With new album, Mustafa the Poet tackles rage and forgiveness. Just don’t call it therapeutic | Canada Voices

There is the music within the notes and the music beyond them. A voice hums, fingers on strings strum, and for an album-long moment, the ballads in Dunya by acclaimed artist and poet Mustafa shift from mere musical composition to a maxim of a home long sought but rarely held. Family, exile, return, stay, leave, longing and love: everything lives here. But much of that everything is still a memory.

“I have a really difficult time understanding home,” admits Mustafa during a Zoom call from Los Angeles. “I resent the home I left because I grieve it. I grieve it because I can’t have it the way I want it. Toronto is full of horrors, but it’s steeped in nostalgia.”

There’s a recognition in Mustafa that roots, much like his own, rarely remain unchanged; firmly planted one day, only to be pulled or shifted the next. His root, Toronto’s Regent Park, has become something different in his weathered palms – the same ones he’s surrendered to the pen over a life mourned in his Juno-winning 2021 album, When Smoke Rises, and in what he’s since left behind through his full-length debut, Dunya, released last month.

“I was talking recently to Daniel Caesar about our struggle to return to Toronto for different reasons, and he said, ‘Bro, that’s the only home we’ll ever have,’ ” says Mustafa, reflecting on his own turbulent emotions. “No matter where we go, our nostalgia for Toronto ties us to our beginnings – where we first discovered music, truth and heartbreak. Despite the politics and resentment I feel when I’m there, I can’t escape the beauty of those memories. I try to hold on, but I can’t live in it. I’m always grieving home.”

There are many faces of this horror according to Mustafa: a health care and policing system that was specifically unfavourable to his family, a beloved neighbourhood that was treated as a government afterthought, and a cycle of gang violence encroaching so intimately as to take the lives of his brother and countless friends. What is most important, at least for Mustafa’s story, is that Toronto was once the only place – his place to be. Now it’s something else. Still somewhat stunted and frozen in that time.

Such is the nature of Dunya, translated from Arabic as “the world in all its flaws”: years of anger sharing space with love, forgiveness and grace – all condensed into a 40-minute album shaped by collaborators such as Aaron Dessner, Rosalía and Clairo. His story hides in this tension, in the unavoidable “Where am I now?” that advises his craft, much like the words he so thoughtfully employs. Expectation and self-examination often collide for the first-generation Sudanese-Canadian artist.

“You know, there are periods where music-making is meant to feel therapeutic, but it never actually is for me,” he testifies between pauses. “It gets beautified, but it’s not the form of conversation I want to have half the time, it just serves as a reminder to call the person I’m talking about … to forgive myself for things that happened seven or so years ago.

“All it does is connect me to intersections of memories or place, where I have a hard time returning to. … It grants me permission to return.”

Speaking 2,000 miles from the town where he grew up, Mustafa’s catharsis in the face of distance is, at least in part, why his story beyond the music is well-trodden ground. As it’s told, he first gained public attention as a 12-year-old poet, whose words about community moved grown men to weep, earning him a standing ovation in 2009 for his poem A Single Rose at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival.

“He always seemed unafraid,” says Randell Adjei, Ontario’s first poet laureate, who first encountered a young Mustafa in a viral video, passionately speaking about his love for his community. “He did it in a way that was true to him and his lived experiences. I took something from that – about not being afraid to push the boundaries, to try new things, regardless of what others think or feel. “It was powerful, you know, superpowerful.”

Music, embraced with intent, would come next in Mustafa’s story as a member of Regent Park’s Halal Gang – a Muslim and Caribbean hip-hop collective that included Mo-G, Safe, Puffy L’z and the late Smoke Dawg.

In those early years within the city’s oldest housing project, their artistry was born out of a need for community, often infused with cultural and religious connections.

With “ahwoolay!” as their signature shout and Mo-G’s “Ginobli” dance catching fire across the city, the local hype grew quickly – until it came to an unfortunate halt. On June 30, 2018, Mustafa’s close friend and fellow Halal Gang member, Smoke Dawg, was killed in Toronto just days before a planned trip to London at the age of 21.

“I have this outlet for that grace and forgiveness, but I don’t have an outlet for the rage,” Mustafa says, still grappling with losses as fresh as that of his older brother, Mohamed Ahmed, who was murdered in July, 2023.

