The 18th edition of the International Literature Festival in Venice, Incroci di civiltà opens from April 2 to 5, an annual event of world literature organized by Ca’ Foscari in collaboration with the Fondazione di Venezia. This year it kicked off with a pre-show by Noa, the pseudonym of Achinoam Nini, a cosmopolitan Israeli artist of Yemeni origins who lived in New York until she was 17 and has been Israeli since then. Last Saturday she performed a sold out concert at the Goldoni theater, accompanied by her lifelong teacher Gil Dor (guitar) and then by Ruslan Sirota (piano), Omri Abramov (sax and EWI) and Daniel Dor (drums). The next morning, she appeared alone at Palazzo Flangini, the Foundation’s new headquarters, which was inaugurated on this occasion, for an open to the public interview/dialogue with the general director of the Fondazione di Venezia, Giovanni Dell’Olivo.
Noa has become a prelude to a crossroad and a bridge. Indeed, she has become a bridge and a crossroad, two semantically significant figures that rarely go together, unlike in Venice, a city of the world and of bridges which bring together islands, no longer isolated, in a plural unity. The bridge of Tre Ponti comes to mind, to which a fourth was later added. Noa has made herself a bridge between the arts (literature, music, dance), a bridge between peoples and cultures and stories, a bridge between the stage and the audience of spectators, because they are both involved in the show (asking them to sing, then to provide the rhythm by clapping their hands, and finally to dance), and then at Palazzo Flangini where the meeting became truly public, when Noa gave the floor to the audience present at the end. After an initial moment of surprise about the unexpected opportunity this offered, questions arrived, even challenging ones, and she did not avoid them.
“What is your relationship with religion?” gave her the opportunity to explain that although she was not born into a religious family, her parents still made her attend religious schools, so that despite living in the United States, she would not lose her Jewish identity:
out of respect for my sense of identity, I grew up Jewish, reading Jewish literature (not only), today I consider myself intimately Jewish from a cultural point of view. Returning to religion, in the Talmud we read of two sages (the rabbis Shammai and Hillel, who lived in the 1st century BC) who were each approached by a pagan who wanted to convert: “There was another event, its protagonist a pagan, who came to the master Shammai and said to him: “Make me a convert to Judaism, but on the condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot”. Shammai chased him away with the builders’ measuring instrument he had in his hand (the cubit, the same as the ancient Egyptians, Ed.). The pagan then went to Hillel, who instead converted him to the Jewish faith, telling him: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary: go and learn it”. They represent two orientations of their respective schools, and I feel close to the second, which essentially says to love your brother as you love yourself.
To the writer, who is ignorant about Judaism, the timeliness of this story is striking. The pagan seems to have little time to dedicate to study (much like today), just enough to stand on one leg, nevertheless he demands to learn everything. For this reason, Shammai – the more rigorous of the two – indignantly rejects him, while instead Hillel does not give up teaching and tries to make his mark inside the pagan by condensing the Torah into the commandment that he considers essential: that is, he plants a powerful seed inside the man, trusting that it will bear fruit in the seasons to come.
Inevitably the question (much more than a simple question) arrived, from a lady who asked Noa how she felt in the face of the many, too many deaths in Gaza, now more than fifty thousand, a burden of death that cannot be erased and will remain, weighing like millstones.
It is a nightmare that we must put an end to – the only thing we can do is protest. Those deaths are not only a consequence of October 7, but of decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an unresolved issue, a void that continues to be filled with death.
That’s exactly what Noa said, she didn’t say “a nightmare that must be …” but rather “a nightmare that we must put an end to”, and while she was saying it she showed the T-shirt of the association of the families of the hostages where “The time has come…” is written in Hebrew, Arabic and English, which refers to the liberation of the hostages and from Netanyahu.
She says she is proud to be part of a popular movement that moves large masses.
Consider that in Israel there are nine million inhabitants, so seeing one hundred thousand people in the square is equivalent to a demonstration in Italy with six hundred thousand people. In May there will be a large conference in Jerusalem organized by civil society to discuss possible solutions together. It is beautiful to see how many different realities collaborate, cry, eat, sleep and live together. This gives hope and shows that the time has come.
