Saving Yazidi Song
In the face of genocide, displacement and technology, a new project hopes to preserve an oral storytelling tradition from Iraq’s Kurdistan Region.
NOVEMBER 14, 2024
PHOTO: A Yazidi storytelling event at Lalish in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region in April 2022 (Winthrop Rodgers)
A warbling voice came floating out of the archway, chanting an old Yazidi story. It was hot on Lalish’s stone terraces, but cool inside the porticos. The more rambunctious children ran up and down the stairways, while others sat quietly with their families, listening to old men recount myth and history. When one narrator paused for a cigarette and a cup of tea, another took up the story.
Oral storytelling is a fundamental part of life for Yazidis, a religious minority of approximately 700,000 people, most of whom live in northern Iraq. It happens at sacred sites like Lalish, the most holy temple for Yazidis, and it also takes place in ordinary settings, from rooftop evenings in Shingal, the Yazidi homeland in northern Iraq, to diaspora gatherings in Lincoln, Nebraska.
But the practice is under threat, a casualty of massive societal and technological change. The 2014 genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State (IS) also delivered a heavy blow, killing many of the people who carried the Yazidis’ history, and scattering storytellers and their audiences across the globe.
But on that late April day in 2022, beneath the conical towers of Lalish, the Yazidi oral tradition was on full display. The event, which gave storytellers a chance to perform together to an appreciative audience, was organized by the TewTew Archive, a project dedicated to preserving this cultural heritage. Its goal is to record as many Yazidi songs and stories as possible and then share them online, making them accessible to all members of the community, wherever they are in the world.
Under one archway, four elderly men sat cross-legged on cushions with their backs to rough limestone walls. They all sported handsome mustaches, some dyed black and others white and tobacco stained. Bowls of fruit and sesame cookies had been set out for the audience gathered in front of the men. In the middle, a younger man adjusted a smartphone held by a tripod perched on a case of canned juice. He hit record, gave a signal, and one of the men began to sing.
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The TewTew Archive is the brainchild of Zêdan Xelef and Emad Bashar, a pair of Yazidi poets who met as students at the University of Duhok, in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. For Xelef, the spark of their project was struck in childhood.
They spent their early years living on a farm in Rabia, a village 65 miles northwest of Mosul near the Syrian border. Their family did not have a television at home, so they largely made their own entertainment telling stories.
“I was always asking my grandmother to tell me the stories again,” Xelef told me in a phone call from Tempe, Arizona, where they are now a PhD candidate at Arizona State University. “I thought they were funny. I thought they were interesting.”
In August 2014, when IS militants attacked Shingal, also known as Sinjar, Xelef was 19 and living with their family in an Iraqi town called Gir Izêr, near the Syrian border.
As many as 5,000 people were murdered in the attack, according to Yazda, an NGO that advocates for victims and survivors of the 2014 genocide. At least 6,800 people were abducted, with many of the women and girls sold into sex slavery. Approximately 2,700 Yazidis remain missing. United Nations and Iraqi experts regularly excavate mass graves to find victims. Around half a million Yazidis were displaced, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
It is a natural consequence of imperfect memory and an aging population of storytellers, and also a result of the enforced violence of displacement and genocide.
Iraq, the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, Germany, and the governments of numerous other countries have recognized the 2014 atrocities as a genocide. For Yazidis, it was the latest link in a chain of oppression that spans centuries. Their stories tell of 74 genocides, or firmans, committed against them throughout their history.
Xelef and their family fled the IS attack and ended up in the Chamisku displacement camp in the Kurdistan Region. After they went to university, the stories from their childhood became still more important to them.
“I missed my grandmother's stories,” Xelef said. They visited their great-aunt and asked her to tell them the old stories like her sister, Xelef’s grandmother, used to.
“She told me some stories, but she couldn’t remember them perfectly… She was frustrated,” they said. She sent them to other storytellers, but they told Xelef that they had not sung or recited in years. Not only were they out of practice, but the trauma and horror of the 2014 genocide had affected their memories. The dislocation from Shingal, where the storytellers had learned and practiced their craft, had had a profound impact. Like Xelef’s great-aunt, they struggled to recall important parts of their cultural heritage.
But we will try, they said.
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Yazidi oral tradition consists of a wide variety of songs, myths, histories, family stories and religious lessons. It is communicated in Kurmanji, a language also known as Northern Kurdish, spoken by around 15 million people. Kurmanji is one of the things that sets Yazidis apart from the dominant Turkish and Arabic speaking communities that live around them, along with their widely misunderstood religious beliefs, which are viewed with suspicion by many Muslims in the region.
“Kurmanji is very rich in songs about battles in the past and love affairs and things like that, these lyrical sad songs,” said Christine Robins, a former professor of Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, who has supported the TewTew Archive since its early days. While many of the songs have a mythic register, she told me, they also record historical events, providing a way for the community to remember its past.
Reliance on oral tradition serves a number of purposes for Yazidis, Robins explained, including protecting their religion and community from hostile outsiders. The Yazidi religion is notably insular, with marriage to outsiders forbidden and conversion impossible. Maintaining an oral tradition also had a practical purpose because literacy in the Yazidi community was not widespread until the 20th century.
Among Yazidis, almost anyone can tell a story or a sing a song. There is no special class of people who carry out this role. However, there are some talented individuals, known as ilim dar, whose performances are particularly prized by the community. In the days before the genocide, these individuals would travel around Shingal, visiting each village to entertain its inhabitants. Their visits were eagerly awaited and chances for people to relax and socialize.
