Signed with Love, Always
In a landscape where trendy music often fades into the background, Saint Levant's music emerges as an anthem for the unheard. Through every song, he challenges the boundaries of culture and its expectations, of what has become naturalised and standardized.
Saint Levant. Available via Saint Levant’s Instagram. Picture taken by @pedrose. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement is intended.
Over the past couple years, you have probably stumbled upon a video of a moustached man sitting in a white room and rapping in three languages: French, Arabic, and English. This TikTok snippet went viral overnight, back in 2023, jumpstarting the career of Marwan Abdelhamid, a.k.a. Saint Levant. Since then, you have also probably heard the story: Marwan was born in Jerusalem to a French-Algerian mother and a Serbian-Palestinian father during the Second Intifada and spent his early years in Gaza, later fleeing to Amman, Jordan and attending university in Santa Barbara, California.
Though multilingual and multicultural music existed prior to Marwan’s appearance, he stands amongst a wave of new, primarily Gen Z, Arab diasporic musicians who reconfigure the meaning of Arabness. Examples of these musicians include Lana Lubany, Bayou, Zeina, and Feluka, to mention a few. These musicians are spearheading a turn-of-the-generation questioning of cultural norms, exploring how hybridity and transculturality exist in the ever-globalized music scene, but also challenging the perception of Arab culture. It would be an insult to limit their music to an exploration of Arabness for these musicians are actively paving the way in exploring a myriad of other topics, such as love, gender roles, and community. Besides that, they channel the sound of the region, its beauty, its resilience, and its pain to create music that comes alive and connects people to one another through danceable tunes.
Before making his musical talents known to the world, Marwan ran a start-up called GrowHome aimed at giving back and rebuilding the economic infrastructure of Palestine—the country that raised him. The notions of reciprocity, homecoming, solidarity, and giving back become a running thread along his music and are evident in the inspiration behind his artist name. In an interview with NME, Marwan expresses, "The name Saint Levant is taken from the area in the Middle East, it’s Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. It’s such a beautiful region of the world and somewhere I’ll always feel at home." This sentiment is reiterated when he says "I keep Palestine as my North Star and everything I do is for that community." Many of his music videos and photoshoots are aimed at precisely this reimagining of the region from its negative depiction in Western media to a revelation of the beauty of its people, its landscape, and its culture. One example is the music video of DIVA shot in its entirety in Algeria.
Saint Levant pre-DEIRA release posing with @mca.rap. Available via Saint Levant’s Instagram. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement is intended.
“Wallahi them girls ain’t gon right in the west / I know I’ve been away but I’m coming back home / all I know, all I know, all I know / is to be falasteeny is to always rep where you come from” or so declares Marwan in his instrumental song From Gaza, With Love — a song inspiring the title of his first EP. He explains in an interview conducted by Paper Magazine that “From Gaza, With Love is an ode to the place where I spent the first seven years of my life, a beautiful city by the sea filled with love, memories and unfortunately great pain, suffering and oppression.” He continues to underline the eternal message of his music with this feeling, concluding with the striking words: “We are much more than the dehumanizing images you see in Western media. This song is a message to the world, and I sign it with love.”
Since then, he has released nine singles and two albums, expanding his genre from traditional Arabic music, 2000s R&B, and hip-hop to adopting a western 80’s funk approach with Middle Eastern and North African panache. A notable contribution includes his album DEIRA addressed to the love and loss of the Gaza City hotel designed and operated by his father, as well as, his most recent release, Love Letters, which serves as a compilation of the plurality of Marwan’s upbringing. The connective theme remains his trilingualism and genuineness in expressions of romance, intertwining his position as Lover Boy Levant with heartfelt messages.
To chart the extent of Saint Levant or Marwan’s music is no small feat as he is a character that cannot be pinned down into one neat box. A trailblazer who is not only currently reforming Arab and Western Music scenes, making possible, in the process, what has been a dream to many youngsters from the region. He is also someone who speaks out about injustices through his activism on social media, imbuing his music with resistance and pride. His message of love encourages generations of people previously made periphery to speak up and make their place in the world known.
