Loolwa Khazzoom blends punk rock with Iraqi-Jewish melodies — Muse Factory
Musician Loolwa Khazzoom sits down to discuss her new song “Cancer is My Engine,” her musical reawakening, and that time she chased Yemeni-Israeli superstar Ofra Haza
Loolwa Khazzoom, the frontwoman of the band Iraqis in Pajamas, is a woman of complexity. Her first name Loolwa means “a pearl in a million” in the Iraqi Judaeo-Arabic language of her ancestors. Khazzoom was brought up by an American Jewish mother and an Iraqi Jewish father in California, and her unique heritage has shaped much of her identity growing up.
“I was born a musician. I started singing before I started talking,” Khazzoom told me in our conversation. As we talked on Zoom over the complexities of growing up with Middle Eastern ancestry in America, I noticed the familiar silhouettes of darbuka drums set up behind her in the background. While her voice is the instrument I’ve come to know her for, having first heard her sing Iraqi-Jewish maqam in the 2007 documentary film The Forgotten Refugees, Khazzoom plays eleven different instruments, most notably piano, guitar, bass, flute, and others.
Khazzoom is also a prolific writer with a strong online presence. Her writing has been featured in publications such as The Forward and Rolling Stone. She is also the Founder of the Jewish Multicultural Project, an online platform that provides educational resources for Jewish multicultural education. In the last five years, Khazzoom has been focusing primarily on her music with her band Iraqis in Pajamas.
After she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, Khazzoom noticed that she “had lost her music.” Having grown up in a musical family, singing and playing instruments as a child and young adult, Khazzoom for a while had lost touch with her musical roots after a decade-long career in public relations. After the initial shock of the diagnosis, Khazzoom decided to reignite her musical flame and pursue her love of both punk rock and Iraqi Jewish liturgical melodies and started Iraqis in Pajamas.
Her most recent single, for which she has released a music video teaser, is called “Cancer is My Engine,” which describes her personal journey with the illness and her decision to opt-out of surgery. Khazzoom has worked with several oncologists and has also taken steps to heal herself mentally and physically.
Just to start off, can you give a little background on how you grew up and how your Iraqi-Jewish heritage influences not only your identity but also your music?
I grew up in San Fransisco in a very headstrong Iraqi-Jewish home. We moved to San Fransisco specifically because there was a Jewish school there. We moved from Montreal. My dad had gotten a position at Stanford, which was an hour away from San Fransisco, but there were no Jewish schools there, so we moved to San Fransisco so that my sister and I could go to a Jewish school.
Everything that we learned was Ashkenazi (the tradition of European Jews), so we would come home and my dad would ask what we learned. “We learned about Chanukah!” “We don’t say Chanukah, we say Hanuka.” “We played with dreidels!” “We don’t play with dreidels.” On and on it went, so I actually wondered why we bothered going to school when we had to unlearn and relearn everything when we went home.
I had this constant conflict because I had this tremendous passion for my heritage. I was very adamant about learning the exact (Iraqi-Jewish) pronunciation. I was born a musician. I started singing before I started talking, so I’ve always had an excellent ear. When I would be learning (Iraqi-Jewish liturgical music) with my dad, he’d say a passage then I’d say a passage. He’d say “Great!” and I’d say, “No, it wasn’t great. Do it again!” Over and over until I knew that I had nailed it with the pronunciation.
Were you exposed to the Judeo-Arabic your whole life or was it something you had to ask your father to speak to you in?
Well, both. Liturgically, I was exposed to it my whole life, but we only spoke English at home. My dad spoke five languages. I asked him in high school, “Why did you never talk to us in Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic?” He said, “Oh, it’s a waste of time because everybody speaks English today.”
I grew up going to public school, and I spoke in English. I prayed in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, but I didn’t actually know what I was saying. I was pulled out of Hebrew school in the second grade because of the taunting and the racism. When I finally became fluent in Hebrew, I started to block out the meaning of the words because the prayers to me were like a river flowing through me. I could go through and dissect it, but when I do, I don’t relate to it half the time.
What was your first formal introduction to music? What got you to the point where you identified as a musician?
