In 2015, three sisters with the last name Haim burst onto the music scene. I’m not talking about the trio from LA, who today are premiering a new single (major mazel!), but about Tair, Liron and Tagel Haim, who formed the group A-WA (Ay-Wah, the Arabic word for “yes”). Their debut album, “Habib Galbi” (“Love of my Heart”), and hit single of the same title, the first Arab language single to hit the top of the Israeli charts, brought Yemenite Jewish music to the spotlight for the first time since their idol, Ofra Haza, of blessed memory, released her Yemenite songs back in the ’80s.
Now, almost a decade after “Habib Galbi,” the oldest of the three sisters, Tair, raised in the arid and beautiful desert of Southern Israel, is releasing an album that ties all the Yemenite history and beauty she grew up on and studied as an adult with those modern electronic sensibilities of A-WA.
Last week, she released the first single from that upcoming album, an infectious song called “Yemenight.” In it, she sings in Arabic and English, in the vein of the Yemenite songs Jewish women sang through the centuries in Yemen, in the local Jewish-inflected Yemenite Arabic. Whereas men’s music, traditionally inaccessible to women singers, was traditionally that of holy texts and poetry, women sang about their own lore — of loves and heartbreaks — in the language of day-to-day life.
“Hatha al-walad ḥali/Min ayn aji lah/Min ayn aji lah/Wala jibāl ṭawīlah,” Haim sings, words that mean: “This boy is sweet, how do I get to him? There’s no path, nor tall mountains.” Yet in the song, the singer won’t heed to these obstacles, beckoning the “divine” “pretty boy” to “fly high, from the city to the sky,” to go on a ride on her “magic carpet,” an allusion to 1959’s Operation Magic Carpet, which brought her great-grandmother and paternal grandparents to Israel from Yemen.
“Everyday is a holiday, every night is Yemenight,” Haim sings in the playful delightful chorus. The song is both upbeat and sensually seductive. It is not about a woman helplessly pining for a man, but rather, about one who beckons her lover. It feels powerful and feminist.
Just like the videos of A-WA, the visuals in the music video for “Yemenight” mix Yemenite patterns, embroidery and garb with modern clothing and dance moves. In the opening, Haim wears a gargush, a traditional hair covering of Jewish Yemenite women still worn during festivities by Yemenite Israelis. It’s a symbol of modesty but also of seduction, just like the kind the song is attempting. She is adorned with traditional jewelry while also wearing a baseball cap, and her outfit, with patterns that echo the room she’s in, is decidedly modern. She’s joined in that fabricated space by a dancer, and at certain moments, wears a traditionally feminine face covering.
There’s such a wonderful play on gender roles and of women taking ownership of their love in this song, an homage to powerful women, like Haim’s great-grandmother, who inspired A-WA’s sophomore album “Bayti Fi Rasi” and who left Yemen alone with her children, refusing to stay in an arranged marriage.
But it’s also reclaiming, a “tikkun,” a repairing of what her grandparents experienced, dreaming of Israel but being treated as “primitive” when they came to the country. In an interview, Haim said this song and album is a way for her to set out on her own independent road, just like her ancestors, fully on her own terms. That journey starts in the desert where she grew up, but adds English to the mix and makes her tunes even more modern and international.
“Yemenight” is Haim’s second solo single. Her first came out half a decade ago in 2020, called “Ani Mitbashelet Le’At” (“I Simmer Slowly”). That video too was full of the similar visuals we see in “Yemenight” and A-WA’s work. “I simmer slowly/Like chamin for Shabbat,” Tair sings, referring to that Shabbat dish that simmers all through the Jewish day of rest when Jews don’t cook. In the song, which is in Hebrew and Arabic, Haim talks about how in a world of instant gratification, she cooks slowly.
Perhaps that’s why it took her all these years to release her first, as of yet untitled, solo album. Since then, Haim, 41, gave birth to her two children. Motherhood, she recently told an Israeli newspaper, has shaped this album greatly. “Mhay journey has been one that includes the birth of my boys, and in a way, my own personal rebirth. I’ve gone through so much in the last years, from the pandemic to the war,” she said. These past couple of months, in anticipation of the album, she’s released videos where she gifts us with 60 seconds of beautiful Yemenite Jewish music, from “Im Nin’alu,” made iconic by Ofra Haza to the Yemenite Jewish folk tune “Odeh Le’Eli.”
Haim’s rebirth comes at a fascinating junction for Yemenite Jews and Israelis, who are finding ways to reclaim their identity, as Yemen’s Houthi movement has launched missile attacks at Israel during the Israel-Hamas War and have made themselves a prominent enemy of Jews. It’s an exciting time to lean into the unique beauty of Jewish Yemenite culture, a community that dates back to the destruction of the first Temple, and delve into the texts and the sounds of the centuries old Yemenite Hebrew, a language that like many Jewish languages, including Ladino, is a disappearing one. “If this is what brings people closer to their roots… the language which is a whole world on its own,” Haim shared with KAN, “then honey came out of onions.”
