Tamer Nafar has spent more than two decades saying what others might hesitate to say. As a co-founder of DAM, the pioneering Palestinian hip-hop group, and one of the most recognisable voices in Arabic rap, he has built a career on confronting power, identity and the contradictions of Palestinian life with little interest in making anyone comfortable.
So when I sit down with the 47-year-old rapper and offer the most ordinary of pleasantries, "Hello, how are you?", his answer is anything but ordinary.
"I'm an Arab citizen of Israel," he replies, wearily.
In six words, Nafar gives an answer to a question that is rarely as simple as it sounds. It is a reminder that for him, even the most casual conversation is entangled with questions of identity, belonging and survival.
Two years ago, at this same festival, Nafar told The Guardian that music could not stop a war machine. Even then, however, he held on to something of Tupac's belief that an artist might spark the mind of the person who would eventually change the world.
Today, however, he has lost patience with that idea. When I ask whether he still believes that now, the idea does not survive the first minute of our conversation.
“F*** that," he says. "I said that before the genocide. What changes the world is oil deals."
It is a raw answer from an artist who has turned decades of blunt, hard-hitting lyrics into global hits and sold-out tours. He is not here to perform optimism, particularly when the facts offer so little reason for it.
Political leaders are not waiting to be persuaded by the right lyric. Their decisions are shaped by power, money, military relationships and technology.
Nafar knows he cannot overturn those forces simply by making something beautiful or politically compelling, but that does not mean he should abandon his art. It means being honest about its place in the hierarchy of change.
The law of the jungle
Nafar's performance at WOMAD comes at a strange moment for Palestinian music.
Palestinian artists are reaching new audiences across the world, selling out shows and claiming space on international stages.
There is a renewed interest in Palestinian music, culture and identity, but that attention has arrived amid, and often in response to, Israel's genocide in Gaza and the accelerating ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank.
How does Nafar feel about that bitter irony?
"That's the law of the jungle," he replies.
Palestinian culture is flourishing internationally at the same moment that Palestinian life is being destroyed. Music is carrying Palestinian stories across the world, yet the political forces determining their lives remain largely unmoved.
The contradiction hangs over our conversation. How should an artist understand success when it comes amid so much loss? What does it mean for the world to embrace Palestinian music while refusing to protect or defend Palestinian lives?
Nafar does not try to force a hopeful answer.
"There are three things we are fighting at once," he says.
"The genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Arab-on-Arab crime [in Israel]," he adds.
"It's about survival."
Nafar is from Lyd, one of several Palestinian towns where organised crime and violence have devastated communities amid accusations of systematic neglect by the Israeli authorities.
For him, the threats Palestinians face cannot be reduced to a single geography or one form of violence.
His answer moves between Gaza, the West Bank and Palestinian communities inside Israel because that is the political reality he inhabits.
Each crisis is distinct, but none can be separated from the wider structures governing Palestinian life.
He has moved away from the idea that music can reach the powerful and awaken something dormant within them. The problem is not that political leaders have failed to hear Palestinians clearly enough. The problem is power itself.
"Oil deals change the world. Weapons and technology change it. Political choices change it," he says.
A song, he knows, sits much further down that hierarchy. For Nafar, the task is to locate where he can still make art within it.
"I don't have the mindset that if only Donald Trump heard a moving song, he would suddenly decide to change his ways. That's bullshit."
He looks out across the festival site, dotted with Palestinian flags, keffiyehs, 'Make Peace Not War' paraphernalia, and plenty of glitter.
"But, you know, I am a little jigsaw piece in the puzzle of the world."
One small piece, trying to understand where his work fits and the limits of what it can do. In the world of festivals and grandiose gestures, it is a more modest claim for art than we are used to hearing, but a refreshingly honest one at that.
Nafar understands the world, recognises his place within it and knows the scale of the task ahead.
Overturning a genocidal government sustained by powerful imperial backers across the world, clearly, is going to take more than a few albums.
Different songs, different energy
Nafar helped pioneer Palestinian hip-hop as a co-founder of DAM, whose music brought the politics and daily realities of Palestinian life inside Israel to audiences around the world.
