For Italian-Somalian Musician Saba, 'Fusion' Is Not a Dirty Word

All music is fusion.

That's been true, or at least a truism, even since the fist person banged on a rock and someone else started singing to the rhythm. Similarly, all people are multicultural. There's no such thing as unmixed genes or ideas.

But few embody this as deeply as Saba Anglana. She readily uses the term "hybrid" to describe her multifaceted nature as an actress, art student and now, with her first album, 'Jidka,' musician. "I need to do many things," she says.

It goes far beyond that, though. Saba (she uses only her first name professionally) doesn't just do many things. Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, to a mother of Ethiopian heritage and an Italian father, and raised in Italy, she is many things. Or, more accurately, she is one person who incorporates many things. And music, she's found, is the best vehicle for expressing this.

"I want to combine all those things but in a natural way, a joyful way," she says, speaking from her home in Rome. "Nothing is so easy to do, but music and art in general are a good way to let us free ourselves to understand our nature as hybrid people. I wanted to be free. I wanted to speak about my way of learning to a culture but not only one. I don't feel Italian. I don't feel Somalian. I feel all these things together. When I speak to Italian people, they don't think I'm Italian, and the same with Somalian people. I tried through music to express this feeling and this problem."

This is a theme Saba has explored in her acting career, having played a policewoman with the same dual heritage in a popular Italian TV series titled 'La Squadra.' Her album addresses the matter directly with its very title, which in Somalian means "the line."

"It's a mental but also physical space which divides me from the culture belonging to my father and the one of my mother, all different," she says. "I'm dancing upon this line."

Saba has been inhibited in connecting with the Somalian part of her heritage by geopolitics. With the ongoing conflicts that have left the country in a near lawless state since her family was forced to flee when she was just five years old, it has not been possible for her to return. To her surprise, language provided the emotional route.

"I'd always thought to sing in Italian or English, because I always heard music from the States and England," she says. "But at some point I tried to put the lyrics in Somali, just because of the beauty and the power of the sound. It was sort of an experiment. And from that time on I felt something very true was going on. I was free, setting myself free. I found out it was a way to speak about my identity for the very first time in my life. I'm not telling you I belong to Somali culture, but I have memories of my childhood and a part of my way of living was coming from where I was born, from Africa, where my father and mother wanted to be together and merge their cultures. So it was sort of a tribute to my childhood and my father and mother's loving country."

Ultimately, she says, the process served as a connection more to her father, who died 17 years ago, than to her mother, who lives with her in Rome. He had lived in Somalia (formerly under Italian colonial rule) for 22 years before Saba was born and would have stayed there if he could.

"There was also a big age difference between my mother and father -- difference plus difference plus difference between them," she says. "Through the Somali language and this work I try to recall my father. He always wanted to die there."

Needless to say, she is taking anything but a purist approach. The music on 'Jidka' incorporates elements of traditional music but draws on many cultures both European and African. Her primary collaborator, Taté Nsongan, hails from Cameroon, and Senegalese musician Lao Kouyate adds kora and Italian Fabio Barovero (who played with Nsongan in the experimental band Mau Mau) produced the sessions. Not all the songs are sung in Somali -- some have lyrics in French, Italian and English.

Still, her work and story have already connected with other Somali exiles. "The power of music is so big," she says. "Many Somali people are writing to me on my Web site, telling me they knew my father because he was teaching school there. And there are many half-Italian/half-Somali people around the world writing, recognizing my surname, my history, and happy to find something that can unite us. I feel very moved when I read about my father. He was my teacher. I remember his voice, his big voice. This was one of the most important results for me, that music can bring people together."

Saba has hopes that she can move even beyond that and become a very rare Somali artist on the world stage. Only Miryam Mursal, a singer exiled to Denmark, earned much attention internationally via two terrific early-'90s albums (the modern 'The Journey,' inspired by the torturous exodus of the singer and her five children from their home country, and the more traditional 'New Dawn,' leading the surviving members of the national troupe Waaberi) on Peter Gabriel's Real World label.

But she's also hoping to expand her own cultural horizons on visits to the part of her Ethiopian family that lives in Addis Ababa now. "There's a part of me I still have to discover," she says. "I want to start to learn about that again, learn the language, which is completely different. To understand other cultures, to be able to say I'm an open-minded person, I have to understand and know and study the entire culture of my family. Everybody has to do that, to cross the lines and embrace the other cultures. It's a level of honesty."