International Women's Day

Today I celebrate the freedom and privilege of owning and expressing my femininity, in a system that has taught many of us to minimize ourselves in the name of shame and peace-keeping.

I celebrate a newfound gratitude for my roots, and the generations of Arab women in my family who’ve gifted me their resilience, humility, goofiness, and unquestioned devotion - the very tools with which I am able to navigate + deepen my independence in a new world. 🌹

I celebrate the magnificent power behind pursuing a career in the arts, and the courage of the most marginalized voices who embody subversion over subservience - knowing that this visibility comes with tremendous sacrifice. Theirs has pushed me to grow, and must be protected/cherished daily.

I celebrate the stunningly inspiring, heart-giving, BRILLIANT, and uplifting women in my life who spark endless joy and love to everyone around them. ♥️

Happy International Women’s Day, today and every day!!

"Fall Asleep" - for the daughters of immigrants whose dual-identity balancing act often intensifies our sense of safety within our own skin. And for those of us who've been caught in the vulnerable dance between the familiar, and the pull towards something greater. It's a terrifying limbo, but all the more worthwhile: daring to indulge those glimmers of freedom beyond our daydreams, when we've been taught to place the world's comfort over our own.

“Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape. These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling..." - Khalil Gibran, On Freedom

It's been one year.

August 4th, 2021

This morning feels eerily quiet, from where I am. The sunlit stillness and greenery and faint city soundtrack and gentle chirpings outside my intact glass windows - are at once lulling and foreboding, like I’ve landed in this illusively pristine post-apocalyptic bubble away from it all. Like waking up from a hazy dream sequence and fighting to recall the unsettling details, that linger indefinitely.

The physical distance is at once arbitrary, ‘lucky,’ and vividly, remorsefully imposed - I was never meant to grow up here. So many of us weren’t. 

Today is a warped day of mourning - the numbers, the individual lives turned mass-groupings, the ‘tragic’ that transcends any tangible grasp on tragedy, the sensational surrealism of nightmarish lows somehow prescribed to millions as acceptable ‘real life,’ the insomnia amidst the rubble of family heirlooms turned crystalline weapons of war, the casually heinous state-sanctioned escape from even the tiniest morsel of accountability or bare-minimum humanity, the infuriating descent into deeper hellscapes ever since…the preventability of it all. 

They knew. 

Here in the diaspora, we carry the ill-defined, numbing, yet gut-punching ache of each massive blow. The privileged guilt and crushing obligation of ‘leaving home’ is in our bloodlines, but the unconditional attachment we feel for all things Lebanon is unspoken, and ever-present, for a reason. 

Today I’m thinking of the immeasurable collective grief and rage and exhaustion and perpetual heartbreak and integrity of those taking to the streets of Beirut and beyond…and those tending to each and every layer of loss, in its personal and external vastness, from wherever they are. I know I am.

Lebanon deserves our attention, and thank you for hearing our stories. 

- Leila

Ne Me Quitte Pas. A Tribute To Beirut.

Ne me quitte pas. Don’t leave me. 

“Etre Libanais, c’est faire soi les mots de Brel, et se souvenir qu’il est ‘des terres brûlées donnant plus de blé qu’un meilleur avril.’ Garder espoir et se relever.” “To be Lebanese is to embrace Brel’s words and remember that there are ‘some scorched lands that yield more wheat than the best April.’ Keep up hope, and get back up.” Roda Fawaz quoted this verse in his recent tribute to Beirut, and it sent shivers up my spine. 

I’d delved into this classic heartbreak song last summer, and something about it consumed me — the utter pit of desperation, the pleading rendered poetic, the ugly and the beautiful occupying the same tragic sphere, the fragile promises we grip onto like sinking lifeboats when we already know they won’t — and can’t — keep us afloat. When we fight for love, we fight for survival. When we’re on the horrifying edge of abandonment and impending loss, we beg and we bargain and we deny, even if only internally, because our entire conception of reality has depended on that one feeling we’ve known to be true — a comfortable discomfort, an inevitably blinding attachment, and a refusal to rupture the chemical operation because a false sense of stability can feel a million times safer than the radical alternative.

So we fight like our lives depend on it. 

But every day since August 4th, 2020, Brel’s lyrics have taken on new layers of meaning I could never have fathomed possible. Each member of this vast, diverse, and powerful Lebanese diaspora has been thrown into an indefinite, guilty, and profoundly helpless state of mourning — one that had been brewing since birth, wired hazily into our very programming — now with a catastrophically concrete outlet. A nightmarish culmination. 

As we grieve the loss of our motherland’s capital, with its architectural treasures and cultural heirlooms and brilliant institutions and close-knit neighborhoods and generational tales of building, and rebuilding, from these scorched lands, we grieve a city of extraordinary potential held captive by the monstrous forces that claim governance. We grieve victims who should never have known such a label. We grieve a home we’ve understood so intimately to be ours, and yet a home we’ve never been able to settle into. A home that continues to leave us displaced. To shatter our most fundamental sense of security. To conflate resilience and survival. To reduce us to literal rubble and ash. To kill us, and escape justice. To abandon us. And still a home we love more than anything. 

When I think of the words “ne me quitte pas,” I think of the ache and rage and yearning and pride and conflict and duality and trauma and suppression we’ve harbored and passed down for decades, as our deepest feeling of “home” has remained so present, yet hauntingly out of reach. And in this moment, when any semblance of its hopeful future has been obliterated at the hands of its very own leaders, we are far past our breaking point. This is the lowest of lows Brel dances around in vulnerability and grandeur, one he adamantly seeks to escape: the stunning, materialized contradiction between an all-consuming love and its omnipotent resistance. And confronting the earth-shattering betrayal we’d feared all along. 

Beirut — ne nous quitte pas. Don’t leave us. 

We long to create an everlasting haven out of you, built of gold and light, “d’or et de lumière.” To return to a land where love is king, where love is the law, “où l’amour sera roi, où l’amour sera loi.” Because we know all too well that when it comes to our people, everywhere — when it comes to the heart of Lebanon — this reality has existed since the start.

And it will never leave us. 

Leila Milki, Category: Artist, Albums: Promises, Singles: All That Remains, New Year, Top Tracks: All That Remains, New Year, Leil Ya Leil, Hit and Run, The Doubt, Biography: Leila Milki is an award-winning Lebanese-American singer, songwriter, and classical-pop pianist living in Los Angeles., Monthly Listeners: 23, Where People Listen: Chicago, West Hollywood, Rishon LeZiyyon, Toronto, Guayaquil

Written by Leila Milki. To support emergency relief efforts in Lebanon, please click here.

Video Credits: “Ne Me Quitte Pas” by Jacques Brel. Piano & Vocals arranged/performed by Leila Milki. Piano engineered by Sam Brawner at Blue Dream Studios. Vocals engineered by Keith Armstrong at Pie Town Studios. Track mixed by Keith Armstrong (additional edits by Leila Milki). Photo by Ojo De Loba. Calligraphy by Mohammad Farik.