The group's work has never separated the political from the personal. Occupation, racism, poverty and violence sit alongside family, humour, self-criticism and the complicated reality of life in Palestinian towns.
Across a catalogue that has moved through Arabic, Hebrew and English, DAM developed a language for experiences that were either misrepresented or absent from mainstream culture.
Their music did not set out to explain Palestinians to the world politely; it documented the world in which they were already living.
Although Nafar is now developing his solo work, he is quick to stress that he is still performing with DAM.
The two projects require "different energy and different songs," he tells The New Arab. Moving between them means moving between different parts of himself and between music created at different political and personal moments.
It is not a clean break with his past, and DAM very much remains part of his present.
When asked which song is his favourite to perform, he chooses In the Name of the Father. It is one of his most personal works, using music to return to family, memory and the conversations that remain unfinished after somebody is gone.
The song does not attempt to persuade a president or redirect international politics; its world is altogether smaller and more intimate.
That does not make it apolitical. Nafar's music repeatedly returns to the places where public history enters private life: the car journey, the family home, the distance between a father and son.
If the machinery of political change operates through weapons, technology and oil deals, art can still document what that machinery does to the people living beneath it.
For Nafar, that is no longer the same as claiming music will stop it.
'I’m not a musician, I'm a writer'
Music is only one part of Nafar's work, and he is now writing a new novel, 3Gs, that spans three generations of his family.
When asked about the shift, he rejects the premise. "I'm not a musician," he says. "I've always been a writer." He describes 3Gs as an "archive of my thoughts," built from a lifetime of recording ideas.
"Someone told me to write a book, and I've always been writing things down, so I looked back and thought, you know what, I think I can make a book out of this. They asked for a specific number of pages, and I thought, yeah, I can do that."
It is an understated account of becoming a novelist: years of thoughts, a page count and the sudden realisation that the book was already there.
3Gs is an imagined memoir spanning three generations of the Nafar family: Fawzi, the father; Tamer, the son; and Shaden, the son's future daughter.
The novel gives him room to hold histories, relationships and memories that cannot always be contained within a song.
Moving between generations also allows Nafar to explore how Palestinian history enters a family, shaping those who experience its ruptures differently but remain bound together by them.
For a Palestinian writer, the act of building an archive is political. Palestinian history has repeatedly been narrated by those responsible for Palestinian dispossession, stripped of its intimacy and reduced to a dispute over territory, security or competing claims.
A family archive does something else. It preserves people as people: contradictory, funny, difficult, loving and shaped by histories they did not choose.
'I have to stay for my children'
When asked how home is, Nafar's answer is blunt. "Many people are leaving," he shares.
He is referring to the worsening conditions for Palestinian citizens of Israel living in cities such as Lyd and Haifa, both home to significant Palestinian communities.
Has he ever considered leaving himself?
"For me, of course, I would love to get out of there. But I have to stay for my children."
On his arm are the stick figures of a child's drawing, made permanent in ink. I ask whether his children drew them. Yes, he replies.
"That’s how they see me on stage, when I am under the lights," he shares.
This small and tender image reminds me of the public weight placed upon Palestinian artists and on Nafar himself.
Their work is expected to represent a people, preserve a culture, explain a political struggle and even change the minds of those responsible for their mass murder, occupation and oppression.
Nafar is also just a father holding a microphone, beneath the stage lights, as seen through the eyes of his children somewhere in the back of the crowd.
He no longer accepts the burden of changing the world. He will continue to write, perform with DAM, create songs with different energies, and build an archive of his thoughts.
But he will not pretend a song can do the work of political power.
"What changes the world is oil deals," he tells The New Arab. Music cannot end a genocide; Nafar is clear about that now.
Music may not change the course of the world, but it is one of the places where history is told and the realities that power would flatten or erase are preserved.
Nafar's work holds the many layers of Palestinian life — its violence and contradictions, but also its gallows humour, intimacy and joy.
He may not complete the puzzle, but he has added a vital piece: a pioneering artist, now an emerging literary figure, refusing to fit a mould or sugarcoat his life to suit anyone's narrative other than his own.
Tamer Nafar's first book, '3Gs', a prose memoir, is slated for release in 2026.
Frances Leach is a London-based writer covering human rights, global affairs and world culture