In Max Porter's novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, a father sits his two sons down to tell them their mother has died. As they sit at the edge of their bed on either side of their now-widowed parent, the boys' shock is punctuated by confusion. "Where are the fire engines?" one of them wonders. Where are the uniformed officers knocking at their door? The concerned strangers offering support? Where is the appropriate level of outrage?
Mustafa Ahmed references Porter's book while out on a walk in London.
"They're wondering why the entire city hasn't stopped to take into account this death and to assess the gravity of it," he tells Exclaim! "Why hasn't it actually put us all into a state of emergency?"
Mustafa has felt this particular disorientation too many times for his 28 years. The kind of emotional disharmony that isolates and unsettles. Raised in Toronto's Regent Park neighbourhood, Canada's oldest housing project, the artist has mourned the loss of friends and family whose deaths have rarely received adequate attention or resources.
Remembrance, it turns out, is a responsibility not all are willing to bear. But it's one the folk artist takes seriously.
"I began writing songs so that I can preserve people," he says. "It's about exalting the ordinary life."
The quotidian has fuelled Mustafa's creativity since childhood. The youngest of six children in a family that emigrated from Sudan in 1992, his sister first introduced him to poetry to keep him out of trouble. By the time he was 12 years old, Canadian media was dubbing him "Toronto's little poet man" for his stanzas on inequity, justice and solidarity.
Teachers were incredulous. The media was enamoured. But for Mustafa, it was about delivering nuanced renderings of his community.
"It's the 'ordinary people' in my life that keep me here," he explains over the phone. "They're not going to write their stories in stone because they don't have a need to or a care to. But I know that their lives, when put on a canvas, become reference points forever."
These reference points are mapped across Mustafa's work. His debut release, 2021's When Smoke Rises, was named in honour of his close friend and collaborator Smoke Dawg, who was shot and killed outside a Toronto nightclub in 2018. The eight-song project is an ambitious account of the ways violence disrupts love, and grief transforms communities.
On Mustafa's newly released official full-length debut, Dunya — which translates from Arabic to "the world in all its flaws" — preservation is paired with interrogation. Friendships are honoured but not idealized. ("What Happened, Mohamed?") Romance is interpreted but imperfect. ("Did I come to you too softly?") Gratitude is interwoven with despair. ("Who is still human?") It's an act of poking, sometimes gently punching, holes into a foundation of assumptions built over a lifetime. In some cases, over several lifetimes.
Among these grounds for exploration, the artist's Islamic faith proved most fertile.
"I was really thinking about my sincerity and my relationship with God, and what communities I felt like I belonged to," he explains. "I think it's a really scary thing when you grow up with a particular understanding, and these understandings inform you, protect you, shape you, and isolate you from other ideologies. Then, when you start to question whether or not those ideologies are even keeping you safe at all, it's like you're free falling a little bit."
Airborne in self-examination, Mustafa came face-to-face with his own contradictions — the ones that mark the intersection of artist, believer, son, brother, friend and advocate. These points of contrast were sometimes drawn from the people around him. The album's first line, "Both our eyes are red, but you're high and I'm crying," captures the gulf that can exist between two value systems, two ideologies, two loved ones.
Other times, the contradiction was within himself. Since his preteen days reciting poetry at Nelson Mandela Park Public School, Mustafa has advocated against violence in many forms. His 2019 documentary Remember Me, Toronto united people across city lines to address rising homicide rates. Lead When Smoke Rises single "Stay Alive" commemorated the lives lost to inner-city violence. He donated proceeds for his recent single "Gaza Is Calling" to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, and organized an Artists for Aid benefit concert in July to benefit War Child UK's response efforts in Gaza and Sudan.
But the singer-songwriter acknowledges the shadow of these convictions.
"I'm advocating for ceasefires and for the halting of violence all around the world," he says. "But locally and in my own community, it feels as though sometimes I can't depend on policing systems to protect us. There are kinds of violence that have kept a lot of my friends alive."
Mustafa reckons with these tensions throughout Dunya, an album whose very existence might be his biggest contradiction of all.
"Most schools of thought in the sect that I follow in Islam believe that music is impermissible," he explains. "I'm exploring my relationship with God and with Islam on songs, and people believe that to be blasphemous, even if I believe an entirely different thing."
