Mustafa is moving forward

Taken from the new print issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

The author Toni Morrison urges the writer towards a specific charge: show me your particularised world. There is a corner from where you sit that is, like the facet of a diamond or the single snowflake in a torrent of white, unlike anything that rests beside it. Morrison’s characters embody this. In her 1992 novel Jazz, a character stands on a corner and explains a city. A city that is, architecturally, a place you might believe yourself to know. There are buildings, there are streets, there are people pouring into those streets at a relentless pace, and through that pouring the concrete is gifted a hundred singular stories. And even though you have maybe seen a city of towers, a city of stop lights, a city of swinging briefcases and loud cars, there is still someone who has the miraculous ability to pull you close, towards the seemingly familiar, lean in as if they have the best secret in existence and whisper: ​“Can you believe THIS?”

And, still, as beautiful as it is to lay that charge at the foot of the writer and urge them to take to it with seriousness and rigour, every invitation presented to the public means a blurring of a border – a sometimes precious border that defines where you have lived and loved, the scenes you are comfortable with people being a witness to, but not an intimate part of. Familiarity deconstructs our ability to protect – both ourselves and the people we love – or memorialise. It’s a challenging part of intimate art-making. The artist becomes a projection of the public’s ideas and ideals, and through that, everything warps: principles, process, the entirety of self.

Mustafa is an artist who is, it seems, right on time, for many. Time is a thematic and also literal concern, both on his stunning new record Dunya and, as we speak, in a very literal sense.

I catch the poet and singer-songwriter by phone at LAX on a Friday afternoon. There’s an evident calm in his voice, despite the fact that his flight has been delayed several hours. He’s on the way from Los Angeles to Northern California for a music festival and hastily works through the details of his adjusted travel plans before exhaling gently. ​“But then after that I get to go to the motherland, bro.”

The return of the Toronto-born Sudanese-Canadian to Sudan is not without its complications. He has to find a different airport to fly into because Khartoum International Airport has been shut since April 2023, when it was stormed and then occupied by Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that used to be under government control. But Mustafa sounds overjoyed, at peace.

Dunya, which follows the 28-year-old’s 2021 debut When Smoke Rises, teems with the tensions of pleasure and conflict, of comfort and longing, of being grounded (whether physically or spiritually) and also slightly heartbroken, or resentful of that which grounds you. It is an album of songs, but also a series of scenes; the pen and gaze of a poet who has been writing for the majority of his life, turned towards sparse and patient guitar on an album sonically quiet enough to allow its language to be the centrepiece.

In listening, I found myself returning to Morrison and thinking about questions of accessibility, which is a question fraught with complications for any principled artist at any margin. Those complications grow depending on intersections and history. Mustafa is – like me – a Black, Muslim artist who grew up in the hood. And though we both understand that the hood is not a monolith – not just from neighbourhood to neighbourhood but also from block to block, from house to house – I felt invited into his album, its specific languages of affection, in a way I took pride in. ​“So much of what I am is the hood,” he tells me.

When our talk turns towards gangs, our shared insistence is that those in the hood, in many cases people we both have known, understand the function of the gang differently – less as something nefarious, and more of a boundary. A border between who can get into this place and who absolutely must stay out.

“I haven’t known ceremony or community like that, and I still don’t know it,” says Mustafa, talking of the gang he was in back in Toronto. ​“It is still very much the litmus test for how I engage with people. I don’t think anyone will be able to fulfil the space and the weight that a lot of my niggas do for me.” It’s a love born from a place of urgency that only realities such as scarcity, or protection at all costs, or staring down jail time, can pull out of someone – love as something indestructible, even through distance or disappointments.

“A lot of people talk about unconditional love without ever having to test the gravity of it,” he continues, his voice rising slightly with both intensity and tenderness. ​“Without ever having to test the expanse of that actual love, or where it could potentially end. With my boys, I did, bro. I got gun charges with my boys, and I watched as we exchanged these looks of what years [in prison] could potentially look like. It was in those hours or in those seconds that I could see the height of the love that my friends have for me.”

