On the Yemeni Jewish Tradition of Musical Storytelling

I come from a people who sing. I don’t mean professionally; singing was simply a part of our everyday lives as Yemeni Jews. During kiddush at my grandma’s house, we sang Shabbat songs, my uncles’ voices boomy and loud. My favorite part of the Passover meal was when we harmonized the holiday songs at the end of dinner, while drumming raucously on the table.

In our neighborhood in a suburb east of Tel Aviv, a neighborhood mostly inhabited by Yemeni Jews, I woke up every Shabbat from the sound of men’s voices wafting in from the synagogue on the next street over, the Yemeni prayer melodious and lulling. My mom sang with the radio when she cooked or cleaned, my siblings sang as they strummed their guitars or played their keyboards.

In Israel, Yemenis were known for their singing voices. Out of the four winners representing Israel in the Eurovision contest over the years, three were Yemenis. Many beloved singers in Israel were Yemeni, most notably Ofra Haza, the first musical artist (long before A-wa and Yemen Blues) to bring our music to the world with her album Yemenite Songs.

What Yemenis weren’t known for was writing. For the deeply devout older generation, even reading for pleasure was a foreign concept. The only books in my grandparents’ homes were holy books. And as a girl who dreamt of becoming a writer, who read incessantly, I found that sad and discouraging. Growing up, I couldn’t name a Yemeni Israeli author and could count the instances where I encountered a Yemeni character in books. Rabbi Shalom Shabazi was the only Yemeni poet I’d known of, and while he was held in high esteem in my community, his work didn’t resonate with me personally, except when Ofra Haza sang new life into his 350-year-old liturgical poetry, like with “Im Ninalu,” whose disco version became a huge hit in European clubs.

I envied my Ashkenazi friends, who came from rich, European literary traditions, who had role models they could look up to. I thought of my own father, a budding poet who’d gave up his literary dreams to pursue a more practical career. After he died, I found a notebook filled with his youthful poetry, in which he’d written: “A poet’s craft is an artist’s kingdom / not for you, son of Yemen.”

What I didn’t know at the time was that for Yemeni Jews, the arts of singing and writing were entwined.

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I met Gila Beshari, the woman who became my portal into the tradition of Yemeni women’s songs several years ago, when I was researching the lives of Yemeni Jewish women. Gila lived in a village by Jerusalem, one steeped in the smells of Yemeni spices. She performed in venues all over Israel, and a few years ago released the album “Zaffa”—which compiled traditional Jewish Yemeni tunes.

An expert on Yemeni singing, Gila explained that in Yemen men and women led separate lives and so they developed distinctly different singing traditions. The men sang in Hebrew, a language they knew from prayer, and their songs were devotional, expressing their love for God and their desire for redemption. While they showed no appreciation for prose writing or reading, the Yemeni men, both Jewish and Muslim, were a poetic bunch, fond of rhyming, and Yemen was a country that prided itself on its poetry.

The women, however, had an entire repertoire sung in Yemeni-Arabic, since, unlike the men, they weren’t allowed to pray. Their songs were unwritten (since the women were illiterate) and contained parallels to the songs of Muslim women (since the content was less spiritual in character). The songs, which told stories from their everyday lives, were often sad: many of the women married off as young girls, sometimes as second or third wives, and were subjected to the authority of men, their husbands, fathers, brothers. In a society where large families cohabited, where women raised their children together, shared housework or craftwork, singing was the women’s way to share, communicate and spend time together. Other songs were sung specifically at weddings, births and funerals. When I listened to Gila singing that day I felt the intensity of emotion, even without fully understanding the meaning of the words.

As I drove away from my meeting with Gila, I had my first of several a-ha moments that culminated in the writing of my novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted. I realized that observing and theorizing and researching wasn’t enough. I had to sing the songs.

Over the following two years I met Gila regularly at her home. Gila provided me with the Yemeni-Arabic lyrics written phonetically in Hebrew, along with the translation. She corrected my pronunciation and gave me context for each song. Once I started singing the Yemeni words infused with the pain and hope of my ancestors, it was as though my body knew the songs, as though that ancestral knowledge had been imprinted in me, waiting to be reactivated.

