Intergenerational listening is developed as a practice of rerouting in exile. It’s how families and communities build a sense of continuity when geography has been broken.
My family emigrated from Afghanistan to the United States in the early 1980s. We were smuggled out of the country and traveled to several different places before arriving in the United States. I was probably three years old or so. We’ve lived in exile for a very long time—over 40 years now.
This idea of exile has turned my relationship with Afghanistan into something very layered and very mobile. I used to think about a physical homeland. But now, because of the work that I’ve done, home is much more something that’s both tangible and intangible. It’s about sounds. It’s about stories. It’s about these fragments that I can now maybe even carry with me wherever I am.
One interesting thing I’ve learned about being displaced is that people can create an archive without sometimes even being conscious of it. As a researcher, I will meet people who will pull out cassettes, pictures, clothes, or other memorabilia that they often don’t understand have value or are of interest to anyone else.
One interesting thing I’ve learned about being displaced is that people can create an archive without sometimes even being conscious of it. As a researcher, I will meet people who will pull out cassettes, pictures, clothes, or other memorabilia that they often don’t understand have value or are of interest to anyone else.
Those artifacts are their way of staying connected to people and to places and to memories that they can no longer physically reach anymore. But there’s a memory still attached to those tangible things. Exile has made me more attuned to the fragments that survive. Specifically, to sounds that end up surviving. It’s turned me into a different kind of listener.
I’m always thinking about whose memories are preserved and how. In that sense, exile has shaped both how I think and how I create as a researcher. So it’s not just about loss—it’s also about rebuilding meaning from these fragments.
The Contrapuntal Condition
In my first year of the PhD program, way back in 2013, I found out that I was pregnant. I was preparing to write my first paper in the field using archival sources, and I was thinking about exile and Afghanistan, and all these things. I came across Edward Said’s essay “Reflections on Exile. “This essay resonated so deeply with me.
Edward Said describes exile as a condition of terminal loss. And he introduces this word—contrapuntal. Contrapuntal means to hold multiple worlds and memories and temporalities at once. And that’s exactly what I had been doing for so much of my life.
Said’s writing really helped me see that exile is not just this rupture—it’s also a space of creative recomposition, of learning to live with fragments and contradictions and to make meaning out of dissonance. In that sense, my own engagement with Afghanistan is very contrapuntal. I listen to the country I cannot return to through echoes, sometimes even remixes, and intergenerational soundscapes.
It also makes me attentive to how sometimes I won’t have the full picture. It makes me attentive to the idea that there are partial histories, and how people in my community take those partial histories in different places around the world and remake meanings of home with those partial memories. And it leads to the idea of an ethical listening practice that engages with questions like—whose stories are amplified, whose versions of the past are preserved, and how can scholarly work support diasporic cultural production rather than extract from it?
When I went back to Afghanistan in 2018 for fieldwork—that was the first time I had returned, 30-something years after we had left—and when I was there in Kabul, revisiting my ancestral lands and the home that I was born in, I felt the cracks in my identity as both insider and outsider. Said writes that seeing the entire world as a foreign land can be both very painful and enabling, and that’s precisely what it was for me.
My work, my research, and my identity are acts of rerouting myself—a way of thinking of exile not as absence, but as this ongoing creative condition. It’s continuously redefining what belonging means, and I’m very much in charge of deciding what that is. Or in the case of my work and research, what belonging can be, what sound can be, what are the meanings of sound in relation to home and in regard to exile as well.
Even after my son was born, to put him to sleep, I would read passages of that essay to him. I wanted to be deliberate about what I passed on to my own roots.
Fragments and Resistance
As a researcher, one of the things that has been interesting and also very challenging is the collection of information I’ve needed to basically write this history. I’ve always been motivated by the idea of writing a people’s history—a version of Afghanistan that isn’t laced in tropes we’re all very familiar with: negative tropes about the tribe, the influence of Islam, etc.
My research is focused on the 1960s and 1970s, which was a kind of golden age in Afghanistan’s music making. A lot was happening in terms of the politics of the Cold War, it was also a time when the state was building itself up. This translated into advancements in technologies that end up lending themselves as very powerful tools for creatives—musicians and artists and theater folks and other people very broadly the arts.
The fragments I have found from this time period really speak to a population that was excited about the advancements its country was making, but at the same time was very aware of state politics and its subject positions vis-à-vis the state. They were using their craft carefully at times and very deliberately at times to push back against the state. There is a lot of incredible, creative resistance through sound that forms the heart of my research.
Oftentimes, Afghanistan’s political landscape has been seen as a place where the powerful act and the people just absorb, and that’s not true. The people of Afghanistan also have their own agency. They act back. And if we look to the space of music and radio production and sound, we really see that in really creative ways, both implicitly and explicitly.
We see that today too. There is a continuity in the community in how it holds to its cultural roots and values through music. Those stories might be in fragments, but there’s a lot of fragments. It’s not small, it’s not just one or two people or one or two musicians—there are many.