Mustafa Ahmed was born in Canada’s most populous city to Sudanese parents, and spent his childhood growing up in the Regent Park neighbourhood. In the housing projects that pepper its streets, Regent Park’s population is represented by lower-income working class Black people and other peoples of colour: refugees, immigrants and indigenous folks. It is, not unlike many hoods around America that share these demographics, the kind of place that is known by a reputation it did not, on its own, create or invent.

A reputation of violence or danger, when affixed to the hood, is meant to both keep the people who are not in the hood out of a place, and the people who are already there locked in. And yes, the hood can certainly be violent, as any micro-reflection of any country, or the broader world, will replicate and produce unique violences. But there is beauty in a survival that comes in the face of neglect; the innovation of a survival that comes with loving your people so fiercely that you want to present them as their entire selves.

Mustafa first began this as a young poet, writing verses of place, of home, of the full landscape of his living and the living of those around him. By 2014 he was working (under the name Mustafa The Poet) alongside the Toronto artist collective Halal Gang, a group of rappers and musicians including Mo‑G, Safe, Puffy L’z and the late Smoke Dawg. Simultaneously, Mustafa was gaining acclaim as a co-writer for chart-making stars such as The Weeknd (Attention), Camila Cabello (She Loves Control, All These Years), Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber (Monster) and the Jonas Brothers (Sucker). In 2021, working as just Mustafa, he released When Smoke Rises to critical acclaim.

On the verge of the release of Dunya, Mustafa finds himself in the midst of a whirlwind year. Not just a renewal and expansion of public interest for his songs, but also for his relentless visions for liberation and the labour he’s taken on to mirror that work. Back in January, he organised a massive concert at New Jersey’s Newark Symphony Hall to aid in food and medical supply distribution in Sudan and Gaza. Earlier this summer, in partnership with War Child, he put on a similar concert at The Troxy in East London, which featured performances from artists including Blood Orange, Clairo, King Krule, FKA twigs, Ramy Youssef and, opening the show, Mustafa himself, performing his recent single Gaza Is Calling.

Mustafa is not a new artist, and is not new to the kind of acclaim that has allowed for us speaking, or for writing these words in a magazine on which he graces the cover. When Smoke Rises was met with critical acclaim and shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize, Canada’s equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize. And still, this has been a year where more eyes have turned towards his work. Gaza Is Calling, specifically its accompanying video, released in June, drew international attention. This was in large part due to its visuals, which feature Bella Hadid, but which also depict young Palestinian children playing, sitting and holding hands amid the destruction wrought by Israel – destruction which, by the time of the video’s release, had been ongoing relentlessly for eight months.

In a moment where attention has been currency, at all costs, and artists have abandoned their quests for collective liberation in the name of individual gains, it is cleansing to have Dunya – an album from an artist who remains 10 toes down for what they believe. An artist who, it seems, is attempting to wrestle back language and location and a rigorous politic of seeking liberation in a cruel and relentlessly punishing environment.

“I have a really impossible time standing in the rage and creating in it,” Mustafa says, his second mention of rage in the first 20 minutes of our conversation (in the first, he described his rage as ​“infinite”). ​“I just don’t know if there is a pen or an instrument that can contain or be a vessel for the kind of fire that I want to release. I think I need actual collapse. I need actual justice. I can’t depend on any of these systems.”

There is a point in our conversation where Mustafa refers to the situation in Palestine as ​“one of the greatest crises of our time”, and not just from a standpoint of material destruction – from a standpoint of what it is doing to people. Not just the act of witnessing a genocide, but also reframing and understanding what power and powerlessness actually is.

