Beats of Home: Finding belonging through music. 

The lights dim, the bass shakes the floor, and the crowd presses closer. My sister Hibotep and I stand side by side, feeding sound into the room. Faces blur into motion, bodies surrender to rhythm, and for a moment the noise of the world falls away. Here, behind the decks, I feel something rare: home. Not a home of walls or borders, but one that hums in my chest, carried on every beat we play. Suddenly, I began reflecting on everything that had led me here.   

I thought of how the home that I now call my own was never a given, but something I had to carve out of rejection, confusion, and displacement.  

My parents once lived in Mogadishu – yes, the Mogadishu of the 60s and 70s, when Somaliness was more layered and alive, and music was its heartbeat. I’ve never seen that city, but my mother painted it for us: neighborhoods where people were known by place, not clan, where Somalis, Italians, Arabs and Indians mingled in the streets, and the air carried the scent of uunsi and the sound of taarab and jazz drifting from radios. It was a city of neighbors who shared everything, of elders treated like everyone’s parents, of women moving with quiet grace in their garays and garabsaar. Through her stories, I inherited a Mogadishu that felt whole, a city that still hums in me like a memory I never lived.    

But then the war broke out, and my parents fled to Addis Ababa, where all but one of us were born.   

Ethiopia was the only place I knew as a child; Amharic, alongside Somali, claimed ownership of my tongue. Yet the perks of belonging to two worlds came with the cost of belonging to none. I was Somali to the Ethiopians – a reminder of otherness, a mark on my forehead that was hard to ignore, even to my closest people.  Among the Somalis, too, I was Habesha, never Somali enough.

I grew up stranded between two worlds, each one pushing me out. I remember the sting of being told, “Go back to where you came from,” and the bewilderment that followed. Where was I supposed to go? My universe had never stretched beyond Addis.    

But then finally one day, when I was six, I went to Abudwaq, Somalia, to visit my grandmother.  One of the most vivid memories I have of that time includes waking up outside, lying on a mat spread across the soft red sand, while the cold morning breeze brushed against my face.   

Across the way, a group of men sat chatting under the branches of an acacia tree. Curious, I asked my grandmother if they were Habesha. She laughed, her voice deep and warm, and said “No, my child. They are Somali, just like you.” That moment shook me. Suddenly, my world expanded beyond Ethiopia. I was in Somalia. But with every expansion came contraction. My sense of identity became more complicated, more fragmented. And no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t feel I belonged. If I wasn’t Ethiopian there, and not fully Somali here, what was I? I kept asking myself.   

For years, I carried that restlessness. My siblings, especially my twin, were my refuge, but even they couldn’t silence the ache of searching for a place that might embrace me fully.   

When I finished high school, I was assigned to Mekele University in Ethiopia. I was thrilled at first - I would be with my best friend, and I looked forward to the adventure. But as time passed, the restlessness settled in. Mekele felt too small, the education wasn’t expanding my worldview in the ways I needed. And finally, my dissatisfaction grew into a decision: I would drop out.    

When I told my parents, they surprised me by an unexpected understanding. Just four days later, my entire life was packed into bags, and I boarded a plane to Kampala, Uganda. I was nineteen.   

Arriving in Uganda was like being tossed into deep waters. Suddenly I was in a country where people had European names, and everyone spoke English. I enrolled in university again – I also felt like an alien, but at least this time it felt justified. 

My twin sister wasn’t with me at first, but my brother was there. He moved through Kampala with such confidence - bargaining with vendors, carrying himself with certainty. I admired his bravery though I didn’t yet share it.   

My first year in Uganda was slow and lonely. I moved cautiously, testing the waters and learning the rhythms of this new place. But life has a way of unfolding when the right people arrive. Eventually, my sister and cousins joined us. And with them my courage grew.   

One random evening as we strolled through our neighborhood, we passed by a doorway I had seen many times before. The sign above was shaped like a fish, and it read “Happier Tilapia”. Something mysterious about it called to me, but as a hijabi, I was hesitant. I didn’t know what I would find behind that door, or why it felt magnetic. But teased by my family, I was double-dared to go in.  

So I did.   

