Rising Star

By Yasseen

I miss my friends at Appleton and I miss the milk. There's no milk like Appleton, Wisconsin, milk, says Rula Zaki.

Rula, 29, a rising star amongst Egypt's singers, tells us in her best known song that we live on an indivisible planet."Love the world, we are one," runs the lyric her father, Galal, wrote for her. It commemorates 9/11 and is a message of love and peace to the US and the world.

Rula sang it originally at the Cairo American College (CAC) 9/11 anniversary and then at the Maadi Community Church and the American University in Cairo (AUC) reunion. She also sang it at a British Embassy fund raising event to send Egyptian Special Olympics entrants to the games in Ireland.

Rula, who is from a Muslim family, is herself proof of the indivisibility of mankind. She sings Western melodies with the same verve and polish she devotes to the quarter tones of Arab music.

She sings in ten languages: Arabic, English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Turkish, Greek, Korean and Hindi. But, perhaps most surprisingly for someone who can sing to Arab-style music, she received her education and voice and musical training almost entirely in US institutions.

What is she up to now?

She recently sang on Egypt's Starmaker TV programme, which is similar to American Idol in the US. She sang , "You needed me", by Ann Murray, and "Its Impossible", a version of which was once sung by Perry Como. The producers put Arabic words to the tune. Then she sang an Arabic song to Arab music , "Meen ily goa fi alby (Who is in my heart).

"The program was aired throughout the Arab world and a woman in Saudi Arabia wrote a poem and asked me to sing it and do a video clip for her dad's birthday. I'm still working on the tune."

Three people are helping her to make a tape in Arabic: a lyricist--Baha El-Din Mohammed--who has written songs for two famous Egyptian singers, Amr Diab and Samira Sa'eed, and two others who are working on the tunes and arrangements..

She also now sings at the Peking Restaurant in Cairo's Ma'adi suburb on Monday evenings and does a karaoke show at the Nile-side Hard Rock Café with her husband. "He is the karaoke jockey and I am the host. I sing three songs."

She is the mother of a two-year-old baby boy, Karim, whom her husband and parents take care of when she is away in a studio or at a performance.

She began her school and singing career at the Cairo American College (CAC) where Larry P. Catlin, the school's Director of Music, was her music teacher and private vocal teacher for seven years.

Rauf Zaidan, the founder of Cairo's New Opera House Choir, worked with her from 1982 when she was nine. Her voice, he said, had "all the makings of a magnificent natural soprano" and she sang at the Cairo Opera House as a young child.

While still at school she gave soprano solo performances in the Faure Requiem (Pie Jesu) and the Vivaldi 'Gloria' (Domine Jesu). She also performed in the operas, 'The Merry Widow' and 'Carmen,' as well as the musicals 'Starlight Express' and 'Carnival'. The climax came with a stunning performance in a school production of "My Fair Lady" which brought her acclaim beyond the walls of the school.

The school's Music Director "took me to New York where I stayed with his parents and went to the Crane School of Music. His parents were good people. They really looked after me. I was 12, the youngest in the school. I won an award as the most outstanding vocalist."

In High School she was offered seven scholarships to reputable US universities to study music. She and her parents and music advisers plumped for Lawrence University in a small, quiet town-- Appleton, Wisconsin. There, on a four-year-scholarship, she obtained a Bachelor of Music degree in 1995.

Since then she has taken the lead roles, acting and singing, in Walt Disney's Arabic version of 'Little Mermaid', 'Toy Story 2' and 'Cinderella'. She sang at the opening of the 36th International Advertising World Congress (IAA) in Cairo, in May 1998 and at the launch of Egypt's First Lady's 'Give a Kid a Hand' worldwide campaign.

She has sung professionally for TV and radio in Egypt, Jordan and the USA as well as acted and sung in numerous TV commercials. While at school she won the Arion award for vocal music and she was the Grand Prize Winner of the Cairo 2000 International Song Festival.

"My dream is to tour the US and Europe and sing for love and peace. I feel our part of the world has been negatively stereotyped."

She says she never felt foreign in the US. Her time at CAC and her travels to other American schools in Europe – in The Hague, Vienna, Belgium and London— to take part in honor choirs helped her to fit in easily.

Her CAC High School fees were very high by Egyptian standards, she says, and once she couldn't afford to go on an honor choir trip for which she had been chosen. "My chemistry teacher, Marcia Mett, paid for me. I'll never forget her kindness."

She is still in touch with Marcia and the Schultz family of Appleton, "They sort of adopted me. I made a lot of friends. People would ask me where I came from and when I told them Egypt, they'd say, 'Wow!' and start talking. I'm still in touch with many of them .

"We e-mail and telephone each other. The Schultzes came to visit us and we went to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean coast together. They loved it and want to come again."

Yasseen is the author of a coming-of-age story called 'Emigrating Home', which takes you from his birthplace, Jamaica, a British colony at the time, to his schools in Britain, and to the home he did not know, in Egypt. Born a dual British-Egyptian national, he was called into the armies of his two countries when they were in conflict. The experience spreadeagled him across a divide and Yasseen often felt akin to the mythical Jason and the Argonauts in his travels. You can visit Yasseen at www.emigratinghome.com.