ვისაც არ ეზარება გადაიკითხოს..
Greek goddess
ATHENS - Haris Alexiou laughed like a little girl when she heard that tickets for her two performances in June at the Roman Amphitheater in Caesarea were selling like wildfire. "What, really? How wonderful," she said. But she was also a bit concerned: She has not appeared in such a large, open venue for a long time, and Israel's summer humidity, like that of Greece, is not good for her vocal chords. Besides, what if something, heaven forbid, were to happen during the performance and people are killed because of her?
When I arrived at Alexiou's home in Athens, at noon on a recent Saturday, news of the petition against Israel, signed by, among others, Giorgos Dalaras, one of Advertisement
the Greek singers most beloved here, had not yet appeared in Israel. Advertisement
Alexiou, who has steered clear of politics all her life and has often been taken to task for not getting involved, admitted with much restraint that she had indeed come under pressure.
"Of course people are criticizing me for going to Israel. But I never ask anyone for their opinion about what I do. Nothing in my action is aimed against anyone. It is an act of love."
I had thought that if I were to ask Alexiou for her opinion on Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip she would leap at the chance to say a few words that would allow her, despite the trip, to avoid a quarrel with the Greek radical left. But after listening attentively to the question she nodded her head quietly, and said, almost in a whisper: "I have to admit that I no longer know what the truth is. There is a very negative attitude toward Israel here, and it is hard to judge. It is clear that it's very important for the Palestinians to have a state of their own and that violence will solve nothing. Regrettably, however, people's fate lies in the hands of politicians, and they are incapable of solving any problem."
It was clear that Alexiou did not want to dwell on "the situation," and perhaps was not eager to talk at all. The day before, a few hours before she was supposed to perform three or four songs at a tribute to her favorite lyricist, Lina Nikolakopoulou, who wrote many of her greatest hits, she suddenly fell ill with a raspy throat and a high fever and announced that she was canceling both the performance and the interview.
However, as always with great artists, whose commitment to their audience overrides all other considerations, including health and their personal welfare, as the hour of the performance approached Alexiou made a surprising recovery. Toward midnight, with the audience that had crowded into the hall in the center of Athens showing signs of impatience, she took the stage and did not leave before singing nine of her best-known songs, concluding with the now-classic "If God Indeed Exists," by the Serbian composer Goran Bregovic. (Ofra Haza recorded a Hebrew version of the song, in a rare appearance with the composer and his band.)
At midday on Saturday, Alexiou admitted to having been under great stress. She hid behind dark glasses and spoke so quietly that I often had to lean close to hear her. When she is performing frequently, she evidently takes great care to protect her sensitive vocal chords.
Alexiou lives in a beautiful house in Athens' Alimos suburb, whose white buildings and streets that slope down to the sea powerfully evoke the old Carmel in Haifa. The spacious living room, with a glossy wood floor, walls laden with books and old records, and many paintings and sculptures, overlooks a garden in full bloom. A light sea breeze wafted in from the large window. It is difficult to guess, in light of the tasteful design, which fearlessly fuses a boldly colorful Mediterranean style with a staid European sensibility, that Alexiou, 57, was born to a poor family of exiles.
Her mother's family was exiled from Izmir in 1923, as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Alexiou herself was born in Thebes, in central Greece. Until she began to prosper in the world of Greek music, she was extremely poor; she completed her schooling only later, on her own.
"I heard her being interviewed in French not long ago," a senior journalist at the Greek daily Kathimerini said admiringly, "and to my surprise her French is not bad at all. I think she is mostly self-taught. And besides," he deigned to add, "she is a very smart lady."
Entering the room, Alexiou spotted the look of surprise on my face and smiled. If I had seen this small woman, with no makeup and dressed in simple trousers and sweater, on the street or in a cafe, I doubt that I would have identified her as the dramatic, striking stage goddess who can electrify an entire hall simply by lifting her eyes and looking straight at the audience. Nor did her speaking voice suggest anything of the chilling, deep, hoarse, slightly nasal vibrato that sets her apart from every other singer.
How did you begin? How did you know you were a singer?
"It started from my father, who had such a beautiful voice. He sang all the laika, the popular music, with his friends, and everyone told him he should be a singer. But he died very young - I was just eight. My brother and I came to Athens with my mother, and there, in the 1960s, the laika was nowhere to be heard, the big thing was all kinds of pop and chansons. I was young and liked to try everything new. I didn't believe anyone would take an interest in my voice, but I went to auditions and had the marvelous fortune to work with people who embraced and accepted me. At first I accompanied other singers - three songs here, four there - and then I started to get noticed."
