ابتعدتُ”
“I ask myself, far in my absence with all my fragility, why I’ve kept myself away”
In her album announcement she emphasizes: “I planted who I am next to an olive tree, to blossom into a white flower, with my album, Woledto (I am born) … This album is the embodiment of pride to be an Arab woman, to be from Nazareth, to be from the Middle East.”
Elyanna at Coachella via Instagram
From this unwavering pride, Elyanna has amassed global recognition while singing solely in Arabic. In 2023, she became the first artist to perform a set fully in Arabic at Coachella. This year (2024), Coachella invited Saint Levant making him the second Palestinian to perform at the festival. He used the platform to condemn the brutal genocide in Gaza, and stressed on his identity with: “Coachella, my name is Saint Levant and I was born in Jerusalem and raised in Gaza.”
In Arabic, I was born translates to “Woledto” and this idea has deep roots in Palestinian cultural production. Mourid Barghouti’s memoir “I Was Born There, I Was Born Here” for example, traces a story of exile and return, recalling his son’s first journey to his homeland. In historical moments such as ours – witnessing such rampant death and destruction – the idea of return falls out of the discussion, but it remains at the heart of Elyanna’s album and the heart of a whole diaspora, and this is likely what makes this album such a resounding success.
The title track, Woledto, draws heavily from Elyanna’s Shami roots, with microtonal harmonies and traditional instrumentalization, but also a sense of theatricality and poetry that, surprisingly, makes me think of Fairuz’s music. Specifically, how Fairuz combined her classical training in Quranic recitation with theatre and contemporary music to a similar effect, outlined by her decision to remain in Lebanon, rather than leave at the outbreak of war.
Similarly today, artists in Palestine face the same conundrum, while their fellow artists in the diaspora also share a feeling of helplessness. Another distinctly Fairuz trait that Elyanna has knowingly or perhaps unknowingly adopted is the use of lyrical registers when lending her artistic support to a political or humanitarian cause. For example, in this register case endings are articulated similarly to Quranic recitation or Modern Standard Arabic: Elyanna dips into this tone when addressing Palestine and shifts into a more colloquial one in her “straightforward” pop songs, but through a grounding in this tradition, steers the album towards concerns of distance, departure and return.
Ganeni draws from Latin American and Arabic pop, with Elyanna expressing that she wanted to create an Arabic Gasolina, an Arabic song“that felt so dancey yet so powerful.”
Callin U’ (Tamally Maak) is an exciting addition to the tracklist": a mashup of Amr Diab’s 2000 hit, Tamally Maak, and the song from which it was sampled, Callin’ U by Outlandish. For the first time, she sings partially in English, and creates a song that you immediately want to replay the moment it ends.
In other tracks, such as Al Sham, Lel Ya Lel, and Sad in Pali, Elyanna combines the style of Ghosn Zeitoun (Olive Branch), her anthem for the children of Palestine, with an Electronic, almost EDM accompaniment. These feelings climax in the final track of the album, Sad in Pali, which opens with sampled speech obscured by electronic distortion.
The track moves from painful remembrance through a journey of lament, to a sense of optimism in a movement that altogether comes to resemble the structure of the qasida poetry style the dominant poetic form through 15 centuries of Arabic literary tradition: nasib, rahil, fakhr (remembrance, journey and praise). Qasida’s from Qays ibn al-Mulawwah’s Majnun and Layla to Mutanabbi’s Ode to Saif el Dawla, to Darwish’s Eleven Stars over Andalusia all abide by this Pre-Islamic qasida structure:
After stopping in the desert at the site of the lover’s long abandoned campsite, the poet would stop and painfully remember the love that was lost. A long fast journey through the desert would follow, emphasising endurance, the desert, the animals, and the land. The poet would typically end on an optimistic note, praising the tribe, the tribal leaders, or themself.
The opening lines convey the difficulty and pain of remembrance, and the struggle to reconcile the past and present: “I don’t know how I thought you would be waiting for me where we met last fall, but you’ve forgotten me. What can I expect after all these years?” The song moves to an overwhelming sense of lament with repeated cries of “ya wali” (my God) set to an EDM soundscape that charges her grief with an almost dystopian quality.
via Instagram
A culture podcast by The New Yorker discusses the recent science fiction renaissance, with Dune at its peak, and discusses whether the science fiction/dystopian genres are becoming a new form of realism. In this light, faced with a failure of realism to aptly capture Palestinian grief, Elyanna turns towards a hybridized, classicosurreal aesthetic. How far did realism go when every moment of Palestinian suffering was captured on social media for the world to see? How much more real can it get?
Sad in Pali ends on a bittersweetly optimistic note with cries of zaghrouta (ululation) which, depending on the specific culture, can be heard both at weddings and funerals. It is at once a cry of celebration and despair, and aptly embodies the emotional complexity of the track and the album as a whole. The ending gives way to cries of celebration with a gentle melody and a poem written by Elyanna’s mother:
و تسألني عن غيابي في أيلول
ففي البعد تعرف معنى اللقاء
و في البعد سيعرف قلبك
معنى الجفاء
وسيعرف طعم العودة
بعد الإنتظار
أهواك
So you ask about my absence in September.
And through distance, you will know the meaning of togetherness,
And through distance, your heart will know the meaning of drought,
And it will know the taste of return,
After the wait.
I adore you.
Showing such artistry at 22, Elyanna is a star in the making, and to many the voice of a generation. And she’s only getting started.