Voices and Music from Palestine
Rasha Nahas
Rasha Nahas lead vocal and guitar
Jelmer De Haan bass
Altair Chague drums
in collaboration with Festival delle Culture
Music has always played a crucial role in the almost eighty-year-long tragedy of the Palestinian people: whether traditional, hip-hop or electronic, music has contributed greatly to the defence and development of a collective identity. If the dramatic history of the Palestinian exodus, conflict, occupation and exile has strengthened rather than weakened the people’s sense of belonging to a land and a history, the pre-1948 upheavals and the current diaspora have allowed the Palestinian world to develop a capacity for resilience and to forge links with other cultures. It is an experience that aligns Palestinian music with the typical features of contemporaneity, such as the hybridisation of languages, cultural ubiquity, and the constant tension between tradition and innovation, between the local and the global.
Rasha Nahas’ music is a mixture of past and present. It simultaneously reflects her family’s deep roots in the Palestinian village of Tarshiha in northern Galilee, the coastal city of Haifa where she was born and raised, and Berlin, where she currently lives.
The patchwork of our lives is indeed made up of the many places to which we feel connected.
