Dida Guigan. (Credit: Rights reserved)
Surrounded by the musicians of her Beirut Express Quintet, the graceful, long-haired brunette swept her audience away last Thursday at the "Jazz sous les étoiles" ("Jazz under the Stars") festival (Sept. 5 — 8 in the Swiss village of Saint-Luc, in the canton of Valais). The jazz was mixed, trilingual and well-traveled.
The band played an “Arab jazz” which, through covers of songs by Asmahan ("Enta hataraf"), Fairuz ("Aatini El Nay") and Marcel Khalife ("Asfour," "Nami, Nami Ya Seghirreh"), as well as tunes she composed, tells her moving story. It's the story of a young woman whose quest for identity manifests itself as much in her vocation as a singer as in her determination to seek out her Lebanese roots.
Dida Guigan at the opening concert of the "Jazz sous les étoiles" (“Jazz under the Stars”) festival in Switzerland. (Credit: Walter Hug)
Born in Beirut
Born in Beirut in 1984, Dida Guigan was adopted exactly 40 years ago at “barely ten days old” by a Franco-Swiss couple. With her two adoptive brothers and sister — all Lebanese but from different mothers — she grew up with loving parents. “My father, who had known Lebanon before the war, fell in love with it. He brought us up to love this country. We were always rocked by Arabic music, Fairuz's voice in particular, and we always ate Lebanese food,” recalled the singer, adding that she felt the call of her roots at a very young age. “Despite having had a trouble-free childhood, I needed to know the context of my birth and the identity of my biological parents,” she said.
'It was as if my body was returning to its roots!'
At 18, Guigan discovered country of birth during a family trip carried out at her request. “The emotional charge of this first contact with my native land was intense. As soon as I set foot there, I felt my whole being tremble, as if my body were returning to its homeland. I knew immediately that I was going to return. Alone. It was obvious.”
She made several short stays in Lebanon, hoping to find her birth mother and biological family, but to no avail. The subject of adoptions during the war remains taboo in Lebanon, and it was with great difficulty that she managed to gain access to her birth records in a hospital in Achrafieh.
Guigan was able to confirm her birth mother's name and address at the time. But as time passed and the family deserted the neighborhood, her search came to nothing. Disappointed, she abandoned her quest for identity.
After earning a master's degree in social sciences, she resolutely turned to the fulfillment of her other great dream: To be a singer. So she enrolled at the Bern University of Music and Performing Arts, where her singular, hushed voice led her into the jazzy register. It was her musical studies that, in one of those unforeseen twists of fate, paradoxically paved the way for her true return to Lebanon and her reunion with her birth mother.
It was a harmless remark from her composition teacher, who asked her one day why she didn't sing in Arabic since she was of Lebanese origin, that changed everything. “That question left me speechless. I stayed locked up in my room for two days, brooding over my thoughts, after which I decided to move to Lebanon for several months at a time, to really reconnect with my Lebanese-ness.”
She had initially left for six months then stayed for four years. From 2010 to 2014, Guigan immersed herself in learning the Arabic language, music and singing, while working with international NGOs involved in educational causes, particularly in southern Lebanon.
“I discovered that the life force that had always carried me and made me unique came from Lebanon. And that beyond my mother, it was a culture that I was intrinsically missing that I had gone to find,” she confided to L'Orient-Le Jour.
“In fact, as soon as I sang in Arabic, I felt the same emotion, the same trembling of my whole being as when I first arrived. Even my voice, which doesn't suit all registers, naturally embraced the Oriental,” added the singer who recorded her first album, "Home," in Beirut — a skillful blend of English jazz and Mediterranean music in which her voice expresses itself with unrivaled talent and warmth.
Her social fiber and her curiosity for the culture of her native country were thus fulfilled. Although she had occasionally scanned passers-by in the hope of catching a glimpse of her mother, especially in the Geitawi district, where she learned her mother lived when she was born, the young singer had refused to dwell on the past.
The Beirut Express Quintet
But while she had written off her reunion with her biological parents, it was through a series of coincidences that she took part in a reality show on LBC, "Safha Jdide" ("New Page") and the miracle happened: She found traces of her mother. In another twist of fate, she learned that her mother had rebuilt her life in Switzerland, living just a few kilometers from her home.
“I finally had confirmation of what I had instinctively understood: That my mother had been through some very difficult times, and that she hadn't parted from me casually,” she said modestly. In hushed tones, she explained that her mother had been the victim of an abusive husband who had already taken away her first-born child: A fate she had wanted to avoid for her daughter by giving her up for adoption abroad.
Ten years after she first set foot on her native soil, things finally came full circle. Guigan returned to Switzerland to find both her blood mother (DNA test) and her parents. There, surrounded by Swiss and Arab musicians, she will launch the Beirut Express Quintet.
A group she would like to see “as a bridge of artistic exchange between my two countries,” said the singer whose musical universe is enriched by her multiple identities.
Accompanied by drummer and percussionist Noé Tavelli, double bassist Manu Hagmann, pianist Mirko Maio and Lebanese oudist Samir Nasr Eddine, and occasionally playing the riq (a type of tambourine used as a traditional instrument in Arabic music) herself, Guigan sings with vibrancy and sincerity.
But above all, through her compositions and interpretations — which draw on the repertoire of jazz and the Arab musical heritage — the profound aim of this Swiss-Lebanese singer is “to give a voice to a people for whom art is the only means of expression left,” she quietly confessed in conclusion.
This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour; English version was edited by Yara Malka.