“The grace is a part of that, but it’s not all of it. … There’s so much violence and peace and belonging and desire in us all, and there’s no way of knowing what will appear on what day.”

This duality reflects not only Mustafa’s struggles but also the realities of urban life in many marginalized communities around the globe, where dreams entangle with loss, and artistry serves as an outlet and a mirror for deeper societal issues. His home ground, Regent Park, while not facing the extreme conditions of Brazil’s favelas or South Africa’s townships, for example, share similar systemic challenges rooted in race and class – economic disparity, social neglect and a struggle for belonging in the face of institutional barriers.

Che Kothari, an arts advocate and creative director who has supported Mustafa’s career since meeting him at 13, runs Gifted Management, a company dedicated to empowering artists with “something special and positive to offer the world.” For Kothari, the boy-turned-celebrated artist always seemed like one in a long line of performers who’ve transformed their scars into sanctified verses. He took a piece of himself and used it to reach unconventional heights.

“What struck me most about Mustafa’s journey, marked by both incredible triumphs and profound tragedies, is his unwavering commitment to his community,” recalls Kothari. “He’s always looked to uplift those around him, always carving out opportunities for others to come with him on this journey.”

In 2021, Kothari joined Mustafa on a transformative trip to Egypt, originally intended as a writing camp for Dunya. The group explored local culture, from music and museums to Friday prayers at the mosque. Each night, Mustafa and his close collaborator, Simon Hessman, would retreat to craft the foundation of the album, incorporating the sounds and influences of Egyptian musicians. The journey also included time spent with Mustafa’s family, a key part of his creative and personal life.

“I often wonder how he sustains such a high level of creativity and purpose through it all,” adds Kothari. “I just know he operates from a higher calling – to me, he’s more than an artist; he’s a beacon of hope and unwavering dedication to the people he serves.”

In keeping with that ethos, Dunya is a folk-infused album about life in the same way When Smoke Rises was about death – which is to say, neither is about just one thing. Raspy-voiced songs about fleeting friendships, as expressed in What Happened, Mohamed?, bleed into others about heartbreak and shared trauma in communities beyond Toronto, such as in Gaza is Calling, inspired by his childhood friend from the region. Meanwhile, Mustafa has emerged as one of the few artists to openly champion Palestinian liberation from Israeli occupation, curating benefit concerts that feature talents such as Omar Apollo, Clairo, Daniel Caesar and Earl Sweatshirt.

“I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to put that out and that the Palestinians in the video trusted me to tell their story,” says Mustafa, who had American-Palestinian model and long-time friend Bella Hadid star in the Gaza is Calling music video back in June alongside Gazan rapper MC Abdul.

Such edicts for Mustafa have never existed in a vacuum; they align with a long history of being equal parts activist and artist, as seen in his open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urging support for Palestinians and his appointment to an advisory council focused on policies for Canada’s youth. The way these issues intersected always shaped the pace of his advocacy – and the deeper sense of purpose it fuelled.

“On the Black, Muslim, or general front against imperialist structures, seeing these movements develop all over the world – like witnessing organizational efforts from people who are so young always brings me happiness,” he says.

Mustafa knows the separation, of course, between the timing of his intentions and the bona fide success he’s found. He understands that all the work he’s done in the dark – from Egypt to Sudan, Los Angeles to New York, in work and prayer – will only ever result in something organic, good or bad. That for as much as listeners are drawn to his messages, they may never understand him, or the life he’s built out of equal parts blessings and loss.

“There’s nothing I could do to shape anything, especially in the kind of societal collapse we’re living in – all I can do is leave my truth,” he says. “The world will just decide to hate people these days, or decide to love others and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

For Mustafa, it’s an unceasing process of revisiting what that truth is. But for now, with the release of Dunya having reached the masses, the hard parts of “communicating suffering on a record,” as he frames it, is over, and the lifelong part of maintaining his peace continues.

“I was talking to my friend the other day, and at the mention of someone who got sentenced to life in prison, he began to weep. He mentioned how hard it is to think about why he gets to live freely while our friend doesn’t,” he says, pausing to think. “I told him that fragility is the very thing we are trying to protect. It’s also a reminder that I always need to keep working.”