I Am YEG Arts: Shumaila Hemani, Ph.D.

Her sound art finds its ears and audiences in unexpected and unforeseeable places. Its place of beginning? A deep urge and calling to create — An intuition to listen, feel, question, and respond. Her name is Shumaila Hemani, and her impressive list of accomplishments are ever-growing (and long!). An award-winning singer-songwriter, acousmatic composer, sing-style poet, spoken-word artist, ethnographer, performer of traditional Sufi repertoire — and an academic — Hemani brings an insatiable curiosity to all her work. It’s what fuels her to dig deeper, listen harder, and generously share the stories that inspire her. Artist, composer, and self-described perspective-maker, this week’s ​“I Am YEG Arts” story belongs to Shumaila Hemani.

Tell us about your connection to Edmonton.

I came to Edmonton in 2008 to study with Professor Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, a highly respected Ethnomusicologist with a specialization in the music of South Asia. Prof. Qureshi mentored my M.A. thesis on Pakistan’s cultural policy towards performing arts, which is the pioneering thesis on this subject. Later, I pursued my Ph.D. with her on the sung Sufi poetry by Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai (a.k.a., Shah Jo Raag) in Sindh, Pakistan, which is also a work that has inspired further research on this subject. After I graduated in 2019, I began working as an instructor at the Faculty of Extension, teaching courses in communication. I also received the Cultural Diversity Award from the Edmonton Arts Council to work on my debut album, Mannat.

Was music always a natural fit for you? What was it about the arts that made you feel like you belonged?

Music has been my heart’s calling. Since early teenage, I began to find a safe haven in listening to music, and it gave me a space to explore what I wanted in life, which was very distant from the constraints that my socio-economic situation placed on me. I also realized around the time I was seventeen that I wanted to pursue a study of music at college, but people thought that I could never do it because I did not have the funds to pursue a study abroad, let alone a study in music, because I did not have any musical training from a conservatory.

A significant part of my undergraduate education in Pakistan, followed by nearly my entire graduate study, was funded with scholarships and grants. In Pakistan, studying music is considered an elitist preoccupation, and I could not have been where I am today without a strong sense of purpose and faith in the direction that my heart has led me towards. I am a non-conformist by nature and have felt disconnected with the world and the society around me for most of my life. It was in the arts that I experienced a connection and belonging, and whenever I have expressed something deep lying in my heart with poetry, music, painting, videos, or sounds, it has always found its ears and audiences in unexpected and unforeseeable places.

As a storyteller, what narrative or inspiration do you find yourself returning to?

My primary inspiration is spiritual lore that I absorbed as a child growing up in an Ismaili, Muslim family, while singing the poetry of the ginans. Sacred figures, such as Ali, who are powerful figures in Sufi poetry have a deep impact on me. The folktales from South Asian culture are also stories I return to with my research and aesthetic engagement with the Sufi poetry by Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. I also write my own tales inspired by modern English literature that I have read throughout my life and stories inspired by my life journey.

What’s the creative process like for you? Where do you usually begin?

For a few years now, the creative process begins with the reality that I am confronting and a compelling urge to respond to it with art. It begins with a deep urge and calling to create, such that I am forced to take a break from my academic work. In 2012, I wrote a long Urdu poem in a state of migraines on my birthday. My headache was quite debilitating and did not allow me to celebrate the day, but somehow, I became fine after writing poetry. A few verses from that poem are part of the song ​“Baydaari” (awakening), which I recorded for Alberta Musical Theatre’s A World of Stories in October, 2020. I had a similar urge in July, 2020, when I was compiling my music recordings. I was pushed to create ​“Perils of Heavy Rainfall” based on the floods in my hometown, Karachi. This composition transformed my creative direction, and I could not have anticipated that it would become the guiding light to create new acousmatic compositions shedding visibility on Pakistan’s present climate crisis.

The place of beginning for me is deep listening to what is externally happening around me and how my body is responding to it. It is in listening to these conversations between internal and external that is the place of beginning for my art. I begin wherever my intuition is guiding me. Usually, it is something that is buried in my chest that is in need to be let out. Once it is out on paper or sound, I get clear on how to move forward with a particular piece that I am working on. Sometimes, what I have let out is the bigger goal or direction in which the present piece becomes the first step. Art sheds visibility to myriad levels of daily perception that would otherwise stay silent in the crevices of our being.

Tell us about a lesson you’ve had to learn more than once.

I’ve had to learn and relearn the lesson that self-doubt only creates delays in aesthetic endeavours. I’ve had to learn to keep my faith and let the process take its time. I have learned to trust my gut, the hard way, and I have to remind myself to honour my hard work because if I do not, I cannot expect others to do so either.

What qualities overlap in being an academic and an artist? What has each role taught you about yourself?

The quality that overlaps is curiosity — we need to stay in a state of wonder, ask many questions, and dig deeper into our subjectivities and how we are approaching the subject matter. Questions such as, ​“Why are we doing this, and what is the purpose of it?” are relevant to ask in either academic or artistic work. And the more we dig, the more genuine and authentic our work is. Each role has taught me that while I am influenced by many artists and academics around me, I do not imitate them. I have an original voice that stems from my experience of the world, and that is a positive quality in me that my mentors have also acknowledged.

What is a Shumaila Hemani live show like? How do you hope to make people feel?

