Gabriel Teodros - An Open Letter to My Cousins in Israel
In Our Headphones
KEXP
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2023
⏱️ 3 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gabriel Teodros - "An Open Letter to My Cousins in Israel" from the 2023 self-released album From the Ashes of Our Homes
Today's Song of the Day comes from beloved local artist/activist (and former KEXP DJ) Gabriel Teodros, whose powerful latest LP, From the Ashes of Our Homes, reflects deeply on the theme of losing your home, whether to an actual fire (as in the case of Teodros himself) or to the pandemic, climate change, or war. In the case of today's Song of the Day, that home is Palestine, a place, as he sings, "where the soldiers show up and they look like us."
As he writes on Facebook:
I wrote this song thinking of all Ethiopians in the diaspora as “cousins” not knowing I had actual cousins in the IDF. I knew it was possible though.
Today I just found out one of our little cousins got summoned to the front lines out there.
To be scared for someone and scared about what they might do.
Sending love to everyone resisting war, resisting occupation, resisting the killing of innocent people.
We all have to do what we can to stop a genocide.
Resist. Free Palestine.
Read the full story at KEXP.org
Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donate
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Oh We alive in the belly of the beast, a two-headed monster, I'm a child of the east. |
| 0:21.0 | Africa, my family, were all all refugees scatter around the planet over |
| 0:24.8 | cotton and their seas. Some of us landed in land it just wasn't free. Found |
| 0:28.9 | contradiction where we tried to find peace. Real ground friction that'll make you find a peace and sound it's so |
| 0:34.3 | different they were selling us a dream some of us were forced conscripted into beef |
| 0:38.4 | to become the face of another person's grief some of us in in homes through each other's whole keys. |
| 0:44.0 | We're not treated equally. |
| 0:45.0 | We are not here peacefully. |
| 0:46.7 | We repeat everything that is unheeled here. |
| 0:49.2 | Victims are us and we victimize others at the same time with the same line they use on us |
| 0:54.2 | Occupy Palestine where the soldiers show up and they look like us all of us |
| 0:58.9 | Got our own blood stain hands for something why the same state would just kill us for nothing. |
| 1:04.0 | Here our solar land that can never be justice. |
| 1:08.0 | Like a rock and a slingshot, the last whole video options are all gone against the army and the 20 football. |
| 1:15.0 | Under all these apartheid laws, my cousins are different kind of second-class citizen. |
| 1:20.0 | The worst kind of warning is prison. |
| 1:23.0 | He be locked up if he is it. |
| 1:26.0 | Their enemies are not different. |
| 1:28.0 | Life in the belly of the beast. |
| 1:30.0 | A two here to stay where they operate and think. |
| 1:32.0 | We are separated now by cotton |
| 1:34.2 | and see and over here they talk about the land of free speech until you critique |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KEXP, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of KEXP and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.