Music alone cannot change the world, but it helps, and will be the soundtrack of the movement, helping it to fly like wind under wings. Shimon Peres once said about optimists and pessimists that they die the same way… but that they live in a profoundly different way. This is why I sang Imagine by John Lennon at Sanremo, an optimistic song that has the right words as a horizon to aim for. Of course, we must be careful not to make dreams into dangerous projections that degenerate, but let imagination and reality influence each other.
She then warned against the traps of social media, a useful but also dangerous tool because it prefers sensationalism and selects homogenous groups of users who do not see different points of view as the recipients of a given piece of information. Rather than helping people understand the complexity of reality they linger morbidly on blood, suffering, and death, guided by algorithms that propagate hatred and violence among those they know will be most affected by it.
Israelis don’t know what Europeans think, just as Europeans don’t know what Israelis think. The same is true for the Chinese, Russians or Arabs. They want to put blinkers on us, narrow our field of vision and make us think in black and white: if you’re not with me you’re against me. They want us uninformed, scared and confused, but the populations are tired of it, and are taking to the streets to protest, defeating the sense of loneliness. They talk to each other, listen to each other and especially ask each other questions. Serious deep questioning! Questioning is an antidote to the simplifications of extremism that jumps to conclusions by trivializing complexity.
When asked who her favorite musicians were, she replies that “having grown up in New York, as a child I loved Broadway hits like West Side Story with music by Leonard Bernstein. The best, however, was the music of the Sixties, with Paul Simon (whose songs I love from the first to the last), Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. I also appreciate Sting, a pop musician with whom I once played. Then jazz with Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone. Basically, as Duke Ellington said, there are two types of music: good music and the rest. Number one is still Bach.
As soon as the show began, Noa gave a speech that we want to publish in its entirety.
It is really hard to find the words to describe what is happening in our lives today. Although the situation in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel is a true nightmare, we are not alone. Israelis see Gazans demonstrating against Hamas, against war, and for peace. Gazans see Israelis demonstrating against our government, against war, and for peace. We are each other’s saviors – only when we work together can we hope to change the bitter reality. At the same time, if we look around us, the entire human family seems to be on a suicide mission for truth, where corruption, crime, violence, hatred, constant lies, and above all, the fear at the root of it all dominates everything from politics to the media, from business to personal relationships, from religions to armies, from pop culture to the decisions we make at every moment of our lives. But in the face of such madness, such darkness, each of us is given the greatest opportunity of our lives to choose, and to live by our choice. We are required to ask ourselves: who are we? what defines our identity? our family, our society, our people, our country, what is important to us? What kind of compromises are we all willing to make? What kind of world do we want to live in? Can we live more simply so others can simply live? Are we willing to share? Do we really care? How deeply do we understand the interconnectedness of all living things, and what is our relationship with the divine? What does the word peace really mean to us, and what are we willing to do to find peace in ourselves and others? These are big questions, but I tell you, my friends, that asking them is an important first step. The next step is walking the road that your heart would have paved, walking it with courage. Even if at first you walk alone, rest assured that you will find companions and friends along the way. Sometimes, the most unlikely traveling companions can become your new family. Every day I say, “Achinoam keep your eyes and mind open, but follow your heart, and let love in the deepest sense of the word guide your actions, your choices, your voice. Do not be afraid of the darkness – be the light”. Thank you.
This hymn to peace, to coexistence, to life, then unfolded in the concert, in a whirlwind of linguistic, poetic, sonic and musical registers, ranging from homage to Bach’s polyphony to pieces that fused the sounds of the Middle East and Naples, up to worldwide hits such as La vita è bella by Nicola Piovani. Noa has grown progressively, until reaching her current maturity as a complete artist, and offered proof of this by singing and playing some unreleased songs in preview, all written after October 7, which will be released shortly on her new album The Giver, in which for the first time she co-wrote the music together with Gil Dor and Ruslan Sirota, who is also the producer. Many of the pieces are inspired by and are variations on the theme of the slogan that we hear shouted in the square, which presupposes the elimination of Israel: from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. One of these is Fear but before singing she reads an Italian version of the poem by Kahlil Gibran, the great Lebanese poet from which her lyrics are taken. The title in Italian is Il fiume e l’oceano (The River and the Ocean) and it talks about the fear of change.
Fear
by
Kahlil Gibran
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.
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