I take people on a journey to see and feel the meanings in the poetry with spoken word, acousmatic compositions, Sufi singing, video installations with snippets of my artistic journey, and the interpretations I bring to the song. I take people from a place of knowing to a place of unlearning, unknowing, and reformulating their relationship with what is otherwise familiar. In my view, it is this experience that many people articulate as experiencing ​“trance,” ​“inner peace,” or feeling more deeply connected with the Divine after my live performances. My goal is to develop a connection with the people that I am otherwise not able to build or sustain in my real life and help people discover parts of themselves they have always wanted to engage with more deeply but could not because it did not conform to the realities they lived in.

What does community mean to you, and where do you find it?

This is a very difficult question for me because even though my artistic and academic work seeks to serve the communities I have grown in, I find myself more and more distant from them as I evolve in my endeavours. The cultural communities I have grown in find my work too complex and have disengaged, and I am at a point where my academic friends also cannot keep up with a range of the aesthetic endeavours I am involved in. For the longest time, my community was my mentors. Regula Burckhardt Qureshi was one person who used to keep up with all the different aspects of me, and even though she has lost her memory as a result of Alzheimer’s and cannot speak, she still tries to cheer me on in my various pursuits whenever I talk to her and her daughter, Sabina. My Ustad Hameed Ali Khan Sahib gave me a sense of community and belonging by teaching me the Sufi repertoire that the Ustads of gharana only pass down to their own kin. Apart from them, my mother is my community because she stands with me at all times.

I also believe that each work of mine has the potential to create a community around it. And I will continue to touch lives and maybe even tangibly meet the people I touch from time to time. For now, I feel like a child holding on to imaginary friends, my mother, and my mentors (some alive, some passed away) to keep an imaginary sense of community and not get too isolated.

Tell us a little about what you’re currently working on or hoping to explore next.

I recently released my debut music album, Mannat, which focuses on the climate crisis in Pakistan, with sung Sufi poetry from Sindh. In this album, I have shared many rare Sufi compositions that I have learned from two master musicians in Pakistan, including late-Ustad Hameed Ali Khan Sahib (from the Gwalior gharana in Sindh) and Faqir Jumman Shah (from the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai).

Recently, I also represented a perspective from the global South on climate justice at the first Canadian Climate Music Summit, organized by Music Declares Emergency in Toronto, followed by a video installation that was exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum on October 28^th.

I am also participating in the Global Music Match 2022, which is the largest online music collaboration. So, in the upcoming months, I hope to post more music collaborations on social media, curate sound exhibits of my acousmatic compositions at art galleries in Alberta, and do more live performances and talks on the need for contributing our voices towards climate justice.

When you’re taking a break from a project, what will we likely find you doing?

I value fresh air and open spaces, so you will see me going for a walk or sitting on a bench close to the river valley and watching other people’s pets playing around.

What excites you most about the YEG arts scene right now?

Edmonton has grown as a cultural center of Alberta with the immigration of diverse groups and communities, and these cultural conversations keep getting enriched. What I am excited about most is the potential that cross-cultural collaborations with poets, sound artists, dancers, videographers, and visual artists within the YEG arts scene offers. My album’s cover art was created by a Chinese visual artist, Jhinzhe (a.k.a., awakening_​art), whom I met on Whyte Ave — a robust cultural hub in Edmonton. I would also love to participate in the Alberta Culture Days, Edmonton Folk Festival, SkirtsAfire, and many other music festivals taking place in Edmonton in the months to come.

Want more YEG Arts Stories? We’ll be sharing them here all year and on social media using the hashtag #IamYegArts. Follow along!

Click here to learn more about Shumaila Hemani and here for a sneak peek into to making of her album, Mannat!

About Shumaila Hemani, Ph.D.

Shumaila Hemani, Ph.D., is an award-winning Alberta-based Sufi singer-songwriter, acousmatic composer, sing-style poet, spoken-word artist, and performer of traditional Sufi repertoire. Her composition, ​“Perils of Heavy Rainfall,” received the Second Prize at the Listening During COVID contest curated by the Canadian Association of Sonic Ecology (CASE), and the pioneering Canadian soundscape composer Hildegard Westerkamp applauded her debut album, Mannat, for beautifully taking listeners to an immersive world of different music, chanting, and drones. The Edmonton Journal applauded Hemani for ​“creating audible sculptures evoking powerful imagery and stirring potent emotion,” and tackling climate change with Sufi poetry.

Hemani spoke at the first Canadian Music Climate Summit in Toronto in October 2022, followed by a video exhibit from her music album at the Royal Ontario Museum. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the largest online music collaboration, Global Music Match (2022), TD Incubator Arts Common, and Mount Royal University’s Trico Changemakers Studio.

Hemani received the Cultural Diversity Award, and her poem ​“Living with Purpose” (published in New Forum) has been nominated for the Alberta Magazine Awards in Poetry (2022). Her original single, ​“Anticipating,” was featured in the cross-Canada tour for Suicide Prevention Awareness and Hope (2020) and has been critically acclaimed for expressing ​“a visceral emotionality and a deep musicality expertly ushering listeners into a place of contemplation and consideration” (John Wright at Radio Airplay, 2020).

Today, Hemani continues her work as an ethnomusicologist, contributing articles for public engagement in The Conversation, the Canadian National Post, the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences, the ArtsDesk (UK), and the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. She is also currently completing her first monograph for Routledge’s Islam and Human Rights Series, supported by the Asian Music Society Award for Independent Scholars, State of Kuwait Award in Islamic Studies, and the Institute of Ismaili Studies Alumni Research Award.