The singer-songwriter wrote album opener "Name of God" about the way people demonize each other's conflicting paths to Islam, and he received backlash for the very way he expressed his faith in the song. It's an ideological difference he has navigated, albeit more lovingly, with his own parents. Now in their 70s, he describes them as "completely disconnected" from his music.
"Their ideas around music as an entity and as an expression are very different to what my ideas are," he explains. "But I think it demystifies what I believe of music and its importance. There's a kind of self-importance that a lot of musicians have. To be honest, we're not doctors. We're actually not changing people's lives entirely. At best, we're mirrors. And I think that I'm holding this mirror up."
Mustafa's narrative mirrors are vivid portraits of the people in his life. On 2021's "Ali," he introduced listeners to Ali Reizig, a dear friend who was shot and killed on his own doorstep. The song's music video, which was filmed around Regent Park, features Mustafa surrounded by friends who gradually fade out of view, one by one. By the end of the song, the artist is left standing alone.
"May Allah have mercy on him," reads the video's final frame, placed underneath Reizig's name and sobering 18-year lifespan. "Ali" won the 2022 Prism Prize, making Mustafa the first artist to earn the award twice.
On Dunya, we meet a new cast of characters: "What Happened Mohamed?" portraying a confidante who has grown distant, their friendship another casualty of the streets. "Nouri," his mother, a force in his present with an enigmatic past. "Imaan," a woman reminded of her agency and power.
Mustafa continues to hold these mirrors up to his community, though not everyone is drawn to their reflection. The fact that some of his loved ones don't listen to his music used to bother the artist until an evening spent with four of his closest friends.
"We were all in this whip, and we were driving late at night," he recalls. "It was 2 a.m. and someone came on the radio, and they said, 'This shit is hard, bro. This is your kind of shit, bro. This is kind of going crazy.'"
Mustafa briefly pauses before delivering the punchline.
"It was Charlie Puth," he reveals. "And from that moment forward, I realized that their opinion just didn't matter, and that I had to make the music that I felt connected to."
He tells another story about playing a Sufjan Stevens song for a friend who mistook it for one of Mustafa's unreleased tracks.
"I can't make this up, I swear," he laughs. "I'm very flattered to be mistaken for Sufjan Stevens — that's probably one of my life goals that I didn't realize until that moment. And [my friends] love the fact that I found a singular way to express myself. But if I was adhering to what they wanted to hear, I would be making power ballads about what it means to live in the hood, and that would literally kill me on a personal level."
In the place of power ballads, Mustafa offers sweeping, guitar-driven folk that is rich in simplicity and radical for its intimacy. He illustrates the world with a sentimental pen, allowing listeners to feel his memories rather than merely witness them. He delivers a "Street N— Lullaby" on Dunya single "SNL." He interpolates an Arabic melody from his childhood on "I'll Go Anywhere." Across the album, he layers Middle Eastern instrumentation overtop recorded conversations with loved ones and contributions from the likes of Clairo, Nicolas Jaar, Rosalía and the National's Aaron Dessner.
He's making music for (and about) people who aren't always compelled to listen, preserving moments they might not be willing to revisit. But he suggests the disconnect could be temporary.
"When it's all said and done, and when they settle down, and when they have children, and when they have their lives, they're gonna look back at this and hopefully be able to hear these songs in a way that they couldn't hear when they were in the belly of the beast," he posits. "When you're in the state of war, you can't understand all of the elements of what has placed you in that position."
Mustafa can tell you how such distance enables perspective. Dunya provides capsules of his life in Toronto, set in the living rooms, bedrooms, hospital waiting rooms, schoolyards, alleyways and rooftops that backdropped his youth and young adulthood. But out of necessity, the majority of the album was written away from home. It takes a level of surrender to open yourself up as intimately as the artist does in his music, but how can you let your guard down in a city that has forced you to fortify the walls around you?
"A large part of the reason that I can't return to Toronto, that I can't write in Toronto, is that I don't feel safe," he explains. "I don't feel an openness."
In the end, Mustafa sought creative security, and a fresh vantage point, elsewhere. Dunya's first songs were conceived during a pivotal trip to Egypt. The experience crystallized the album's themes of home, faith and family, but rubbed salt in the wound of his departure.