Her career in fact looks like such a natural success that it seems to have been effortless. In 1972, the singer and composer Apostolos Kaldaras used her in an album called "Asia Minor." It became a tremendous hit, and 21-year-old Alexiou, with the almond eyes and the thick, sensuous lips, stood out. Her voice was already deep and husky and dramatic, and her stage presence projected an impossible combination of subdued pain, feminine seductiveness and volcanic joie de vivre. Overnight her name was transformed from Haris (charming) to Haroula (our little charmer), and that is what she has been known as in Greece ever since.
"It wasn't difficult," she says about her professional career. "Songs are the Greeks' form of expression. That is how they give voice to their pain, and there is much pain in Greece. We believe that songs heal the wounds."
But there are so many performers of these songs. Didn't luck also play a part?
"Definitely. And it's true that there are many singers. And there are also many who want to be singers. Every other Greek wants to be a singer. And there are many people who write songs and perform. I was lucky."
It wasn't just luck, of course. Song burned within her. It is not by chance that the Greeks see Alexiou as the embodiment - joyful, filled with love but always tragic, dramatic and heartrending - of their country's destiny. Her private life, which she zealously tries to guard and keep far from the media and the public eye, is nevertheless described without embellishment in songs she herself began writing in the late 1970s.
But there is no limit to the public's interpretations. Taxi drivers, cafe denizens and hawkers in the market, when asked what Haroula means to them, offer different versions of her marriage, her divorce, her disappointments and her loves. They extol her relationship with her son and believe wholeheartedly that her life is devoted to the songs, for which they revere her.
This is not an image that Alexiou goes out of her way to dispel. The more she takes care to speak in a quiet tone, restrained and conciliatory - a modest woman seated in a comfortable chair at home - the more her stage image seems to materialize and hover above the conversation like a larger-than-life cloud. And cloud metaphors, by the way, are recurrent in her songs: from the hit "Odos Nefeli" ("Street of the Cloud") to "Nefeli's Tango," one of her most popular songs, which refers both to a girl's name and a word for cloud. "It's true," she confirms, "I told my whole life in the songs."
Is this also true of "Iphigenia's Ballad," in which you relate how your mother led you and your brother along the roads, with lines like "The door to the house you locked twice / And you led us to the city and we followed you there / And when they saw you, so frightened, / Like ravens the passersby pecked at your children"?
"Absolutely," she replies. "I wrote that song in her memory in 1978, the week that she died. [The song does not allude to the mythological Iphigenia - that was simply her mother's name.] My mother was born into a family of exiles. Being uprooted is a fundamental experience in our family, like poverty and insecurity. Then suddenly, when my brother and I were little, she was widowed and had no source of income, and again she uprooted herself. I wanted to narrate her life, a woman who was forced to take everything she had - two small children - and to reexamine each street, each place. For us children, each new place we came to was a small homeland, and each move was an uprooting. That is the personal aspect, but in retrospect I know that I told a story that spoke to many Greeks. Being uprooted, being exiled is an experience that accompanies us as a nation, and the dictatorship under which we grew up turned us into cautious people: we developed attentive ears and wide-open eyes. Like it or not, we became political people."
Alexiou doesn't like to talk about her private life but admits that she has known harsh disappointments and break-ups, just as she describes in her songs. There are numberless stories told in Greece, some of them bordering on legend but all of them terribly heartbreaking and tragic, about the men in Haroula's life. And the storyteller always adds that none of these men, with all due respect, can hold a candle to her, poor thing.
"How do you say 'love' in Hebrew?" she asks suddenly, and tries to enunciate the letter "heh" [in ahava], an impossible task for native Greek speakers. "And how do you say 'eros'?" This is the Greek word for erotic, romantic love, as contrasted with agape, which refers to love in general. "What? You have no special word for eros? Maybe you should have one, no? It's peculiar."
As for her private life, she has always tried to keep it that way - private - "but it wasn't easy. When my partners were not from my profession, it worked. This profession is very demanding; it exacts its sacrifices, and they are always from one's private life."
There is one aspect of her life which she has succeeded in keeping private, despite everything: motherhood. "I did everything I could so that my son would not feel that his mother was a kind of image - this Haroula person - but rather his mother, a Greek mother of the old school, not like today's mothers. Do you know what a Greek mother is? It is one who cooks and bakes and waits for her son with food on the table. No, it was not always easy, because I was not always home, but it was so important to me for him to remember that I was there for him, that I came when he needed me, that he grew up in a normal home."
Increasingly, as the conversation proceeds, the disparity between her stage image and the woman sitting in her home is revealed as a burden. How will this woman, who overnight became the salient symbol not only of Greek song but of the whole of Greek culture, and no less the Greek symbol of total femininity, ever be able to lead a genuine private life? The image is, after all, stronger than she is.
