Words & Music Ruth Hazleton
Album: DAISYWHEEL (2019)



Nûdem Durak is an ethnic Kurdish singer from Cizre, Turkey. She is well-known throughout her community for teaching local folk songs in the Kurdish language to young children in sing-alongs. Kurds are one of Turkey’s most heavily persecuted minorities, with a long history of tensions between Kurds and the governments of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, where sizable minorities live.

Up until 1991, the Kurdish language was entirely banned in Turkey. A law passed that year allows the language for communication but bans the purposefully vague “spreading of propaganda.”

To the Turkish government, which even banned the word “Kurd” until the 1990s (calling them “Mountain Turks” instead) simply singing was unacceptable. Nûdem was arrested in 2015, and charged under the vague notion of propagandizing because the songs she sang were in her own... (Continues)