I think of how hopeful people have seemed with each International Court of Justice statement or ruling describing Israel’s occupation of Gaza and other Palestinian territories as ​“illegal” – even though we, collectively, understand how flimsy these statements and rulings are. Even though some of us, collectively, understand the flaws in relying on a court, any court, for actual, tangible justice on any scale. On the scale as it projects to our guys from the hood – in an orange suit behind a brown table in the downtown of any city, with a judge staring down at them. And on the scale as it projects to stopping a genocidal regime backed by a world superpower with no interest in ceasing the funding. I hold grace for people because I understand the mental work required to commit to even a kind of false hope that allows for moving forward in the work. I can forgive moments of false hope, as I would like my own moments of false hope to be forgiven.

But as we dance around the topic of forgiveness, specifically as it relates to Black folks, Mustafa offers another idea.

“I do find it unnerving that… I was telling my friend that it sometimes feels that forgiveness is a manipulation for Black excellence.”

He pauses here, thoughtfully, before continuing.

“I don’t forgive the hood. I don’t forgive the things around it. I don’t forgive the police that attended to my brother’s body [in July of last year, Mustafa’s brother Mohamed was killed in a shooting]. I don’t forgive anybody. The thing about forgiveness, it’s like… It’s not for me to forgive, I don’t think. It’s beyond me. Also, once I forgive, then that means that the accountability begins to dissipate. I need it to be a banner, and I need it to be held over my head that I have maintained a war against all of these people, and all of these systems that have led me to this graveyard.”

Dunya is, within the plain binaries of genre conventions, a folk record. There’s repetition, specificity and an abundance of direct address that makes many of the songs feel so personal, it seems as if your heart is breaking alongside the speaker; reaching out to touch a person, a place, or a time you don’t intimately know, but surely must, given how richly every inch of an ache or a pleasure is rendered.

Mustafa is high on imagery, particularly colours. The sky is a container: for longing, for light; a container for bullets fired towards it (“You took the gun and shot it at the sky /​To trade this bullet for a new life,” he sings on single SNL). The album feels, in approach to form and function of storytelling, no different from a Simon & Garfunkel record or early Joni Mitchell, with different material used to pull the stories together. The blocks are unique, more treacherous. Yes, bullets are fired at the sky because there are bullets. There is one bicycle shared between a whole crew, and corner stores where the bicycle is ridden to. It’s a place some of us know intimately, a place some of us survived and miss, from a complicated distance. It is a particularised world. The facet of a diamond.

For all it traverses, though, Dunya feels primarily like an album of seeking. Of all the lyrical nuances and nods to so-called ​“traditional” folk, what appears with real frequency on the album, particularly in its run of direct addresses, are questions.

A highlight is What Happened Mohamed? which opens with gravity – ​“What happened my nigga? We were laughing my nigga” – and then, by the end, after the past memories of alleys and hospitals and the hood seep in, a shift in tone: ​“Are you lonely my nigga? Need a homie, my nigga?” It’s the song that most fits and shines a light on what seems like the mission statement of Dunya: population. A generous populating of each song, overflowing not only with people, landmarks or geography, but also a broad population of emotion, from verse to verse, or sometimes line to line, the leaps largely seamless, as they might be in your own head.

What may strike a listener about the record may also strike them about Mustafa. While certain of his mission as an artist and steadfast in his principles, he is often in a mode of questioning himself, his practising of faith. Everything he questions about himself shows up in his work.

“There’s something about prayer and being in the Masjid congregation that felt like sometimes – because I was slightly public-facing – a lot of the Muslims around me, they interrogated the way I practise, the way I prayed and the way I recited Quran,” he begins, talking about the forces that shaped the writing process for the record. ​“I started to change the way I would enunciate, change my recitation style and change the way I would prostrate. I didn’t know who I was performing for. I didn’t know whether that prayer was for God, or whether it was forgotten. Whether I had a joint intention that I wanted to do for both God and the audience. And all those alterations made me feel like I needed to take God back for myself, take a love back for myself.

