Salam Susu is a Syrian musician, classical pianist, folk harpist, singer and teacher. She plays with different musical groups and works at Aarhus Music School as a teacher in The World Music Center. Born in Syria Lattakia of Syrian parents, she completed her Master in Music and was a lecturer at the University of Homs in the music faculty. She also has a bachelor in English Literature.
Life in Syria was not as perfect as I dreamed about related to women’s rights, social change and opening to the wider world; in other words, the values of the international civil society, so many values that took a long time of my thinking and dreaming. I later became a social and political activist, which led me to be a prisoner for a period. Music was and has always been my saving boat through all the hard times in my life. Now I live in Denmark together with my husband who I met here in Denmark after I fled from Syria and the war to start a new life.
My dream island, the pink-coloured imagination that gave me the power to go on in life and through many times that I felt like the end. A tiny melody comes to my memory or a picture of lived ones, loved ones, the images of the imaginary world that I dreamed of. What if all my dreams came true and I get out to the world I imagined, no religions that control society, no militaries that kill people, instead real democratic values that rule the world.
It was like the marks that lead me to the open world and make me do my trip form south to north. It was a self-discovery trip that made me realize and appreciate each and every thing I have in life. From the air to the sky to trees and of course to be witness of many amazing things in life through playing music and seeing the happiness in the eyes of the people.
Since I came to Denmark it has been a little difficult to find the comfort zone, or in other words, where I feel that I am included. Nature has been my zone all along where I feel that we all are together on this big earth, we all belong to the Great mother Earth, we share the same air and sky, and all the natural elements which we can’t own or buy with money. So, in this way it’s the place that gathers people from all genders and nationalities and colours, but still are the same humans.
For me, the sea is the great power that gathers all the planet, we connect through it and communicate through it as well. In old days, many millennia back, the sea was the only way to travel between far east to west and north to south.
I feel my home is the sea. There is a kind of magic about it that takes away all your negativity and bad energy to give you peace and calm. This is my comfort zone where it is a mix between amazing forest and big wide sea.
Coming to Denmark opened a lot of new possibilities for a dreamer like me. I used to fight in my own society for equality and freedom, women’s rights as an individual and so many other values that have been living inside my head for a long time. I just met them here in an open society where each individual has been born with these rights from the first moment they open their eyes to the world, the same as the ones I had to fight for in my society. It was an amazing experience to meet the dream society. After some time here in this country, I started to find out things that are still different from the outside but in the centre of it still women need equality in the salary and a fair place in the job scale. It sounded like the same fight, but in different circumstances with more open possibilities, and of course with a lot of rights which I didn’t have in my previous home.
The future is always a concern for a refugee. I moved to Aarhus, my lovely city now, where I got so many amazing things that made my life happier and full of colours. That doesn’t mean that Copenhagen is not lovely, but it was something different. Anyway, I started to feel home in this city’s welcoming atmosphere and open opportunities to dive into. But I took a walk some time ago, me and my friend, to find a place that made me feel that I am totally unwelcome and excluded from. It’s where I really felt that we came to a place where everybody looked at us as outsiders. And more, I got this feeling of going back in time to where rich people, who have the money, get all the privileges to do whatever they want and whenever they want without considering that they are not the only elements of the society. For someone like me it was like a double discrimination, firstly being a refugee from an Arab country and a coloured person, and secondly being from the medium level in society that has no place in such a place.
Music was always my free zone or the only place in the world that I can be whoever I want to be, but in time passing and after a few horrible years through the war in my homeland, the music saved my life and gave me a reason to start again after a hard crash. The music was the first step of my recovery trip from finding and saying the right words, to dreaming again. The keyboard of the piano made its way through my bad memories to start erasing them step by step and writing new and good ones, full of colours and hope.
The flavours of the tones give my life taste another dimension, one that I never thought or believed could even exist. I gained my voice again through music, gained my dreams, my hopes of a better life. Step by step music came to be my new way of life, my new way of understanding the difficulties of life and a way to deal with it.
The piano became my voice and my thoughts run through it. It became my new identity. And when I started my journey in a new country in another part of the world, the piano led me into a new society by introducing me to the new world in which I am starting to build up my life from zero again. But it was not from zero as I imagined, there was my piano and my music that protected me and opened a new way for me.
Once I was thinking that before humanity discovered sound, where was it? How was it found?
I was with my music student, and I started to imagine a story about how or where sound started, that a small girl decided to start a journey to search for sound. And through her trip she meets all the great natural elements who help her find the place where sound comes from and she gets totally blown away by the amazing great forest where all the sound of the universe comes from. She starts to walk into this great place and smells and touches the colourful sounds that make her fly in her own imagination to realize at the end of her trip that the sound source is nothing other than her own heart and great soul. Even though such a reality doesn’t make people appreciate how powerful sound is, if we just stopped for a second and gave it a thought: how would we be able to express ourselves? And how would many other things in life be without the existence of sound? Some research says that we humans can see through sounds, as well as smell and taste. The thought itself can give us a little glimpse of what sound can change or add. I think that this might be a big part of my connection to the sea and the sounds I hear when I am there.
It was my mission to find a new home, the place that I wanted to be my home, and it is the country that I ended up in, Denmark. The lovely place with all the great and open opportunities to start again, to gain my wasted life, to build up a life that I dreamed about, dreamt of for a long time. So here I call it the new beginning, my new home. I feel really connected to many things here, social values and freedom as well.
I talk a lot about these two things because, in my own opinion, they are the basic elements to build a healthy society and to grow a good generation, to make the earth a better place to be for us humans.