So my mom said that when I was three months old, we were in the car and I was in the car seat, and I started singing one of the shbahoth. Not with words, but I was humming it. It was very distinct. It was very clearly one of the shbahoth. She said she nearly had an accident looking in the rearview mirror, and she said I was bouncing back and forth while I was singing. I was humming these distinct melodies before I started talking.
In Iraq, at least in the Iraqi Jewish community…I can’t speak on behalf of the Iraqi Muslim of Christian communities, being a musician was considered being a prostitute. Everyone on my dad’s side is very musical, nobody is a musician. It was very discouraged, especially for women. I do not remember a day in my life when I wasn’t making up music, trying to play other people’s instruments, and beginning my parents for a piano. I have a freakishly long memory. I remember I was probably three, I was sitting on a piano bench next to a friend. I was just transfixed, just in awe of the piano. She asked if I wanted her to teach me how to play it, and it was like someone had just opened a door to a magical wonderland.
We had this plastic organ in my house, and I used to just constantly make up songs on it. I was begging my parents for a piano. We lived in an apartment in Montreal. They said, “When we move into a house, you could have a piano.” Then when I was five, we left Montreal and moved into a house in San Fransisco. I said, “Now, can I have a piano?” They said, “Well, we’re renting the house. When we buy a house, you could have a piano.” Then when I was six, they bought a house. I said, “Now can I have a piano?” I didn’t realize they were blowing me off! They said, “If you can save up the money for a piano, you can have one.”
My parents did not give us an allowance. They had what they called the “behavior modification system.” They gave us pluses and minuses. Every plus was 5 cents. If you vacuum the house, you get 20 pluses. If you talk back to them, you get 20 minuses. I had this Mickey Mouse puzzle box, and every time I would get my money, I would count it. When I was eight, we moved into a new house and I had at that point $300. In retrospect, I understand they were blowing me off the whole time. In that moment, they understood that I was very serious and I really, really needed a piano. So we went to a used piano store, and we found a piano for $500. Then they put me in Yamaha music school and within weeks, I was the assistant teacher. The Yamaha teacher called my parents and told them, “Your child does not belong here. She belongs in the conservatory.”
So, my mom took me for a try out at the San Fransisco Conservatory of Music and the director of the school was the one who auditioned everyone. She auditioned me, and she left the room, sat next to my mom, and said, “Where have you been keeping her?”
I was immediately enrolled, and I studied flute and piano for my whole childhood. Meanwhile, I was playing eleven different instruments — guitar, violin, French horn, piccolo, trumpet… I just loved sound.
At what point in your journey, did you really start to think about Iraqi-Jewish music? Were you always into it because you grew up in this proud home or did you kind of fall into it?
It was all part of the landscape of my life, I was playing Bach on piano and I was singing these ancient Iraqi-Jewish prayers. They were just all there but they weren’t intersecting.
Mostly, I just wanted to create something that comes out of me. This is where I ended up…just various choices and circumstances and ebbs and flows of my life. That leads to the story of Ofra Haza.
Ofra Haza exploded on the international music scene when I was in college, and I was obsessed with her. I spent three years, like, stalking her. This was before we had the internet. I would contact Yemenite-Jewish centers in New York, in Israel. I was constantly pursuing her.
After I graduated from college, I went to go visit my best friend and she was running some organization at the time. They had arranged for Ofra Haza to come and perform, but it was all sold out, and at the last minute, someone got sick so I got her ticket. The seats were way up in the back. I was just kind of standing there, like, I’m like going crazy — I needed to meet this woman! Then I saw there were two seats in the front row that nobody had, so I pulled my best friends there.
Then Ofra Haza came out, and she just had like, just like pearls. She opened her mouth and just pearls came out. There was no technical anything, it was just straight acapella. She was the first one who mixed the Middle Eastern Jewish prayers with “contemporary music.”