Twenty years ago she cut her long, wavy hair and morphed into a pale, round-eyed boy. The public was shaken. "Haroula with short hair? What's going on?" This story alone has spawned dozens of versions: She cut her hair due to an accident, due to illness, due to a traumatic break-up. "It was really bizarre," she says, "the shock my hairdo caused to Greece. But what's the big deal? Is it not the prerogative of every woman to change her hairstyle, the way she dresses, to put on makeup as she pleases? I was going through a period of change in my life and I wanted to switch my hairstyle - that's all! But I understood then that the picture, the image, the symbol is stronger than I am. That for them I no longer really exist for myself. Since then I have wanted to kill Haroula several times. Let her die. So I can start my life from the beginning. How did it happen that I, who was never afraid of swimming against the tide, who doesn't care what people say, am unable to tear off this mask, which is not the real me?"
Over the years "Haroula" has increasingly become an oppressive presence to her, Alexiou says. "It's not simple, fame. The picture of the singer becomes a death trap for the woman inside. The greater she becomes, the more the anxiety within her intensifies. Not only of failure - of everything. It's funny, you know, because with the years our professionalism and knowledge and insight are supposed to help us - and they do help: everything comes far more easily, and gets better - but at the same time there is the anxiety, which can be absolutely paralyzing. I go onstage, everything is familiar, I have done thousands of rehearsals, the audience loves me. I know all that. But the throat is dry, the hands are trembling and it takes a good few minutes before I return to myself and know again what I am doing."
But the anxiety did not stop you from experimenting, from singing in a different style, which some of the audience did not accept.
"I tell myself that there is one thing I have to believe in: my truth. Everything I do, I do from love. That is the only thing that helps against fear. Okay, I worked with composers that I liked but that the audience did not like. 'Oh, no,' they said, 'Haroula has left us, she has gone in other directions.' And then suddenly I saw that younger people were coming to my concerts, people who were ready to accept innovation."
Alexiou never lets herself forget that the audience is not her property. "They do not belong to any of us. We must not try to maneuver them, but there is also no point to trying to butter them up. I will not change my skin just so more people will like me. Not here and not anywhere else. I am Greek, I cannot be like, oh, Madonna. All I am capable of is singing the pain and the fear and the joy, which are the wellsprings of our songs. It's the same in Israel, no? I think that in this we are very much alike."
The pain and the fear, maybe, I told her, but the joy not so much. Alexiou took a deep breath. "I think that a lot more time will be needed before the pain of what this nation underwent will be erased," she said. "But the joy is ingrained in your nation, too, I am sure."
Before visiting Israel, Alexiou will appear in Barcelona and Madrid and perform a concert with the Boston Symphony. Nowhere do people ask what she will sing - only the Israelis have already submitted an endless list of requests. "Sing this and this, and skip this." She laughs. "I will sing everything, from my entire repertoire. Two excellent young singers will be coming with me, and I will also do a few songs with Yehuda Poliker, who is now coming to Athens for rehearsals. Yehuda is absolutely my twin brother."
Later she also mentions the tremendous contribution made by Shimon Parnas, who hosts Mediterranean music programs on Israeli radio and television, to the encounter between her and the Israeli audience and to Israelis' familiarity with Greek music altogether. "He is compiling a special CD in my honor."
Glykeria and Dalaras have recorded songs in Hebrew. Will you try, too?
Alexiou laughs. "What? Giorgos too? I didn't know. I am afraid of wrecking your language, but it's an idea that I do not completely rule out. It is always a lovely moment when a guest singer does a local song in the local language."
When Alexiou returns to Greece after the concerts in Israel she will get back to the exhausting work on her next album. She now runs the show herself, producing, recording, writing songs and promoting young singers. She also took the reins in a special tribute to another great Greek singer, the late Vicky Mosholiou. Alexiou was able to bring together ten well-known female singers, young and not-so-young, for a one-time performance that was recorded and became a runaway hit. "I will never forget that," she says, her voice breaking. "We held the rehearsals here, in my home, and I went to visit Vicky in the hospital and she wanted to know everything. We still thought she would appear. Her songs are the most beautiful we have to this day, the most beautiful, the most beautiful."
And which of your own songs do you feel closest to?
Alexiou did not hesitate: "Ola Se Thimizoun" ["Everything Reminds Me of You"] her biggest hit, from the 1980s, with which she concludes every performance. "That song is truly my body. No other singer but me performs it. I am afraid," she adds with a sad smile, "that it is also what will be sung at my funeral. What do you say? Well, let it be. Singers' funerals are very beautiful in Greece."
atinati21
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Goran Bregovic, კომპოზიტორი ბალკანეთიდან (ნაწილი II)
