Bedouine on displacement and the long tail of sadness

The title song to Azniv Korkejian’s fourth album as Bedouine, Neon Summer Skin, recreates a perfect childhood day: "Being taken to the pool, where my only worry is being dragged away when the sun’s setting," she says. Steeped in dreamy 1970s soft pop, the track is meant to "paint a picture of what it’s like to feel safe," a contrast she traces to children in Palestine and Lebanon who are not afforded that right.

Korkejian’s family are Armenian; she and her parents were born in Syria and her brothers in Saudi Arabia, where the family lived "on a US compound that was like a gated community" until 1995. They relocated to the US through the green card lottery after the Gulf war—"And thank God, because we would eventually have had to return to Syria," she says—yet as a child she felt the move as loss, memory of a first Halloween in Massachusetts underlined by "this sense that I could just continue walking for ever" compared with the finite bounds of their compound.

bedouine, azniv korkejian, neon summer, soft pop, 1970s, displacement, palestine, lebanon, armenian, syria