Digital Archives as Resistance
From 2003–2021, during the time of the NATO-backed republican government in Afghanistan, one of the positive achievements was the digitization of documents, cultural materials and historical materials. Archives like the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University now have digital archives. For places that have been undergoing displacement and violence for so many decades, that’s an enormous contribution, particularly for researchers interested in these parts of the world.
It’s not just Afghanistan— think of places like Syria and Iraq and Palestine and Sudan and Yemen, and so on. Besides governments and institutions, archiving is now also being done differently by the younger generation. For example, the music archive created by Omid, who is based in California. He has been able to collect archival pieces from radio, television, performances, and films, among other things.
He started out as a cassette collector and has since expanded into vinyl, and now he’s getting more access to collectors around the world, including in Pakistan. The physical archive is stored at his home. He’s now digitized a lot of it. He has a wonderful Instagram page where he makes it all accessible. I love using his page as a resource for the classes that I teach.
Remixed Memories
Listening, especially across generations, is a very powerful way for people in exile and communities in exile to recreate home.
When families are displaced, not everyone has the same memories of a place. Our elders remember the taste of fruit, the smell of a neighbourhood, the sound of a market, while younger generations might only know a place through their parents’ memories, stories, or songs. In this sense, music becomes this bridge between those worlds, almost definitely in the way that I’ve understood it, especially as someone who left Afghanistan when they were very young. It captures people’s memories and becomes a conduit for the narrative —the history—to come alive.
When an elder will sing an old folk song from the village they grew up in, they’re not just sharing a tune with you. They’re literally transmitting this world that existed for them to you. The emotional attachments people have to sound —and then share it with you —become an incredibly profound and personal gift you receive. And when a younger person from the current generation samples that song, or maybe they sing a cover of it on YouTube, or they’re remixing it, they’re extending that memory into the moment. It becomes a dialogue across time.
Oftentimes, I get asked what I think about the music being produced today, and what I think about remixes. I think people are looking for an adverse judgment from me as someone who has studied music from Afghanistan as part of my intellectual journey. But as a historian, devoid of the subjective judgments we can give to that music, I think this is their interpretation and their way of preserving something, getting their own spin to it, but still giving a nod to “this still means something to me”.
This intergenerational listening is maybe a practice of rerouting in exile. It’s how families and communities are trying to build a sense of continuity when geography has been broken.
These different memories of maybe one particular song—you can collect them together and it becomes a sonic tapestry. A stitching, a layering of sound and memory that then becomes renewed, or maybe another kind of sonic landscape comes into view, making meaning for people.
When we listen to music, irrespective of the generations, it’s an act of participation. It’s how communities decide what to remember, what to mourn, what to feel happy about, what to carry forward, what they want to pass on. It becomes intimate, a form of homemaking.
Contemporary Experiments
Some of the music being produced by young artists in the diaspora today invites productive conversation. Especially when they move between the languages they inherited from their parents, and the languages of the place they now live in. Often someone will ask a question—“Well, what is this lyric and where does it come from?”—and then someone else in the room will have some memory of that song. And then again, you’re in a dialogue about home in fragments.
I think it’s wonderful that the Afghan musical landscape in exile includes such diverse genres. Other cultures also have a multitude of genres that that people listen to. But often in the Afghan diaspora, you get all kinds of judgments on the quality of music. That always gives me pause.
Have we been forgiving or compassionate enough to each other, living through over five decades of war? Whether we’ve been in that country or not, it’s affected all of us in different ways. We have these creatives who are trying to be creative—why can’t we support that effort?
I feel like there’s a time and place and moment where we can judge the craft, but we also have to be compassionate and forgiving towards each other for people who just want to enjoy and play.
Playing for the world
Many contemporary Afghan musicians now perform extensively for people outside Afghanistan, including a larger Persian audience—people from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, and these diasporas that exist in different parts of the world now and are sizable. They’re absolutely commercializing their music towards that audience. I do sometimes enjoy the music of such artists. They have been able to put Afghanistan’s music on a global platform, and that deserves recognition of its own because it serves as an introduction.
But none of these individuals are necessarily pioneers of doing this. Ahmad Zahir was really the person who brought this to us on a global scale. He experimented with taking global compositions and grafting them onto lyrics in Farsi, sometimes in Pashto, and introducing that to Afghanistan’s musical landscape. What is interesting is that you listen to this and you recognize it as music from Afghanistan. You’re not thinking, “Oh, this is so globalized.” It’s still rooted. It’s still recognizably Afghan. When an elder person shares an Ahmad Zahir song with you, they are singing about a memory from their own life. That kind of listening — intergenerational listening — is really a practice of re-rooting in exile. You could say that for Afghans in exile, the home that’s been lost in space is rebuilt through sound.
So listening isn’t passive — it’s an act of participation as well as preservation. It’s how Afghan communities decide what to remember, what to mourn, and what to carry forward. In exile, that act of collective listening becomes a form of homemaking. It reminds people of their collective strength, their shared grief, and their enduring connection. As Said might say, it transforms the pain of exile into a vantage point — into awareness, into solidarity, and into resistance.
Mejgan Massoumi, as told to Taran Khan.
Article photo: courtesy Mejgan Massoumi.
