A clash of states over Saleh al-Kuwaiti

There is a swing that we can almost all agree on, albeit with an unmistakable tilt, when countries fight over some names with pride, while other names arouse disdain, everyone says “this is not one of us!”
This tilted seesaw applies par excellence to the late Iraqi musician Saleh al-Kuwaiti, as he is the subject of a conflict of countries on him when Israel received him as an Iraqi Jew since the 1950s and left him living in the dust market like any settler and did not appreciate his value until very late in his life, and launched his name on a street in Jerusalem, while he is the Iraqi who created the difficult construction generation in the Iraqi song, and his touches have not dimmed to this day. Kuwait intrudes on Saleh’s ownership of it under the pretext of the name and says Saleh is also from us. In the midst of all this, this musician lies, having lived half of his life burdened with disappointment until his death in 1986.
When it comes to the Kuwaiti pretext, it has no historical significance because it merely relies on the name “Kuwaiti.”
I posed this question to the late Iraqi writer Yeheskel Kojman and he sarcastically replied, “It’s irrelevant! When Saleh was born, there was no recognisable entity of Kuwait as it is today.”
“In one of the travels of the family, who lived in Maysan province in southern Iraq and traded gold with India and made long sea voyages, Saleh was born in Kuwait before his family’s ship set sail, and this alone makes the Iraqi Saleh belong to Kuwait City in name only,” said the author of the book.
Israel, which did not appreciate the value of Saleh al-Kuwaiti, made him a mere settler number with his brother Daoud, and only after his death did it -restore- his honour. However, his son Shlomo told me, “I did not know that my father was so famous and valuable in Iraq until it was too late.”
Be that as it may, there are reluctant attempts to -restore- some of the Kuwaiti’s lost glory in his native Iraq. However, the memory and taste of Iraqis have not for a single moment overlooked the melodies of this musician who chronicled in hundreds of songs the pain, passion and love of Iraqis in the voices of Salima Murad, Zakia George, Narges Shawqi, Nazim al-Ghazali, Ha-dir-i Abu Aziz and Afifa Iskandar.
The rehabilitation faces what we might call cultural exclusion. It is part of a process of memory destruction with the hijacking of the Iraqi song.
Saleh al-Kuwaiti is an Iraqi artist who was forced to emigrate to Israel, as he admitted, and he often expressed this painfully as he listened to his songs from Radio Baghdad in the 1960s and 1970s without those songs being registered under his name, and they were usually attributed to folklore, under a political pretext.
I was able to feel Saleh al-Kuwaiti’s pain when his son Shlomo provided me with ten hours of audio recordings in which he narrates some of his biography without diminishing his pain as he does not listen to his name before a song by Salmia Murad broadcast from Radio Baghdad, he would say “My people in Iraq, I am not a politician, I am an artist, so for your sake mention my name whenever Salima sings.”
He asked bitterly, “Why is the name of the composer Nazim Naim mentioned with his compositions while he lives in the United States and my name is deliberately absent?”
In any case, I am sceptical about the success of attempts to rehabilitate the first creator of the Iraqi song, Saleh al-Kuwaiti, even if they are sincerely intended, at a time when Iraqi memory is being deliberately and hatefully destroyed.
There are statues that make history in cities, but history has not been fair to the musician Saleh al-Kuwaiti, even though his melodies touched the hearts of all Iraqis.

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