A fusion woman

Singer/actress Mira Award walks a fine line between her Palestinian and Israeli identities

By JUDITH SUDILOVSKY
Mira Awad (photo credit: DANIEL TCHETCHIK / COURTESY MIRA AWAD)
Mira Awad
(photo credit: DANIEL TCHETCHIK / COURTESY MIRA AWAD)
WITH ALL her talent, accomplishments and awards, singer/songwriter/actress Mira Awad would be quite intimidating if she wasn’t so downright nice and best-girlfriend like.
She walks into one of her favorite haunts in the Montefiore neighborhood where she lives in Tel Aviv with her husband of one year, greets another regular patron and chats pleasantly with the waitresses, all of whom who know her by name, before sitting down to order a vegan breakfast and coffee.
She has been trying to eat vegan recently, she says, after turning to vegetarianism two years ago, and has succeeded in being completely vegan for three months.
“I am almost vegetarian and always had the aspiration to stop eating anything that has to do with animal killing.
I have the aspiration to be vegan one day, too. I am not 100 percent successful, but I try my best,” she tells The Jerusalem Report. “I like food and the culinary experience.”
The middle child and only daughter of a Christian Arab father and Bulgarian Christian mother from the Galilee village of Rameh, both of whom are doctors, one of her favorite dishes is the traditional Bulgarian “guvech,” a mixed vegetable and meat casserole dish cooked slowly in an oven at high temperature in a special ceramic pot.
“You throw anything you want into it and it comes out tasting great,” she says.
In a recent TEDx presentation she told her story, speaking about her balancing act resentfully, trying to first conform to society’s expectations of her as a girl in her Israeli-Arab village, and later, when she moved to Tel Aviv, walking the line between her Palestinian and Israeli identities. You just have to look forward and then you soar, she concludes to the audience, which gave her a standing ovation.
“I am a woman, a human being and a musician but people are not satisfied with that. I didn’t feel the need to define myself politically until people started asking me.
I define myself usually as a human being first and then a woman, though I am one of those people who likes being a woman,” she says during the interview in the sunny Tel Aviv café, noting that people don’t take into account that her Bulgarian heritage also plays an important role in who she is and in her music.
There is a certain way of harmonizing in Bulgarian music that appeals to her, she says, explaining that, while Western music is based on a four-on-four beat, Bulgarian music is seven-on-eight.
“You give me any beat and I know how to dance to it,” smiles Awad, who has also participated in Israel’s version of “Dancing with the Stars.” What may sound off to Western ears is musical beauty to hers. “I like dissonance.”
Indeed, together with the savory Balkan dish, which combines a variety of flavors and textures, the beat of Bulgarian music could be used as a metaphor of her own life.
Whatever gets thrown way, Awad knows how to pick it up and fly with it, be it her performances with some of Israel’s top musical stars to appearances with international stars such as Andrea Bocelli, the Italian operatic tenor, and American vocalist Bobby McFerrin, as well as Greek and Spanish musicians.
Her local connections include David Broza with whom she worked together on his latest release “East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem” recorded with Palestinian and Israeli musicians in East Jerusalem; her long-standing friendship and collaboration with Achinoam Nini – despite heavy criticism and threats during the 2009 Gaza confrontation the two singers represented Israel with the song “There Must Be a Better Way” in the Eurovision song contest (the song finished 16th); and Idan Reichel.
A supposedly one-off performance in a classmate’s Arab-language musical at the Rimon Music School about remembrance led her into an Arab/Hebrew/English acting career. She worked as an actress in the Cameri Theater for six years; works with the Arabic-Hebrew theater in Jaffa; played the role of Eliza Doolittle in the Israeli Opera’s 2002 production of “My Fair Lady”; and starred in Israel’s hit television series “Arab Labor” in addition to other TV, radio and film roles.
Awad is now working on both her own screenplay based on the stories of her father’s childhood in 1948, when his family was forced to leave their village until they were eventually allowed to return, as well as a script for a television series about a successful Arab woman photographer living in Tel Aviv with her Jewish husband. Though much of the latter’s script is based on her own experiences, the character is very much not her, she says.
She is active with the Save a Child’s Heart charity and groups that work with disadvantaged children, and bring together Israeli and Palestinian children through arts; leads workshops on creativity; and two years ago funded a scholarship that recognizes creativity and leadership among the youth of her village. She hopes to someday expand it to other places in an effort to bridge the gap between education in Arab schools and their Jewish counterparts.
