Never Far From the Mountains

 

 

Sound Check

It’s been a good while since I last blogged. In between COVID lockdowns I found the community I didn’t know I was looking for, the wonderous Alfoxton Park, and have been fully immersed in community building (and honing my ability to live in one) as well as working pretty unceasingly at the music education stuff. Time flowed, and the work and the play seemed useful and absorbing enough to make the semi-regular pangs to hit that lovely, lonesome, unfurling road remain talk and late night dreaming rather than action.

 

And then a really interesting project opened up. Filiz got funding for myself and three others to go to south east, Kurdish-majority Turkey to run a ‘train the trainer’ programme for musicians, educators and social workers in the principles and practices of community music. Nice one Filiz. This is an area gradually rebuilding from a massive earthquake in February 2023, with many thousands of people still living in temporary accommodation - ‘container cities’. Filiz’s contacts said that, 18 months on, the immediate wave of attending to physical needs was met, but there was a huge need for psycho-social support, and that community music tools could be really helpful.

 

We were keen to avoid the ‘fly in, do something fancy but not necessarily contextually appropriate, pat ourselves on the back and fuck off’ model – because it seemed rude and probably wouldn’t be very useful. So we designed a programme that involved a couple of weeks of acclimatisation, a five-day fieldwork period where we would run workshops in two of the cities most affected by the earthquake, then a five-day residential training programme, free and open to all, and especially those we had met during the course of the fieldwork.

 

And what better way to acclimatise than with a Very Long Train Journey. From Istanbul in the far west to Diyarbakir in the far east. 30 hours of yellow fields, pale blue skies, goatherds, sudden rivers, acres of sunflowers with their heads bowed as if mourning the end of summer (though it was still 35 degrees), tiny veg-plotted villages, industrial towns with endless streets of car body repair shops. The mountains never far away once we got further east. Bread, tomatoes, salty crumbly cheese, olive paste, cucumber, tea from the café car. We practiced our set in our cabin, a mix of Turkish and Kurdish bangers with some cèilidh tunes thrown in, guitar, bass, clarinet, violin, voice and egg shaker (never underestimate the power of an egg shaker), and got a round of applause from next door (a good portent). The train stopped in the middle of the night so (I think) we could all open our windows and watch and listen to a wedding happening next to the tracks: double reeds, electric drums and circular halay dancing. 

 

Diyarbakir

And then, surrounded by hundreds of miles of this yellow-brown stillness, Diyarbakir, unofficial capital of unofficial Kurdistan. An old, plaice-shaped walled city called ‘Sur’, a couple of kilometers in diameter. Built on a big rock outcrop, sloping down on one side to the river Tigres (that runs all the way to Baghdad), with the apartment blocks and more fancy shops of the new city on the other side.

 

 (Photo credit)

 

This unique geographical set-up, the walls and outcrop vibe, had for hundreds of years kept the city’s gorgeous and atmospheric architecture, both physical and social, broadly intact. Narrow, winding streets (maximising shade and cool), metal front doors that open into spacious courtyards with fountains and north-sea coloured stone. Mosque complexes with the subtle, impassioned inflections of muezzins echoing across the city. Street vendors: tea, ayran, lemonade, buttered sweetcorn, liver kebab, Çiğ köfte, piles of apricots and peppers, raw sliced courgette served with salt and chilli. Kids in Galatasary tops and women walking slowly from the market. Reyhan Şerbeti, an astonishing cold drink made from black basil and hibiscus that I imagine is the drink of choice in heaven, if heaven exists.

 And then this weird part of Sur that felt very new, and was sort of like the rest of the city but with wide streets and cookie-cutter buildings and fancy coffee shops with signs in English. Bordered by big fields of grass with sprinkers and just a few, also new, houses. It felt odd, artificial, and the inkling I had from my pre-reading about the history of the city proved correct when we spoke to local friends. Hear this: From Sept 2015 – Summer 2016 the Turkish army put large areas of Sur under total curfew (no one was allowed to leave) and then entered with ‘urban assault vehicles’ and soldiers in balaclavas (“Baklava? Yes! Balaclavas? No!”), killing hundreds and destroying thousands of buildings. References and more information here and here. The action was part of the decades long conflict between Kurdish people who want an independent Kurdish state, and the Turkish government who oppose this idea. The kids who were 10 then are 18 now, and I can only guess at the impact.

