LALA TAMAR

(MA)

The Mediterranean is a sea of layers. Over the millennia, civilisations, languages, religions and deportations have been deposited within it. Among all the stories of encounter and loss that its shores hold, few are as harrowing as that of the Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. They took medieval Castilian with them, blended it with Moroccan Arabic and Hebrew, and created a language that for centuries survived only in the mouths of women, in songs sung in homes and courtyards. That language is called Haquetia and was almost dead when Lala Tamar discovered it.

Her full name is Tamar Bloch. She was born in Galilee, Israel, to a Moroccan mother and a Brazilian father, which means she grew up with Maghrebi Arabic, Hebrew and Portuguese circulating in the same household, without any of these languages seeming more legitimate than the others. Lala is a Moroccan honorific meaning ‘lady’ or ‘girl’, and in this choice of stage name lies a declaration of loyalty to her maternal roots.

The music that saved her came late, in her twenties, when she stumbled upon the ethnographic recordings of Moroccan Jewish women singing in Haquetia, kept in the National Archives in Jerusalem. There she realised that her voice did not come solely from the present: she was the heir to a chorus of grandmothers, aunts and neighbours, whose melodies were waiting to be reincarnated.

What she did next was worthy of an archaeologist: she patiently transcribed the recordings, studied classical Moroccan musical tradition for years, and learnt to play percussion and the guimbri. This stringed instrument of Gnawa origin, made from camel skin, and she became the first artist to record a contemporary album in Haquetia. Her self-titled debut album, released in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, is a manifesto of hybridisation between the deep-rooted traditions of North African women, Gnawa, Andalusian and Sephardic music, dancefloor pop production and contemporary electronic beats.

For Lala Tamar, her music is not just entertainment: it is an act of cultural preservation and reinvention, reminding us that memory can also sweat, twirl and laugh. And because, when she takes to the stage, the past ceases to be the past. It becomes beat, breath, a future in motion.