Rajae El Mouhandiz, tearing down stereotypes like “a disruptive force put on Earth”

Photo: Rajae El Mouhandiz / Spontane FilmenFotografie  

The question, “Where are you from?” flummoxes most people with mixed roots, but singer Rajae El Mouhandiz has a simple answer. “I say I am Dutch with an Algerian mother and a Moroccan father. But I am very North African in my love for heritage, roots, passion, food and fashion.”

This self-awareness is in everything she does, underpinning her confidence in the roles she plays as a Muslim, a woman, a human being and an artist. She describes herself as a pioneer, a disruptive force put on Earth to break stereotypes and facilitate dialogue, and this is what drives her art.

These are fitting descriptions for someone who has had to consciously work to be true to her vision of herself. She grew up in Amsterdam-West in the 1980s, a child of traditional Muslim North African immigrants in a society where there were hardly any. The Netherlands was very Christian then; shops were open from Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm, and the local community centre doubled as a mosque. It was very different from the city today, where supermarkets have a halal corner and cities have mosques and a visibly multicultural population.

Within the first few years of her life, Rajae discovered that there were two realities, one at home and one outside. She went to a Christian school, where they read the Bible, but at home, she prayed five times a day to Allah. “Our culture and their culture. I’ve always stood in the middle, as if in a third reality.”

When she was three, her parents divorced. Single mothers were frowned upon even in the seemingly more liberal Dutch society, but her mother brought up six children by herself, depending on the kindness of their neighbours, who used to babysit and help her mother with her Dutch lessons. It was then that Rajae was introduced to ballet.

Photo: Rajae El Mouhandiz /Jamain Brigitha

She had visited a neighbour’s house for a lesson then she heard Western classical music for the first time. With that one lesson, she says, it was as if her world had suddenly switched from black and white to colour. The family could not afford ballet classes, but the kindly teacher saw Rajae’s passion and let her attend for free.

Rajae’s education in the Western arts continued. When she was 15, her music helped her deal with the challenges of life as a teenager and as someone who was different not only within the society she lived in but also within the confines of her home. By then, she knew that she was going to be an artist, but her family believed that it was unbecoming of a Moroccan Muslim girl.

Rajae left home, and her talent got her into music school soon after. But Rajae realised that there was no one else who shared the same culture and religion as her, and so she would not find a mentor who could help her find her own sound and artistic message. She was drawn to North African music, though at the time there was no market for it. She said that though she loved Western music, she needed to connect with her spiritual roots. She quit her studies and took advantage of opportunities to travel internationally. This helped her forge her own sound: pop-soul-jazz-North African.

“I was asked to change my name. Sexualise my music. But I didn’t want to turn myself and my art into something I could not live with. So I approached Muslim labels. But they didn’t know how to market me either, as I was not a man and not a hijabi.”

Photo: Rajae El Mouhandiz /Sander Stoepker

She realised that it was not enough to study music and art. Business knowledge was important to sell her art and create a space to promote it. She started working on selling and producing music, and at 25, she started her own record label, Truthseeker Records, a salute to the Sufi tradition of seeking truth.

She dedicated Incarnation, her first album, to her estranged family, which whom she has tried to reconcile. But the way she has lived her life is too far removed from theirs; it’s not what Moroccan girls were supposed to do. “Maybe I was born to break that stereotype,” she remarked. She says her strong connection with Allah brought her through, and that she decided that it was better to love her people from a distance and be at peace.

Rajae related her life story at a TedX talk in the Netherlands, and it resonated so much with the audience that she was asked to give the talk again on national TV. She’s working on telling her story in a musical theatre production, Thuis, Onheemd (“At home, displaced”), which premieres in the Netherlands next year, and then possibly internationally.

“I want to make music for the whole world,” Rajae said. She wants to make music to get people communicating about the things that matter. Artists, she says, should serve humanity, to get people to communicate about the things that matter universally—human rights, climate change and feminism.

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