Sonic Roots: Position and Composition in Avihu Medina’s Andalusian Return

• In Event: Mizrahi Maps of Meaning and Rearticulations in Israel

Abstract

Avihu Medina is best known as one of the guiding architects, songwriters, and producers of the Mizrahi music phenomenon of the 1970s-90s. His fight for inclusion of Mizrahi music in the Israeli mainstream can be understood as a championing of sonic pan-ethnicity and a fight against Eurocentric discrimination of Arab Jews. At the same time, he advocated ethnic specificity – fashioning himself a new Yemeni – unfettered by romanticized notions of Yemeni-ness as the unpolluted cultural remnants that linked modern Israelis to their ancient soil. In numerous newspaper articles in the 1980s-90s, Medina claims his Yemeni heritage – in his own terms in the “here and now.” Medina’s identification with Mizrahi pan-ethnicity and Yemeni ethnic specificity are unproblematic for him – as was his 2011 roots journey – not to Saan’a, Yemen but to Medina, Spain. Andalusia, one of his multiple ancestral homelands, is palpable in his compositions – like Turkey, Saan’a, Jerusalem, Kibbutz Kissufim and Holon.

Stuart Hall reminds us, “Cultural identity is not a fixed essence. It is not once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute return. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Not an essence, but a positioning.” Drawing on Deleuze and Guarttari’s rhizome as anti-genealogical web-like mapping – similar to soundwaves in their permeability and immediacy – this paper focuses on Avihu Medina’s Spanish position and composition –his songs but also the stuff of which he is composed. The son of a Yemeni cantor and Ladino/Yemeni mother, Medina inhabits multiple co-existing inheritances. This paper raises questions about sounds separated from one context and re-contextualized in another. Musical genres are sites in which people negotiate their identities and recompose their sonic memories in the context of shifting communal loyalties and reclaimed family histories. Avihu Medina finds no contradiction in the uncertain that fluxes beyond the confines of identity in certain terms.

Author

• Amy Horowitz, Indiana University