What I found behind that door would change my life. It was nothing grand: dim light, cracked walls, a floor that trembled underfoot. But inside, the air buzzed with freedom. Misfits, dreamers, artists – they all gathered not to blend in, but to exist, raw and unapologetic. It became the place where I danced in public for the first time in my life.   

That night led to many others. I was like a little child who had discovered a treasure. Only in my case, that treasure was something most people take for granted: belonging.   

I discovered a world of film, art, and conversations that challenged everything I thought I knew. Lena, a Siberian filmmaker and teacher, and Arlen, an Armenian-Greek cinema buff, trained in anthropology who would later co-found Nyege Nyege Tapes, curated the film screenings. Their film choices were rarely comfortable; they unsettled audiences, sparked debate, and opened doors to ways of seeing I hadn’t imagined before. I loved that discomfort, that invitation to think differently.   

After nights at Happier Tilapia, my sister and I would walk home with ginger sodas in hand, feeling, for once, that we belonged to something bigger than ourselves.   

Music became a natural extension of this new belonging. On Wednesdays, people shared music at the bar. And because I loved collecting songs from near and far, I plugged in my phone one night and played tracks for the room. The joy of sharing music, and the energy it created, sparked something in me. And for the first time, I thought: maybe I could be a DJ.   

I started rushing from university classes just to make it to Happier Tilapia. It wasn’t just a club, it was a symphony of beautiful chaos, a space where imperfection was celebrated.   

But nothing good lasts. Eventually, Happier Tilapia closed. For us, it felt like losing a sanctuary. We scrambled to recreate the magic, lugging our DJ controllers to strange locations, a liquor depot, for instance, where we stacked empty beer crates into a makeshift DJ booth. We blasted music into the street until the police shut us down.    

From there, the search continued. We drifted to a place called High Liz, where Arlen and I tested experimental sounds. Like us, our music was fragmented but held together by the rhythms of perseverance. It was often met with disgust. Once, an old man told me we were “trying to kill him” with our tracks. But rejection played a familiar tune—we knew how to sing along, and it only fueled us.   

Our friends Derrick and Arlen started a party series called Boutique Electronic. It was a place for the sounds that didn’t belong anywhere else. People came, curious and open, and their crowds grew too large to be contained by bars and clubs, forcing us into warehouses. And from warehouses, we spilled into something bigger.    

That something was Nyege Nyege.   

The first Nyege Nyege Festival was small - mostly artists performing for each other, with only a handful of friends in attendance. But it planted a seed. For the first time, local artists on the fringe had a stage to experiment and express themselves. 

New genres were born in this crucible: Acholitronix, Congo techno, and other sounds that defied categorization. Nyege Nyege became a cultural explosion, drawing artists and audiences from across the world.   

The Ugandan government, alarmed by rumors and misperceptions, threatened to shut the festival down almost every year. Ironically, the controversy only fueled its growth. The more the authorities denounced Nyege Nyege, the more curious people became. They came to see for themselves, then stayed for the magic. Each year, the festival grew bigger, louder, and more uncontainable.    

For me, Nyege Nyege means more than a festival. It is the culmination of a thousand small yeses and nos, a domino effect of decisions that began when I walked through the door of Happier Tilapia. It is the community I dreamed of as a child, the one that makes the world feel wide again instead of narrow.   

Today, Nyege Nyege is a global platform. Artists from Uganda travel abroad to share their music, while international performers come here, exchanging ideas and sounds. What began as a refuge for misfits has become a movement.    

Now I see how the pieces connect. The confusion of childhood, the loneliness of migration, the courage of my siblings, the closed door of Mekele University, the open door of Happier Tilapia, all of it led me here.    

So, standing in front of a Boiler Room crowd – some of them screaming my stage name, “Houdini,” a merging of my name, Hodan, and my grandparents’ name, Dini – with my twin by my side, I carry all of that with me: the alienation, the rejection, the confusion. None of it disappeared. Instead, it wove itself into rhythm, into the sound that makes strangers dance as if we were kin.   

“Go back where you came from,” still echoes in my mind, but I just smile, now that I see I was never meant to shrink into someone else’s idea of home. I was meant to expand. And through music, I finally did. I used to think belonging was something you stumbled upon, something others allowed you, but now I know it can be built – note by note, beat by beat – until it fills the room and says: you are home.