Moroccan Israeli Singer Neta Elkayam Reimagines Her Ancestors’ Blues

When Neta Elkayam found tape recordings from the Camp du Grand Arénas, a French transit camp in the 20th century, she felt like she had discovered a magical treasure.

The recordings were by Moroccan Jewish folklorist Prof. Yissakhar Ben-Amir who interviewed people in the process of migrating from Morocco to Israel in the 1950s and 60s. “I keep reliving this crisis of my community, when they were leaving the homeland and chasing this biblical dream,” the Moroccan Israeli artist tells OkayAfrica while walking through her neighborhood in New Orleans. “He caught them in a moment when they were super fragile, especially the women who could not write and read.”

Listening to “the hums and mutterings of immigrant women, and melodies interrupted by a baby's cry, an embarrassed laugh, the clatter of pots... a trembling sentence and the voice of a woman,” Elkayam learned how Moroccan Jewish women used to practice their faith by expressing themselves through lyrics and improvisation.

“All of a sudden I also remembered my grandmother putting me to sleep like that. The tunes felt familiar, I felt it tickling my DNA,” she says and chuckles. “I realized that there is a language here. The women were a community gathering around these songs.”

The recordings helped her imagine her grandmother’s culture and life in Morocco, which she did not describe to Elkayam often. “I was always fascinated, because I felt the gap between my grandmother’s house and society outside,” she says. “My grandmother is the only reason I believe in God.”

Reaching her at a time when Elkayam was pondering her artistic practice, these tapes became the starting point of Arénas, Elkayam’s latest album on which she reimagines Moroccan Jewish music alongside her husband Amit Hai Cohen.

Centering her voice as an extension of the women’s voices of her ancestors, Cohen blends tradition with synths, sampling, beats with bendirs, and New Orleans-influenced horns. Half of the album is original, the other half is based on scattered lyrics and tunes Elkayam could make out in the recordings. “When I caught a line, I tried my best to shape it in a way that is reasonable for today, but still keeps the same essence of the past,” she says.

Track three, “Hawa Hawa,” is inspired by a word Elkayam repeatedly heard in the recordings. “When the [musicologist] asked the woman ‘what is Hawa?’ she said ‘if you won’t sing it, what else would you sing?’ It doesn’t mean anything, it helps you process and fills the void between sentences.”

The word Hawa was sung collectively in a call and response style, which is echoed in Elkayam’s song. To her, it felt like finding her ancestors’ blues. “They used it to support each other while working,” she says. “Music served life and not the other way around. In the western world, we almost make art and music holy. But for them, life came first and music was there to heal and help process loss.”

The album’s New Orleans influences came naturally as the city’s music holds a similar space of resilience and reclaiming one’s roots. “We have so much common ground with the birthplace of jazz and blues and much of the lyrics which describe daily life,” says Elkayam.

Track two, “A Lalla Ya Ima,” is inspired by Tahdid singing which refers to the traditional sword and protection rituals performed by Jewish communities in Morocco. It originally praised a heroic groom arriving on a horse, but Elkayam turned it around and praised a heroic woman and her beauty instead. “In the end, she doesn't need anyone,” she says with a laugh. “I adapted it to my own life and I wanted to imagine how these songs would sound if they were written now. If there wasn’t this historical tragedy through which I lost 1000 years of culture.”

The Tamazight language was the first thing Elkayam’s community lost upon migrating to Israel. They adopted Dajira to communicate with the other North Africans; Elkayam learned it when reconnecting with her roots. “I remember really falling in love with the language and the adults didn’t understand why. They’d say ‘we moved on, it’s a new country, stop emphasizing the differences, adopt the mainstream’”, she remembers. “I refused, I was a big believer in the mother tongue. I wanted to communicate with my grandmother and the stories she’d brought with her.”

When Elkayam speaks to Moroccans, they sometimes note with curiosity that she sounds like their grandmother. “The Jews took some of this [old] language with them and wouldn't let it go,” she says. “When I write songs in Darija, I don't want to totally adapt and pretend I was born there. I want to be honest and create in a way that reflects my identity and my roots.”

Echoing other diasporic Moroccans, Elkayam says that her Moroccan-ness is never questioned, even though people realize that there’s a story behind her accent. “Moroccan Jews and Muslims had an inter-faith connection like no other in the Jewish diaspora,” she says. “It goes back to Andalusia and Amazigh culture, so Moroccans still have that muscle of practicing coexistence.”

