Neo-Angelinos, they are model-skater, actor-director, composer, poet-rapper, multidisciplinary in any case… from Ramy Youssef to Atlgrandma through Mustafa The Poet, they grew up almost everywhere in the United States or even in Canada, but they met in Los Angeles. It is their country, between urban dramas and uprooting, that they tell in their albums, their films, their documentaries, their texts sprinkled with raw poetry… Under the California sun, they pose with clothes that resemble them and fuse styles and cabinets with a casualness tinged with seriousness. A portrait gallery as much as a Sam Rock fashion series.
Mustafa, rootless and indignant poet and singer
In 2009, the Canadian public discovered, in a short video, a skinny 12-year-old poet, Mustafa Ahmed, who, in front of the brick walls of a social housing, recited a text a cappella, a single rose, desperate for the violence and poverty of Regent Park, his neighborhood in Toronto. “Don’t let it be the only rose in this dilapidated park.”concluded the very young teenager of Sudanese origin.
Fifteen years later, the man who became known by the name Mustafa the Poet, and who now calls himself Mustafa for short, may have become a singer, but he remains outraged by injustices with a voice and a folkloric instrumentation whose moving softness contrasts with the harshness of the words.
After a first album, When the smoke rises (2021), entirely anchored in the urban environment of his youth and the evocation of his deceased friends, the former child prodigy of Regent Park broadens the perspective of his melancholy with Dunya, second album whose title could be translated into Arabic as “the world down here”. A shocking reflection of empathy and contained rage, as imbued with sociopolitical observations as with mystical fervor, composed by a Muslim folk singer who poses on the cover in a white djellaba and a green chechia.
This July 30, two days after turning twenty-eight, we joined Mustafa Ahmed in Los Angeles. “I have nothing else to do in Toronto, assures in a phlegmatic tone, but I have not settled in another city. » He says that he does not suffer from this nomadic life. “I feel emotionally and socially detached from many things. Being homeless is accompanied by this disconnection. »
This lack of roots is, after all, part of their identity. Fleeing Sudan and war in the 1990s, her parents found refuge in Regent Park, Toronto’s oldest public housing project. This neighborhood, plagued by shootings and gang wars, does not seem like a promised land.
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