 

Many of the people who lived in Sur had originally been displaced in the 1990s, when the Turkish government set fire to 400 villages surrounding Diyarbakir who were accused of supporting Kurdish fighters. Residents were given three days notice to leave . The Turkish government continues to bomb northern Syria and Iraq. No, I didn’t know either.

 

And then after flattening about a third of the old town, with the people that used to live there moved elsewhere, they cleared the rubble and are rebuilding a kind of weird gentrified tourist area, serving tourists predominantly from other parts of Turkey and the wider Middle East. That this all happened two months after UNESCO declared the old city a world heritage site, and with it a significantly increased tourist revenue potential, may or may not be connected. 

Photo source

So this was very much the background of the 10 days or so of our initial Diyarbakir visit, and it was crucial that we at least understood it a bit in order to understand the daily experience of our participants. Jamming late into the evening with local musicians and friends of friends, chatting between songs and sips of tea, it became clear that everyone’s priority was to keep Kurdish culture, its music and especially its language, alive. One said to me “if your culture is lost then you ar lost”, and that “art [including music] is not an extra in life, it is a basic technique of life, like speech”. Several arts organisations in the town are dedicated to teaching young people the traditional instruments and repertoire, and (in contrast to England), Kurdish traditional music is widely listened to by people of all ages. Whenever we were with a group of Kurds, songs seemed to bubble up from nowhere, everyone joining in, everyone understanding significance of the words (except me). It follows in the Kurdish tradition of dengbesh, a story-song form in which unaccompanied singers recitate oral histories, both personal and collective, similar to the historical role of the griot among the Mandinke of West Africa. They perform every day in Diyarbakir and we spent a good while there listening and soaking; quite an extraordinary thing to experience, even without the language. Check it out. 

 

Late into one jam I must have looked like I was fading, for someone leant across the table and asked how I was. I replied in a tranquil musical fuzz that I was ‘perfect’. Someone from down the table replied, “yes, the world is yours”. Reflecting on this on the way home, my friend thought that the meaning was ‘the world is yours because you are a great musician’, but I heard it as ‘the world is yours because you have peace, affluence and a British passport, all of which are rare gems not available to all, and though we are enjoying our time together, these facts remain’. I am not sure which, or both, or something entirely different, was the intended meaning, but it stays with me.

 

Maraş and Adıyaman

(Note: this is the only photo I have of the container cities. Generally they looked much more homely and less sparse than this)

And then the work started. We linked up with our translator, producer and project manager – legends all – and took cross-country buses to Adıyaman and then Maraş (pronounced ‘Marash’).  Diyarbakir was somewhat affected by the earthquake; Adıyaman and Maraş much more so. Perhaps a third of the buildings in the cities were either: literally reduced to rubble; concrete skeletons; empty plots where the rubble had been taken away; in the process of being taken down or rebuilt. Diggers balanced on piles of rubble painstakingly scraped and loaded concrete and twisted metal onto trucks, dust rising around. Sometimes it wasn’t clear whether a building was half built or half destroyed. Surreal and sobering.

 

But all around, people getting on with their lives. Shops relocated to containers, taxis weaving through broken streets, moments of friendliness and solidarity everywhere. It might have been my imagination, but it felt like people were helping each other everywhere we looked, warmth and mutual aid on micro and macro levels. There were fewer people asking for money on the street than in any given town in England, and I sensed a network of support that encompassed everyone. Is this the Kurdish/Turkish way, or had this solidarity grown from the disaster? Either way, it was amazing to observe and share in this giving and receiving.