"I think my rage is that [Toronto has] been taken from me, because you don't get a lot of homes," he reflects. "I was writing in Egypt, and the sorrow around writing in Egypt was about my disconnect from the motherland. My disconnect from Egypt and Sudan. Although all my family was there, I didn't grow up there. I wasn't born there. My Arabic will never be as strong as theirs. The city that I actually know, the city that I actually grew in, the city that that I actually identify with, is Toronto."
As we discuss his fissured relationship with the city, he fondly recalls listening to Jeff Buckley's Grace on a recent walk abroad. These moments, spent traversing cities by foot while immersed in music, are the highlight of his day. But the habit got him into trouble back home.
Compromising your sensory awareness left you vulnerable to danger, and if he was caught walking around Toronto with both earphones in, his older brother Mohamed would be the first to express concern.
"I think [my brother's] fears and his tension with the city is what I probably adopted after he passed," Mustafa considers.
Mohamed Ahmed was killed aged 36 in a daytime shooting on July 25, 2023. "They killed my brother in the very community I gave my life to," Mustafa then wrote on Instagram. "Here's my faith on a platter, it won't return."
It's an inconceivable loss. But for someone who has already grieved so many, the lack of response added resentment to the mourning.
"For me, and maybe it's my own ego, but I thought, for how much I've been advocating, when my brother passed, I just expected more of the city," he explains. There was that disoriented grief, so familiarly expressed in the pages of Max Porter's story.
"I expected more of the city in a time where I was in a kind of delirium," he continues. "I expected more of my community to show up when policing systems weren't being efficient, when publications were writing really poorly about my brother's passing."
Mustafa has since left his home city. The only song on Dunya written there, fittingly, is the standout "Leaving Toronto." It's a track that demonstrates how the album is not only a work of preservation, but one of prophecy. He penned its lyrics years ago while still living in his hometown, but would eventually leave Toronto as the song predicted. Its coda contains the line, "Make sure they bury me next to my brother," though Mohamed was alive and well when Mustafa put the words to paper. "Gaza Is Calling," completed in 2020, was inspired by a broken friendship with a boy from Palestine, but has assumed new meaning following the events of October 7, 2023. "I'll Go Anywhere" was written about the distances Mustafa would travel to get closer to God, and he would eventually cross the world for that very purpose.
"It was almost as if my writing was preparing me for the year that I was going to have," the artist suggests.
Mustafa describes his current habitation status as not quite living anywhere. Recently, he rented a room in a friend's place in Los Angeles. He could see himself settling in another Canadian city like Vancouver, and he has considered moving to London for its similarities to Toronto. There's a particular ache, one of longing, that only your home can carve out within you. For the former Regent Park resident, it's clear that his ache has not been dulled by the pain he experienced there.
"I don't think I've ever said this, but I do love Toronto," he says in what sounds like a genuine moment of realization. "I do believe that I am the result of the city. I'm the result of its warmth, and of its growing pains. All those cranes in the sky of Toronto? I identify with them. I identify with the misidentification of our city and its cultures. But the truth is, I just never had the luxury of being there without paranoia, of being there without violence, of being there without a burial. And unfortunately, the Toronto that swallowed so much of my joy hasn't returned it to me."
It isn't difficult to imagine how joy could easily slip through the fingers of a person trying to simultaneously preserve self and community. How resentment about the world's indifference could calcify into bitterness. Who would blame those two boys in Porter's novel, sitting on the edge of their bed on the heels of their mother's death, for carrying that anger through the rest of their lives?
And yet, Mustafa, like those two boys, seems to have recuperated at least some of what's been taken from him. In conversation, gratitude bookends profound statements on loss. Laughter accents colourful stories from his past. Care seems to be his currency, a sentiment imprinted across every Dunya lyric. In these ways, the album functions as a sort of antidote to individualism. A celebration of the collective, whether that be through faith, postal code, friendship, romance or bloodline. It might seem burdensome to hold the collective with the personal as Mustafa does, but this has ultimately been the artist's most reliable lifeline.
"I still very much believe in opening ourselves up as much as we possibly can, outside of online spaces, outside of protests, outside of organizing," he says. "We have to be able to develop strong social ties, because those strong social ties, on a personal level, are the ones that are going to keep us smiling, man. They're going to keep us here."