Samir Odeh-Tamimi: Jarich (Mondgott)

Samir Odeh-Tamimi is a storyteller (with an inexhaustible supply of Palestinian jokes). The stories fluctuate between self-irony and sarcasm, between vulnerability and anger. He tells them in real life, and they pervade his entire work as an artist. They are marked by empathy for his own people, but told from the distance of an elective European who has lived in Germany for over 20 years. And perhaps it is precisely that analytical distance that allows him to give the subjects from Arab literature and Islamic mysticism that he uses in his works a contemporary relevance, and often a politically charged character.
His musical language, firmly rooted in Western compositional culture, draws on the gestural world of Arab, particularly Sufi music, from Qur’an recitation and tradition. Archaic, ritualistic, eruptive and often at the limits of energy and dynamics, his works are usually concise; the music is more commentary than narrative, with no chattiness but rather a grand, unambiguous gesture.
His new work Jarich refers to memories from his childhood, the story of his mother, whose father was shot on the day of her birth during the British mandate. When Palestine was divided a few years later she also lost her mother, who was no longer allowed to return home after visiting relatives on the other side of the border drawn that day. The family, living in a Palestinian village on the Israeli side, heard nothing from her for 20 years. Samir’s mother grew up with relatives. She did not believe her mother dead, rather feeling–and hearing–an inner connection to her. Time and again she would later tell her children about it: about a female voice that came to her from afar at night and disappeared again, and of the ritual drums and ecstatic songs of the Sufi musicians, which had an important emotional meaning for the entire village. These imagined sounds entered her nights, coming closer and disappearing into the distance once more.
This powerful image accompanied Samir Odeh-Tamimi throughout childhood. For him, the approach and distancing of sounds connected to home and childhood is a constant, a defining factor in his musical thought. Now it has become the decisive theme of the new work.
In technical terms, Jarich is a first for Samir Odeh-Tamimi. The core of the work is a four-channel tape, a montage of recordings made by the composer in Palestine during the autumn of 2013. There are ritual songs and drums of Sufi musicians, differently tuned gongs, wedding songs of Palestinian women and a concert performance by a famous Palestinian singer, songs of praise in which the singer »screams her heart out« (S.O.-T.).
The task of the three female singers in Jarich (in earlier vocal works by Odeh-Tamimi the singers certainly sang, if not quite screamed »their hearts out« at the limits of their physical abilities) is now a different one. Corresponding with the tape, they retrace the story experienced so often by the composer’s mother. As the dreamlike recorded sounds come closer, the quiet breathing heard at the start of the piece turns into something restless, presciently taking up sonic gestures from the tape, extending to a still hesitant, dreamy, siren-like co-experience of ecstasy in this dreamt Sufi world. After a drawn-out, sighing outburst, the caravan slowly disappears into nothingness again.
Jarich is the moon god, who perhaps shines his light on this dream scene, and Jarich is also the Arab name for the city of Jericho. Some say it is the oldest city in the world. Situated near Jordan on the northsouth axis between Syria and Egypt, it has always been an important trading town and housed members of all peoples. For Samir Odeh-Tamimi it symbolizes the fact that all the peoples of the Middle East belong together. Today, Jericho is a border town in a divided land.