When they found a storyteller, the young archivists would sit and talk with them about their life growing up in Shingal and record the conversation. What did they eat? How did they build their houses? Where did their families work? Who were their friends?
Yazidi stories and songs vary in length, but sometimes can last more than two hours, Xelef said. They often follow narrative formulas and employ memory tricks to help the storyteller remember what comes next. For example, the last word of a stanza or sentence will often be the first word of the next stanza or sentence.
“It just helps language flow. Repetition is a memory device,” they said, likening the stories to a knotted rope, where the performer moves along, finding their place with each rhetorical loop.
Yazidi oral tradition is a decentralized process where there is no real authorship. The stories belong entirely to the community. That means that they change over time and each storyteller has their own version. This used to irritate Bashar. He wanted to hear the stories exactly as they were told in his village growing up.
“I was a bit angry. I’d say, ‘Some people changed this song! Why do [they] sing or tell the story with a lot of differences?’” Bashar told me from Duhok, when we spoke on the phone in September. But as he worked on the TewTew Archive, he realized that variation is a strong point—not a weakness—of oral tradition.
“It’s not something documented and fixed, it’s related to people’s lives. It changes with people’s experience and their journey, their own journey. Someone will add a part about one of his family members that he lost, or a part for their lovers or another thing related to their experience,” Bashar said.
“For our project, the greatest interest was not only in the folklore stories, but also in the memories of these people, the details of their lives, how they learned to tell the stories, and what the atmosphere was like when they heard or memorized them.”
But not everything can be captured. Some Yazidi songs and stories that survived for many years, passed from person to person, are now likely gone forever. It is a natural consequence of imperfect memory and an aging population of storytellers, and also a result of the enforced violence of displacement and genocide. “We as a society should have done this decades ago,” Bashar said.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Xelef was working at Kashkul, a center for arts and culture at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani, where they were writing poetry and editing poetry collections. Realizing that the pandemic would kill people who were carrying the Yazidi’s cultural heritage around in their memories, they contacted Bashar and together they applied for emergency funding to record as many stories as possible. They called the project the TewTew Archive, after the phrase that Yazidis listeners typically say in a storyteller’s pauses to convey attention and enjoyment.
With help from scholars like Robins and the director of Kashkul, Alana Marie Levinson-Labrosse, they secured a grant from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. They used the money to hire a small group of young Yazidi men and women to go out into their communities and search for storytellers.
When they found a storyteller, the young archivists would sit and talk with them about their life growing up in Shingal and record the conversation. What did they eat? How did they build their houses? Where did their families work? Who were their friends? The answers to such questions provided valuable ethnographic data, and they also prompted the interviewees to remember which stories to tell and which songs to sing for the archive.
Xelef and Bashar continue to search for songs that they know and love, and information about how Yazidis used to live. Sometimes they find gems, but they are constantly fighting against time. “Mîrza Xetarî was one of the most important keepers of oral history in the Yazidi community in the whole world. He passed away earlier this year,” Bashar told me.
This technique yielded fascinating linguistic results, and the recordings of these conversations will be part of “Shingal Lives,” a sister project to the TewTew Archive. “If you ask a singer or a storyteller about his life, first of all, his own dictionary is different from the normal person in the community. When he talks about 60 years ago, how his life was then, he will use a lot of words that are not normally used today,” Bashar said. “We lost [those words] and now we use Arabic instead.”
Beginning in the 1970s, Shingal was a target of the Iraqi government's Arabization policy, which intensified the following decade under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The policy imposed demographic change on Iraq’s minorities like Yazidis and Kurds by incentivizing Arabs to move to Yazidi and Kurdish regions from other parts of Iraq. It robbed minorities of their land and forced them to use Arabic at school.
“I’m very worried about [the Yazidis’] cultural heritage,” Robins said. “They feel they need this heritage and that it is becoming less accessible to them. It’s really a matter of their community having had change forced upon it because they've been displaced.”
There are also more subtle disruptions. In the 1980s, televisions became more common in homes around Shingal. In part, this was promoted by the Ba’athist regime, as it allowed Hussein to be beamed directly into homes across the country. But it also brought other forms of compelling entertainment — from Syrian dramas and Mexican telenovelas to World Cup football — that competed with the old songs and stories told in Yazidi households. More recently, smartphones and social media have brought new distractions.
So far, the TewTew Archive contains 84 audio and video recordings. When the project launches to the public, sometime in the next few months, these recordings will be available online through the University of Exeter, alongside written information about when, where and how they were made. For non-specialist audiences, shorter versions of the recordings will be posted on YouTube and social media, making use of the very technologies that have been so disruptive to the Yazidi oral tradition.
Xelef and Bashar continue to search for songs that they know and love, and information about how Yazidis used to live. Sometimes they find gems, but they are constantly fighting against time. “Mîrza Xetarî was one of the most important keepers of oral history in the Yazidi community in the whole world. He passed away earlier this year,” Bashar told me. Xetarî was in his 90s by the time the TewTew Archive got off the ground. There are some recordings of his storytelling, but he was too unwell for the project to interview him.
“I sometimes feel sad that we couldn't have a long interview with him, more than 20 hours, because he had thousands of stories and religious songs and texts and mythologies and all things related to our history and our traditions,” Bashar said.
Xetarî’s death made clear the project’s stakes and the immense challenge of preserving Yazidi cultural heritage. “It's almost impossible that it will survive as a body of oral tradition, even though I want to imagine futures where people can still sing their songs together in their gatherings,” Xelef said. But anything saved is valuable, they added, even if that future never arrives. “It's why I want to keep archiving. I want us to be able to go back to these stories.”