She was singing and I was going nuts. That stage was really low, and I started thinking that I should just run onto the stage. We were at an intermission, and I’m hanging out with my friends, and I’m eyeballing the stage. My friends were like “what’s going on with you?” I told them, “That stage is really low and I’m thinking about jumping on it.” There was another woman I was friendly with who just said “let’s do it!” So she starts running onto the stage, and I end up running past her. The security guards start charging down. I dove under the curtains, I heard her get caught, and I just kept running, running, running. I ended up opening a door, running into this room where all the dancers were. I ended up meeting her manager and I met her. I had this picture of her and me on my wall for years. She thought it was hilarious. She was really my first role model.
What happened later for me was that I lost my music. I had this journey where I’d get into my music, I’d start a band, then I’d get distracted. Then in 2010, I was diagnosed with cancer. I chose to reject the conventional option of surgery, I chose to see the diagnosis as an opportunity to do very profound healing and transformation in my life. Cancer was almost irrelevant, it was just kind of the catalyst. I realized I had lost my music, and I had this really radical decision that I said I am going to devote myself to my music and I’ll never let it gather dust again. Shortly after, the nodules started shrinking.
So how long has it been since you started the band Iraqis in Pajamas? How did that come about?
Five years.
What I did was I started, I can’t remember which came first. I know that I started putting out ads on Craigslist, but I also started going to open mics. You know, I played bass and it was very awkward to sing punk rock songs with a bass without a band. One day I got up, and I said exactly that to the crowd, and I said “You know, it’s very awkward to do this, but fuck it!” and then everybody went “YEAH!” Then that became, like, my thing and here everyone is doing that. Like, I’m on bass and it’s very unusual also for women to be playing bass. You know, I would meet other guitarists. The first rendition of the band did not stick. We wrote some really great music, but the drummer’s son kept getting surgeries unfortunately and he had to drop out. Then there were a lot of things happening in between, but then I moved into the forest. I’m now outside of Seattle.
There were a few renditions, a lot of turnover for a while. It was really tough. It was a pain in the ass to keep a band together. Especially because I’m doing really weird music. Alternative punk-rock with Iraqi Jewish prayers, there aren’t a lot of people who can pull that shit off. We have to have a similar musical sensibility or it doesn’t work, but then it’s this very organic creation where we’re all contributing something unique to the sound. It took years.
This is a good time now to get into your song. What does it mean to say that cancer is your engine?
I got a grant from the Lloyd Symington Foundation and Healing Journeys, which is an organization for people living with and healing from cancer, was the fiscal sponsor so we had non-profit status and Lord Symington Foundation funds innovative programs. They gave us funding to create the song and music video.
As for the meaning, the question there is what happens when we allow an obstacle, a challenge, an adversity to shake things up? When we don’t fight it, but we look at it, and think “huh, how can I leverage this?” How can this actually serve me? How can this be a friend instead of a foe? What’s possible then?
I want to be clear that I’m not telling anybody what to do. This was my choice, but I do offer the question in case it’s compelling to someone else. What might happen? How might you look at things differently? How might things unfold differently if you choose a different mindset? I think many people say “I can’t” but what they really mean is “I won’t.” Not everyone, some people maybe literally, genuinely are unable and cannot, but I think a lot of people fall into the camp where they perceive themselves as unable or they can’t do something when really they’re not allowing themselves to get freakishly creative and just blow the whole thing open… If my number one priority is healing or whatever it is we want to do, fill in the blank goal… If you make a decision “this is what I’m gonna do and this is what I want.” I’m gonna do fucking everything, I’m gonna turn the world upside down to do it. What might be possible then that would not be possible if you didn’t make that decision?
To listen to the full conversation and to find out why Khazzoom came to name the band “Iraqis in Pajamas,” please check out the video below. To check out the “Cancer is My Engine” music video teaser, please click here.
To connect with Loolwa Khazzoom and Iraqis in Pajamas online, visit their website and like their Facebook page.
Valeriya “Lera” Nakshun is the Founder and Editor of Muse Factory. She’s also a freelance culture writer and community organizer whose work focuses on Eurasia, the Middle East, and the underrepresented cultures of those regions. A naturalized American citizen, she is interested in all things art, multiculturalism, migration, and the spaces in between.
She currently works as a Marketing Specialist for the Strategic Partnership’s Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Connect with her on Twitter @Lerachkajan
Originally published at https://musefactorymag.com on December 2, 2020.