*

I don’t remember the exact moment when the second epiphany happened, perhaps the most important one, but one day, it dawned on me: the women’s songs was my literary tradition. It may have been unwritten and created in a different language, and yes, it was meant to be sung, but it was rich and beautiful and mine. A Jewish, Yemeni and feminine literary tradition. Even if, when I researched the tradition, I found that it was treated as folklore, not really poetry, not literature. Even if the Yemeni community itself considered the songs a lesser form compared to the men’s counterpart, for dealing with earthly, “foolish” things like love, jealousy, longings, betrayal.

There was something audacious about that insistence to be heard, to create and own their narrative, in a patriarchal social structure that silenced women. The songs allowed the women to express thoughts and feelings they would have never dared voice, things that might be considered indecent in this very conservative society.

As a literary tradition, the women’s songs had everything I loved and admired about poetry and literature: imaginative use of imagery and metaphor, which often borrowed elements from the natural world, a strong a sense of story as expected from an oral tradition, and a display of raw, honest emotion. Coming of age as a writer in Canada, a country I’d moved to at 25, I often felt my writing was too much, was even told so by peers, and my writing had been critiqued as too sentimental (a label that is often attributed to writers of certain backgrounds, it seems, and often to women). I didn’t understand. All I wanted was to evoke emotion in readers, the way these songs had done. Now, I felt buoyed by the discovery, supported by a sisterhood of women who came before me.

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Soon, my interest in this rich cultural practice has found its way into the novel I was writing—a novel about voice and voicelessness, about traditions lost and found—until it became a central thematic thread. The protagonist of my novel, Zohara, is a 30-year-old Yemeni Israeli woman so estranged from her heritage and her family that she’d been living alone in New York, pursuing a PhD on the kind of Israeli literature that excluded her. When her mother, Saida, dies suddenly, Zohara travels back home, where she finds tapes upon tapes of her mother singing in Arabic, songs that have deep yearning and sadness in them. Knowing nothing of the tradition, Zohara embarks on a journey into her past, which leads to astonishing discoveries about her mother’s life.

I knew I wanted to incorporate some of the women’s songs in this book. So, I studied the songs my teacher shared with me and consulted the most comprehensive book I knew to be written on the subject. Nissim Binyamin Gamlieli’s groundbreaking Arabic Poetry and Songs of the Yemenite Jewish Women, released in 1975. Gamlieli took it upon himself to collect dozens of songs from Yemeni women all over Israel and published the songs alongside his translation into Hebrew.

Browsing through the songs, I marked ones that seemed to echo aspects of Saida’s story, but I found myself bumping into a few roadblocks. The songs were written, or sung, in Judeo-Arabic and while I have been studying Arabic and could understand some of it, the easiest thing for me to do was to translate from the Hebrew into English. Accepting the shortcomings of double translation, I worked to rewrite the poems with an ear to the rhythms and sounds of English. But I still worried about how faithful I was being to the original poems. Then, I remembered the dynamic characteristic of the poems, the spirit of collaboration, which stood in opposite to the idea of authorship as we knew it in the west. I remembered that the songs changed as they were sung according to whomever was singing: the opening of a couplet matched with a new ending, words and images liberally added and detracted. The version on the page was already an approximation, a snapshot.

Realizing I could change the poems, reconstruct them, freed me to play with the poetry as I saw fit. I kept some of the original lines, borrowed lines from other poems, and composed a few of my own, using what I know about the characteristics of the tradition, its themes and motifs, and adding Saida’s spirit into the mix.

Of course, I understood that in the act of committing oral poetry onto the page, the poetry was no longer dynamic. I froze that version in time, as Gamlieli had done in his book. That, in itself, was an act of translation, from an oral tradition into a literary one. I recognized that loss—inherent in every translation—but also acknowledged what was gained. Instilling my work with the age-old rituals of my people infused the songs with new life while honoring and celebrating a pantheon of unnamed Yemeni Jewish poetesses. By rewriting the songs, drawing on the oral traditions of my community and incorporating them into my art, my own writing became an extension of the tradition, which has carried our memories across generations. I became a part of the collective voice of Yemeni Jewish women who remember through storytelling, and a part of the act of passing it on.

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Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari is available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.