DOM TAK , SEASON ONE

Researcher / Writer – Sowt

Dom Tak is a narrative podcast series by Sowt that revisits the lives of Arab female singers whose artistic legacy has often been shaped by admiration, omission, contradiction, and erasure. Across the season, the series constructs audio biographies that move through fragmented archives, oral histories, and musical references to trace how these women navigated fame, gendered expectation, and cultural memory within different Arab contexts.

Through long-form storytelling, Dom Tak examines how music becomes a site where public myth and private life intersect, and how women’s artistic contributions are often remembered through selective or incomplete narratives.

One episode reconstructs the story of Aziza Jalal, whose rapid rise and early withdrawal from public life continue to shape her mythologisation in Arab popular culture. Another traces Masoud Al-Amartli, a rural Iraqi singer whose life and persona sit at the intersection of folk tradition, gender ambiguity, and oral performance practices. A third follows Aisha Al-Falatiya, one of Sudan’s early recorded female voices, situating her within the emergence of broadcasting and the social negotiations that accompanied women’s presence in public sound.

Through layered research processes combining archival recordings, press material, fragmented documentation, and musical excerpts, Aida formed narratives that rely as much on absence and gaps as on available testimony. The writing then develops these materials into structured audio essays that move between biography, cultural analysis, and sonic memory, shaping each episode as both a narrative reconstruction and an investigation into how histories of Arab music are produced and preserved.

Credits
Written by Aida Kaadan; produced and edited by Sabrin Taha; sound direction by Taysir Qabbani; hosted by Rana Daoud.