The Pop Feminist Poetry of Saâda Bonaire

Saâda Bonaire was conceived by DJ Ralf Behrendt in 1982 in Bremen, Germany as a disco/world music and art concept. Inspired by the influence of Caribbean immigrants on the British music scene of the late 70s, Saâda Bonaire sought to fuse Eastern influences from Germany’s own immigrant population with dub, disco, and funk. The group centered around two sultry female vocalists (Stefanie Lange and Claudia Hossfeld), renowned saxophonist Charlie Mariano, and a number of Kurdish musicians from Turkey who Behrendt met through his work with the immigration department of the German government.

Dennis Bovel, a British dub producer who helped give rise to dub-influenced post-punk acts, cohered the diverse and stylistically chaotic sounds from Saada Bonaire’s members into a unified groove. Perhaps in another dimension, Saâda Bonaire’s multi-cultural dance punk tracks would have influenced someone like M.I.A. This avant-garde sound did not impress the label, however, and EMI Germany was outraged by the production cost of the single. EMI dropped the group before the release of their LP. Label-less, Saada Bonaire called it quits. In the words of bassist Ralph “von” Richtoven, in an interview for Dazed Digital: “We just had too many ideas. If the people of today are able to accept music that includes oriental elements, spoken word, disco-funk-bass, dub-effects and electronic sounds, all at the same time, you can say: the times are changing.”

The questionable aesthetics aside, Stefanie and Claudia were certainly pushing boundaries lyrically. What I find most alluring about this project is the fun, exuberance, sexuality, and inquisitiveness coursing through Stefanie and Claudia’s ambiguous spoken-word style lyrics. It feels like early feminist pop poetry. It only took a quick Google search to find the details of the project’s production process, but the women behind the words remained mysterious. Their background before getting into music and their pursuits after Saada Bonaire are unknown.

Moreover, the only original content from the two women is a curious snippet of an interview, in which Claudia says:

“Well, we don’t understand ourselves as feminists and we’re not militant either. We only tell stories that happen to us every day. We write them in our diary and make lyrics. The songs are about things that happen to everyone and we want to at the most convey a message to the women who read these texts, about our difficulties and how we cope with them.”

The women’s denial of themselves as feminists makes sense: Saada Bonaire’s lyrics do not explicitly decry women’s struggles and are devoid of politics on the surface. But feminist messaging is there, just obscured by their ambiguous storytelling. The tones of sexual freedom and fluidity throughout the album, for example, are displayed matter-of-fact and can be read as a feminist statement. On “More Women,” Stefanie and Claudia lament that men always follow them around when they are in Berlin, when what they really want is–yes–more women. Bisexuality runs through the veins of Saada Bonaire, which is all about borderlessness, and the most overt queerness is displayed by “More Women,” “Invitation,” and arguably “You Could be More as You Are.”

The track I find most resonant, ‘feminist,’ and honest is “I am so Curious.” The song is daydreamy yet serious, and it reflects a big question we all ponder (Why am I the way that I am?) and a corollary of that question many of us could ponder (What, in my being restricted to a female body and experience, makes me this way?). The song captures the tense self-criticism that often plays on a loop in the heads of women with sometimes conflicting standards to live up to: the womanly standards imposed upon us by men, and the standards we impose upon ourselves as women for others, as a sisterhood, as feminists. To me though, there is no reproach in Stefanie’s voice. She’s just wondering.