The poet, a songwriter for artists including the Weeknd, explains how music helped him explore the loss of friends to inner-city violence: ‘Sorrow is meant to be experienced and felt’
Appearing on a Zoom call from his Los Angeles apartment, sporting the white, perforated kufi skullcap worn in mosques, 24-year-old Canadian musician Mustafa is a long way from Regent Park, the predominantly Black, working-class neighbourhood in downtown Toronto where he grew up. Regent Park is a place with a dual identity: one of camaraderie and community, the “building blocks for how I think, how I breathe and how I speak”, he says; the other deprivation and violence, where Mustafa’s adolescence was shaped by grief and death, including the murders of friends such as Ano, Santana, Ali, and the rapper Jahvante “Smoke Dawg” Smart.
Using the vulnerability of folk music – a genre that rarely makes space for the Black Muslim experience – Mustafa’s stunning debut long-form project, When Smoke Rises, is an elegy to these friends, a dialogue with those grieving and a love letter to his community. “Don’t crease your Air Forces, just stay inside tonight,” he begs his friends to a rhythm beaten out on acoustic guitar. Of Smoke Dawg, who was killed in 2018, he pleads, “Please come back, at least in my dreams”, over tender piano played by James Blake.
