-by Phil Drew,

Nawal’s traditional name turned out to be a foreshadowing of her eventual career as an artist, in her case a musician.

Her ethnic heritage is of a tiny island group in the Indian Ocean, in the straits of Madagascar, between the East African coast and the massive island from which the latter body of water gets its name. As such, she is indeed a rarity — a woman performing in public.

"It is hard for people to understand, that a man can be an artist, but for a woman it is really hard," says Nawal, 42, in a voice with hints of the Middle East but of France as well, soft- spoken but made firm by a life of breaking convention.

Some people just refuse to accept that I am a Comorian." She chuckles softly. "Maybe she is a man, they say."

Camorian culture is the product of waves of outside influences, a polyglot of disparate strands blowing over the island nation.

"The thing I love in Camorian music, where I get my inspiration, is in balancing African sounds with Arabic, heaviness and lightness together," says Nawal. "I love this picture of earth and sky."

A taste of that delicate balancing act will be on display Saturday at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, where Nawal will perform with her band of Comorian musicians, and American percussionist Melissa Cara Rigoli, who joined Nawal's entourage three years ago.

The mixture of influences that produce Comorian music also produced paternalistic barriers to female performers. Comorian women do not traditionally hold jobs outside the home, much less perform in public.

Traditionally, they are confined to singing or playing instruments on private, mostly familial, occasions.

"Women make music for when people are born, or for marriages, or for (funerals)," she says. "They make music for healing people. This is so from the Arabic side, but from the (African) side also."

But in her family, a streak of female stubbornness in the face of such paternalistic tradition dates to her maternal grandmother, who insisted on education for her own daughter; Nawal's mother, she says, was one of the first women in Comoros to hold a paying job.

Nawal learned to sing at an early age in the keening style of her Sufi heritage. She was schooled by her father in a traditional stringed instrument called the gambusi.