THE UNDEFINABLE ZAKI IBRAHIM
FROM FEBRUARY/MARCH 2022 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
Travelling between hip-hop, pop, electronic music and neo-soul – and her homes in Cape Town, Toronto and B.C. – Zaki Ibrahim is hard to label. And that’s kind of the point
When I ask Zaki Ibrahim what it’s like to be back home, she replies with a telling question: “Which home do you mean?”
In her 10-plus years as a working recording artist, Ibrahim has found herself oscillating between South Africa (Cape Town, where her family’s from) and Toronto (its west end in her younger days). Not unlike other diaspora kids, Ibrahim would often leave one home to visit the other throughout her childhood and adolescence. (She also splits her time between Toronto and Nanaimo, B.C., heading to the lush West Coast, where her mother lives, when she can.) But as she got older and her personal and professional worlds began to broaden and sprawl, she became more intentional about where she spent her time. “Each time I went back [to South Africa, I was] in different chapters of my life,” Ibrahim tells me over the phone. “There was that emotional... you know, that emotional feeling of reconnecting with my father’s lineage and experience there. But also, [my perspective] opened. Every time was different.”
That exploration of familiar yet foreign terrain across time and geography would go on to deeply influence Ibrahim’s work, and her approach to the public-facing side of her career. Now we see Zaki; now we don’t. Where in the world could she be? What was she learning? And who was she becoming? Combining the worlds of hip-hop, pop, electronic music and neo-soul, Zaki Ibrahim is undefinable. And that’s kind of the point.
To the singer, it starts with her roots. The more she visited South Africa, the more she’d noticed how manicured her experience back home – her father’s country, her inheritance – had been. “There are a lot of areas that are [still] designated zones,” she says of the complicated tension she’d come up against while home. Legally, South African apartheid ended in 1994, yet its after-effects live on, especially for Black South Africans.
It’s important to note here that the South African concept of race differs from, say, a North American one. In South Africa, physical markers of a not-so-long-ago time of segregation are hard to miss. Segregation is still a non-formal practice, casually and eerily haunting Black South Africans indigenous to the land they’re socially or institutionally barred from. “Every time I went back, I felt like I was just more and more curious to know where things connect, and how things are actually more connected than they are separate,” Ibrahim says. And the more she picked and prodded at her curiosity and explored home in a new light, the more she found unlikely pockets of congregation that just fit for her and her approach to artistry.
“We have been needing human contact,” says Ibrahim. At her Great Hall show in March, she plans to “emphasize an energy exchange” with the audience
“I found that I was connecting with African communities, and Muslim communities and Asian communities,” she says, pointing to the value of seeing yourself in others. “I really found myself [in] the cultures that I experienced as a kid growing up.”
In Toronto, she experienced those cultures in Parkdale, where she spent part of her early years, and Bloor and Ossington, where she met like-minded artists-turned-friends. In 2009, she began yo-yoing between Canada and South Africa, regularly crossing the world over and over and over again; it takes at least 19 hours to travel between the two. “Each time I go, I tap into the newness of what’s happening in the communities I saw developing from afar. In South Africa, that’s lingo and culture that are evolving faster than [they do in other] places I’ve experienced.”
That pace, energy and innovation inspire Ibrahim. It’s a combination that has the power to give life, to rejuvenate. To Ibrahim, South Africa is a place that represents limitlessness. “I feel like I have immersed myself in communities I feel connected to, and that informed a lot of the music that I made from 2009 onward.”
On March 8, Ibrahim will return to another home in her constellation of homes for a performance at the Great Hall. Emerging from two years spent in pandemic solitude – a turbulent, life-altering season that’s still underway – Ibrahim is ready to shake some shit up.
“I’ve been in Toronto the entire pandemic,” she tells me, with the exception of a few B.C. trips to visit her mom. “I travelled internationally for the first time in November, going back to South Africa.”
What that trip did for the singer was different from what it had done before: This time, Ibrahim returned to Toronto yearning for connection, “with home, with artists and collaborators I’ve been in touch with virtually,” she says. “It opened up a whole new way of looking at my process.” For the first time in a while, Ibrahim felt new. She came back on what she calls a different frequency, jolted out of the rut she’d found herself in.
“I feel like things have just really started to move in a different way,” she emphasizes about where she’s at these days, and what’s influencing her. “People are coming out of hibernation. And I’m wanting to speak to that in the live experience.”
Simply, Ibrahim’s excited to take the stage. “We have been needing human contact,” she says earnestly. “And so I’m kind of keeping that in mind, not only with the content I’m writing and the way I’m working. It’s [about] trying to emphasize an energy exchange in the live experience.”
If you ask Zaki Ibrahim what keeps her going, you may get a few answers: collectiveness, expression, a commitment to dreaming. Her treasure is her audacity to be constantly curious, as a writer and a performer. So much of what the pandemic has highlighted is the unspeakable loss we face in a lifetime. But Ibrahim’s daring us to dare again. To look at each other and see each other again.