Arab-Israeli Singer Bridges Cultures Through Music
June 25,2013
Arab-Israeli songwriter and pop star Mira Awad began her weeklong run at New York’s Metropolitan Room by singing a traditional tune from the Arab village in northern Israel where she was born in 1975 to a Palestinian father and a Bulgarian mother.
“It comes from the belly. It doesn’t come from thinking," Awad said of her music. "It doesn’t come from a planned way of singing like opera or like the Western kind of singing which is very calculated. This is much more passionate like flamenco, like these things that come from the blood. Like we say: 'We have hot blood.' It’s not by accident.”
There is a different sort of heat in the soulful Europop songs Awad’s fans are most familiar with. All My Faces is the title song from her 2011 album.
“It only tackles the level of my womanhood, but it’s like that about everything," Awad said. "We all have many faces. No one is one thing. That’s boring. We are all made out of many many many many layers.”
Awad says this Western, unabashedly sensual style of music would raise eyebrows in her hometown, although the village is relatively modern compared to many Palestinian communities in Israel’s Galilee region.
“But nevertheless, it’s an Arab culture and still it is very patriarchal and the father decides for the family, the man decides for the woman," she said. "A woman is expected to, OK, go study, go work, but choose family life eventually, and I didn’t. I wanted a career. I wanted to go follow my passions. The word ‘passions’ is scary one in the culture I come from. A woman having passions is scary. It’s a woman you cannot control.”
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