We ran workshops. In youth centres, in container cities, in a circus tent. Songwriting was our go-to main activity, as it allowed us to embracing our diverse languages and give creative power to participants.  Songs about rivers, greetings, juggling, what makes us strong and what wisdom we would pass on to future generations. Sometimes in two languages, sometimes in four (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, English). We used the 36 pairs of drums sticks we had brought with us and musicalized many a hitherto silent surface. We made shakers out of water bottles and gravel. We had sing-alongs. We danced. In all senses, we improvised. After one workshop we walked down a village street en-masse, singing Čaje Šukarije all the way to the local village hall where we were offered lunch and sampled the local tobacco that grew in fields all around. Everyone wanted to have a go on the ’real’ instruments, especially the violin and ukulele. And we met and trained some of talented, dedicated music educators who work day in, day out to give meaningful musical opportunities in very tough, underfunded conditions. Oh, and we saw the heads of the gods at sunrise on Mount Nemrut:

The Training

It’s fair to say we were pretty spent after the time in Adıyaman and Maraş, physically and emotionally. Jayaraja talks about a person’s zone of concern (what they care about) and their zone of influence (what they can actually change). Spending loads of time thinking about things we care about but can’t change gives us less time in our zone of influence. Focusing on what we can change makes us better at changing stuff and increases our zone of influence; a virtuous cycle.

 

So we regrouped, ate some (read: a lot of) baklava and read the participant list for the training. A hugely diverse group, from professional musicians and educators with decades of experience, to conservatoire students, to psychologists who were field-hardened but didn’t play any music. Tricky. How could we keep it interesting for the experienced musicians yet accessible for all? To what extent could we question the relatively formal, deferential teacher/pupil model that we had heard was typical in Turkey but that contrasted with the inclusive, non-hierarchical principles of community music? How much of what we offered should be possible without instruments, given that some groups didn’t have access to any? How could us facilitators, with our diverse but on the whole trauma-free lives, legitimately and safely talk about trauma informed practice with groups that had survived earthquakes and systematic state repression? And how do we do all of this in half the time we would normally have, given the time needed for translation?

 

We thought and discussed as a team, we refined as we went along, and in the end I was broadly happy with our offer. The material was strong – warm-ups, body percussion, many songs, songwriting, group improvisation, planning and feedback skills (Thank you Mr Bean, who provided a wordless and brilliant 5 minutes for us to practice our feedback and evaluation skills), the art and science of facilitation, music and the nervous system. We gave them the best of what we had without any fluff; authentic but not sentimental.

 

And then we handed it over to the participants, creating space for them to design and try out activities – in some cases whole workshops – specific to their settings. These included: (re-)building relationships between earthquake survivors and Syrian refugees; improvising in response to facial expressions in order to support Roma children to be able to better articulate their emotions; a workshop on the theme of the seasons using a collection of instruments that could be carried in a small backpack. Observing the participants take our ideas and whizz them up into something they could use was as good as any formal feedback, and the proof of the pudding.

On the last night we gathered in a hidden Sur courtyard for a spectacular party. It’s amazing how much better parties are when people become intoxicated on good food, music and each other rather than messy, cloudy alcohol. We popped the musical cork with our cèilidh tunes, then people took their turn, randomly collaborating, often drawing from that same Kurdish canon. Local santoors, erbanes and bağlamas mixing with violins, cajón and electric bass. Beauty and power. Two of our participants who we hadn’t heard all week turned out to be opera singers, and raised the roof. We danced halay around the tables. One participant had painted each of us a picture that, for her, summed us up. This is mine and I love it:

Gradually the amount of people on the makeshift stage got bigger, until everyone was on stage and no one was in the audience. Ideal scenario.

Sitting here now, a couple of weeks later and at the base of a mountain in central Japan, my strongest impression of that month is of the combination of resolve and kindness that we found at every turn. In the dance teacher who had taught all the kids at the centre traditional Alevi sacred dances, and the kids who, in turn, were keen to teach us. In the several separate Diyarbakir veg street vendors who tried to completely refuse payment when we bought veg because they wanted to welcome us to their city. And then, after we had insisted on paying, loaded up our bags with loads more. In the circus tent in a container city in Maraş, where a group of young men had given up their jobs to train as clowns/circus artists, spending three months in each container city and living in containers, and in one case bringing up their kids there. And on, and on… With all due respect to late-stage global capitalism (read: with continued contempt of late-stage global capitalism), it feels like many corners of the world are a bit jaded/homogenised these days. Diyarbakir and environs, for all their trials and tribulations, retain the soul and the fire. If you get a chance to go, do. It’s mint. 

(Additional photo credits: Ahmed)