Sonically, this deep connection is reflected in Jewish Moroccan music which preserves some of the Andalusian music that was first co-created by the two communities. “I remember hearing this Andalusian music in the synagogue I grew up in,” says Elkayam. She heard it again in Morocco during Ramadan, suddenly feeling transported back to the synagogue.

Elkayam’s own music is inspired by both Andalusian music, ancient Hebrew poetry found on Moroccan graves, and piyyutim, liturgical songs that are layered over Amazigh tunes. “Moroccan Judaism used to be very spiritual and connected to Kabbalah and mysticism, which is another thing we lost with the transition,” she says. “[In Israel], it became more obsessed with the rules.”

Despite her awareness of what’s been lost, Elkayam is not interested in merely preserving her grandmother’s culture. “Preserving culture is actually killing it,” she says. “Don’t put it in your museums, I want it to be part of my life, to practice, celebrate and continue it wherever I go.”

Track four, “Hna Jina,” is Elkayam’s response to a famous Zionist song about the first settlers coming to build Israel. “I was trying to give this tune a contrast of what happened to my community when they brought us here,” she explains. The track opens with a long, melodic cry, followed by quick strings, urgent percussion and the trumpet that is a staple in Jewish music. “With trust and hope – we came/ No belongings, not stability – we came/ Strangers without a language – we came,” sings Elkayam.

“Immigrants are easy to manipulate and control when they are totally in need, and it’s tragic,” she says. “I wanted to convey that every time people come, other people need to leave. So this migration story is a story about movement, but also loss of histories and legacies.”

This sentiment is the essence of Arénas. In her reflections on migration and displacement, Elkayam is especially concerned with women and mothers. “This album tries to give a voice to the silenced story of women in this situation, because you won’t read about women in historic books,” she says.

In “Hna Jina’s” music video, Elkayam is sitting on the back of a simple truck that is making its way through a green landscape. Several people are traveling alongside her, some are sitting and staring at the environment, reading, dancing, or praying. At the very end of the video, the perspective shifts and the images turn black and white, showing footage of the Nakba (the catastrophe), the mass displacement and dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947–1949 creation of the State of Israel.

Elkayam closes out the song with the lines “Slaves to the authorities – we've become/ Lost with no direction – we've become/ Closed off from the world – we've become/ To suffering and loneliness…/ We came.”

One of the people on the truck is Elkayam’s mentor Reuven Abergel, co-founder of the Mizrahi Black Panthers, a movement that arose in the 1970s. It mostly consisted of second generation Mizrahi youth who demanded equal rights and an end to widespread racism and discrimination against their community in Israel.

Elkayam met Abergel in her years of activism, when she protested against the Israeli government’s economic policies and police violence. Her group was called “The Transit Camp,” foreshadowing Arénas. She’d already gone on her first life-changing trip to Morocco, begun learning Arabic and moved to Jerusalem to practice Arabic in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. She was a fan of Abergel, because she’d seen him give an interview in Moroccan Arabic on YouTube. “It was the first time I saw a Moroccan Jew be proud of his language and not hide it,” she remembers.

Abergel sat down on the lawn in her tent camp one day and told their group, “You want to have real impact? The system are morning people, you need to wake up and protest in the morning.” “Unfortunately it ended really badly, the police arrested him in front of our eyes so aggressively and I understood the price he’s been paying until today,” she says.

When Elkayam asked Abergel to share some of his wisdom for a song on her album, she expected him to write a song about politics. Instead, they co-wrote track six, “Ya Latif,” a song about being free to follow your dream. “It was his gift and blessing for me,” she says.

Elkayam grew up looking at the tragedy that had befallen her grandmother upon moving, but not having the words to talk about this tragedy. “Reuven always said our struggle is between the Holocaust and the Nakba. And in our faith, our history, our story as Mizrahi Jews, is in that place in between traumas,” she says.

Elkayam wants to tell this story through her music to help people heal, not to compete with other tragedies or point fingers. “We’re also part of a system that is oppressing others, so everyone needs to tell their stories and reflect, instead of denying other people’s stories,” she says. “Music is so powerful, because it’s the opposite of war. You use instruments to create connections and I feel that Jews need to do this more, because that’s when we’re strong and faithful to our Judaism.”

Having become a mother, Elkayam feels that music is the only tool for resistance that is left to her. “There’s still so many things we need to protest,” she says. “I want to emphasize how much we have in common, and how much we can gather to create a better future for our kids. Because without recognition there's no justice and without justice there's no healing.”