Her love of Latin and Brazilian music has brought her to partner with two Tel Avivbased international musicians, Brazilian Joca Perpignan and Moroccan Marc Kokan, to create the Transit Trio. She has just started Labelfree, her own record label, and is currently working on her third album after leaving Sony Records in the World Music category.
“I was being suffocated, they are a big machine and they think they know best how to sell music. I believe no one knows how to sell music better than the musician. I know how the music has to be treated without marketing people telling me how it should be treated,” Awad says.
Her new album will be like her, she says – a fusion of sounds including electronic, pop and Arabic.
Together with her longtime guitarist Shay Alan she composed the soundtrack to the documentary “Write down, I am an Arab” about Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darwish and wrote music for three of his well-known poems. Awad has plans to do similar trilogies with the poems of three other Palestinian poets – Marwan Makhoul, Tawfik Zayad and Samiha El Qassim, who died recently and was also from Rameh. “I recomposed three of Darwish’s famous texts and gave them my sound,” she relates.
With all the projects she juggles, she sometimes has to “shut off” she says, and every few months takes a day off for herself. “My work is not life or death – it is music.”
By nature she is a private person and prefers to keep her personal life just that, she says. Her wedding to her eight-years-herjunior Ukrainian Israeli husband, who is half Jewish and half Christian, took place in an intimate ceremony in Bulgaria, where her two brothers live.
Though she has been to many of the world’s great cities – New York, Paris, Rome – she loves Tel Aviv with its open space and open people. It is a big city that is easy to get around, and yet intimate enough to get a community going with its pluses and minuses, she says.
“It is very easy to start a conversation in Tel Aviv. I don’t know other places like that,” says the “almost 40-year-old” Awad. Of course, that also entails people disregarding such things as personal space and privacy, like asking her when she is going to start having children. “I mean, what do you expect? I am going to tell you that? I try to be polite.”
Then there is the complex political context of being a Palestinian in a Jewish state, she says, using the term that sets off bells for some Israelis. But, if she calls herself Israeli- Arab and forgets to say she is Palestinian, she is criticized by the Arab community.
“I am very proud of being Palestinian, but do I have to carry a flag?” she asks.
A relative newcomer to social media – at first she didn’t get it, she admits – during the most recent Gaza war, Awad took to the Internet with a message of tolerance and coexistence, speaking out against both the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli youths and the subsequent murder of a Palestinian boy.
“It hurt me in the heart and I was feeling very helpless,” she says.
So, Awad, who is also a graphic artist and photographer, began her “Spread the Light” campaign, inviting people to take a picture of themselves next to a source of light with some inspirational words and sending them to her. The project took off but eventually she had to let it go because she didn’t have time to properly format all the submissions.
Sometimes the Internet presence can be frustrating, though, Awad complains, especially when she gets hundreds of likes for a picture she posts of herself having morning coffee but yet no one takes note of a news item she posts concerning the situation of children or women in Africa or elsewhere.
Awad began her musical career as a teenager rebelling against the constraints put on her by her community, writing music condemning violence against women. She had her own band and once shaved off all her hair to the consternation of her parents. Girls were supposed to be polite and quiet, and help in the kitchen when she was growing up.
Recently Awad posed for “My Safe Place,” a photography project by journalist Lihi Lapid (wife of politician Yair Lapid) opposing violence against women, confronting two issues important to her: speaking out against violence and the stereotyping of feminine beauty.
“I am very sensitive to violence in general, including domestic violence. I am totally a pacifist. Violence is a cowardly way of acting, the very act of hitting women and children. This includes verbal violence and physical violence. It is horrible. We women have the habit of believing someone who says we are stupid and don’t know how to do things,” she says.
Every woman has been sexually harassed at some point in her life, Awad contends.
“That is 100 percent of women. We all get sexually harassed and, really, that is not OK. It is a horrible statistic. We have to talk about it,” she says. “It all starts with education.”
In addition, she says, at various points in her youth and career she has been made to feel fat because her body does not fit into the currently accepted concept of ideal female beauty. So much so, that once, after a photo shoot, she caught the photographer “Photoshopping” a picture he had taken of her, slimming her down and stretching her out. She stopped him right in his tracks.
“They did it without even consulting me, without thinking that I might object. I have a totally normal body,” says Awad. “I was telling people to feel good about themselves and then here he was changing me. I would love to be tall and thin and beautiful like a model. But that’s not me.”