“I think that’s how I began the record. I went to Sudan and Egypt. I sat among a thing that was deeply unfamiliar to me, but I still somehow felt a connection to, and I began writing. I think this album was very much about my return and it’s about prostrating to Allah, despite [the forces described above].”

I ask Mustafa about Black Muslimhood and how he and his identity sit in the ecosystem. Or in the homogenous (at least in the US) economy of Muslim representation – which, when you are Black and especially gifted, can leave you feeling like a fascination and an outsider all at once. An object in a museum that feels familiar but isn’t.

Mustafa sighs with the weight of some familiarity. ​“I think Arab supremacy has affected my ability to be Black and Muslim more than any other white system has,” he says. ​“There is no kind of exaggeration when I say that, time and time and time again, I’ve been rendered invisible by a lot of Arab Muslims and non-Black Muslims in the mosque, in communal spaces.”

Much like Mustafa’s relationship with rage, this specific frustration isn’t a stagnant one. It’s active, igniting and part of the reason his work teems with a furious clarity around who he is speaking to, who is an active participant and who is simply a witness. Speaking again about his treatment by some Arab and non-Black Muslims, he says: ​“It’s so blatant, their hatred for us and our culture, and they cannot see it even be presented in a space that they believe is holy, because they can’t even see us synonymous with that holiness. [Some Arab and non-Black Muslims] can’t, and so they want us to wipe ourselves of what makes us us, what makes us Black, in order to believe that we’re worthy of some of those conversations.

“I think that for a lot of Arabs and even South Asians, they believe their suffering includes them in a kind of conversation, or permits them a kind of critique of us. I think that that has not served me or served my community at all.”

He pauses, briefly, after another torrent of language. ​“Listen: that would never prevent me from doing all the work that I can for all of us. I know it’s vital, because all that I could do is try to create borders around a space where we are seeing and love where we are, where our wings aren’t being clipped, and where people aren’t plucking out our feathers one by one by one.”

Perhaps the miracle of Dunya is how it moves with a spirit of vibrant protection, the miraculous ability to hold, in your palm, an entire city and everyone you have ever loved and who has poured into it – to draw people close and say can you believe THIS?

When I ask how he’s staying protected, with the pre-existing pace and on the precipice of an accelerant new album being dropped into his orbit, Mustafa thinks for a minute. ​“I think a lot of my frustration has come from not being able to actually present myself in any capacity that I’ve actually liked to,” he says. This feels somewhat surprising, given the large amount of thoughtful, creative control that has gone into the rollout of Dunya – visually stunning music videos, such as those for Gaza is Calling and its follow up SNL, for example.

But he’s touching on another thing here. The way that, through increased visibility, a visible person is divided into several selves; a funhouse hall of mirrors wherein each reflection is not the self that is most accurate. Portions of the person become exaggerated and they have to live with those exaggerations, or sometimes be asked to answer for them. And yes, keep their head down and do meaningful, vital work.

“I’m actually exhausted by the paranoia [that comes with attention], bro. I’m exhausted by the paranoia being around niggas that I love so much but I know, because of what they were born into and we were born into, that anything could change. I think that I have a parallel relationship with the internet and any people who are deemed or established as visible. Bro, we make heroes and idols out of regular people that didn’t ask for that position. Then it’s that very thing that we end up fighting against. I just don’t want to give into it. I’m not trying to feed the thing that might kill me.”

As we wind down our discussion on visibility, fame, principles and whether he’s ready for the world to receive this very large part of himself, Mustafa sighs. With a smile and a shrug in his voice, he says: ​“I think I’ll be good. Maybe it’s this grief and cynicism that keeps me afloat. It keeps me moving forward.”

GROOMER Taylour Woodruff PRODUCER Katherine Bampton LOCAL PRODUCTION Indigo Projects LOCAL PRODUCER Emily Hillgren LOCAL PRODUCTION MANAGER Shana Nogoy PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT Jonathan Folds STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS Leonard Murray and Casey Huang PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Josie Gonzalez RETOUCH The Hand of God