Elie Ayyoub, known as “da7ik allayl” in the Lebanese arena is famous for his jokes, one-man-shows and skillfulness at making his audiences laugh till they drop. Here, we can watch one of his 90s songs poking fun, directly and indireclty, in words and images, at Srilankan people. It is pretty powerful to see how long our inherent mocking of the other dates back to and how it is engraved in everyday things we do like songs and performances. Worst of it all, is that when I was much younger and clueless about all racism related sprees, when this song was out, I totally found it funny and can sing it word by word very swiftly- not that it has many words. It just proves how without education, whether feminist education, non violent education, anti racism education, people just grow up to take everything normalized as sick as it can be, this song and what it depicts as an example.

Enjoy da7ik allayl.