Gualtiero Bertelli, un cantastorie italiano

Gualtiero Bertelli è nato a Venezia, nell’isola della Giudecca, il 16 febbraio 1944. Il padre, Enrico, era operaio dell’antico Arsenale, la madre, Lidia Gottardo, una casalinga.
La musica era una passione diffusa nella famiglia Bertelli, e Gualtiero fu avviato allo studio della fisarmonica all’età di cinque anni. Non aveva ancora raggiunto l’età di sette anni che già si esibiva come solista nel complesso di fisarmoniche del suo maestro. Alla fine degli anni cinquanta percorre la sua stagione del rock e successivamente della canzone d’autore, fondando due gruppi musicali che lo vedranno attivo fino al 1963. E’ stata questa la palestra nella quale si è formato come cantante ed autore. In questo periodo Gualtiero prende parte alla vita politica e culturale della sua città e viene in contatto con pubblicazioni discografiche, musicisti e ricercatori che si occupavano di canto sociale. In particolare, grazie all’amicizia con il musicista Luigi Nono, incontra Sergio Liberovici di Cantacronache, occasione che prepara la svolta nell’attività musicale di Gualtiero Bertelli.
In quegli anni la ricerca demografica ed in particolare sul canto storico/politico si coniuga con l’attività di autori, come Fausto Amodei e Ivan Della Mea, che con le loro nuove canzoni raccontano la realtà urbana che si sta sviluppando a Torino, a Roma, un po’ ovunque nel nostro paese. Su questa strada si colloca il lavoro di Gualtiero dal 1963 in poi, preparandosi all’inevitabile, e atteso, contatto con il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, fondato da Gianni Bosio e Roberto Leydi attorno al quale si concretizzarono tutte queste esperienze.

Dengbej, or the epic of Kurdish people

Dengbêj are traditional Kurdish storytellers reciting long epic songs, generally without musical accompaniment. Their epics contain a variety of Kurdish history, love stories, and the struggle of Kurds against suppression. Dengbêjs do not sing for entertainment only. They have also played a vital role in transferring oral Kurdish history to the new generations, especially against assimilation policies of the sovereign states ruling the Kurdish land. Not many Denbêjs, however, remained. Seyîtxanê Boyaxcî is one them and considered to be one the best dengbejs of our time.
Seyîtxan has lived a life which could be a film. He worked as a carrier, trashman and for the last 25 years as a shoeshine man which later became his name: Seyîtxanê Boyaxcî (Seyîtxan the shoeshine man). His name is Seydo Şimşek in his Turkish identity card.
Seyîtxan was born in 1933 in Lexerî village of Ergani district of Diyarbakir. He lost his mother when he was 2 and his father when he was 4 years old. He was raised by his paternal uncle.
Seyîtxan has never been to school and worked as shepherd and farmhand. Then he moved to Diyarbakir where started shining the shoes. He says he started singing when he was 15.
Such a great talent had to work with a piece of velvet cloth and almond oil with which he was shining the shoes, sometimes under insulting glances of rich men and their spoiled children.
Later Seyîtxan was recruited as trash man by the mayor of time Mehdi Zana. Now he was an employee of the city hall and had a regular income, does not matter if it was from garbage. He also continues shining shoes in the evening, after the shift.
In 1980 the municipality offers Seyîtxan a fulltime job. However, he does not want to quit shining shoes which he thinks gave him a reputation. Eventually, he gets retired.

Freemuse petition for dengbej Raziye Kızıl

Freemuse (the world forum on music and censorship advocating freedom of expression for musicians and composers worldwide) has launched a petition for dengbej Raziye Kızıl (also known as Gazin). The woman storyteller (dengbej) was sentenced to one year in prison for having sung two Kurdish songs and thereby “making propaganda for an illegal organisation”. A second trial against her now carries an extra five-year prison threat.
On 7 February 2010, Raziye ‘Gazin‘ Kızıl, who is a singer and president of Komela Jinen Dengbej (House of Women Singers), sang the two Kurdish songs ‘Megri’ (‘Don’t Cry’) and ‘Lo Lawo’ upon request at an event held at the Tatvan Municpality Culture Centre in south-eastern Turkey.
The event was recorded on video by the police, and based on Article 7/2 of the Anti-Terror Law, Kızıl was later sentenced by Van 3rd High Criminal Court to one year imprisonment on charges of “making propaganda for an illegal organisation”, reported Oktay Candemir for BIA News.

In court, the Tatvan Police had put forward that in these two songs Kızıl praised two members of an illegal organisation, Mesut and Mustafa, who were killed in armed conflicts in the Gabar mountains.

Mistakes in the translation

Kızıl said that the police made mistakes in the translation of the lyrics. She pointed out that the words “Gabar” and “Mesut” as mentioned by the police did not even occur in the songs. The court did not accept the related objection.

“This song is about two students called Mustafa and Mahsun who were killed in the course of the Amara demonstration in 2009 as the result of the military intervention. The word ‘Amara’ was translated as ‘Gabar’. The name ‘Mahsun’ was translated as ‘Mesut’. And these two people were depicted [in the translation] as terrorists killed at ‘Gabar’. However, the court did not even take my defence seriously. They gave me a one-year punishment based on the wrong lyrics as translated by the police”, Kızıl told BIA News.

Kızıl criticized the fact that people like her are still being punished for Kurdish songs: “Turkey has to overcome this. What are they trying to do? What we are saying is just a work of music. In any case, what is the benefit for the country to open a case by reasons of supposed meanings. It is impossible to understand this anti-democratic application against a local artist like me while TRT6 is broadcasting in Kurdish. I wish we did not have these issues in this country any more. These trials are sad for all of us. We are artists. It does not matter if you are a Turk, a Kurd, a Laz or a Circassian — everybody should be able to sing songs freely in their mother language. It cannot be a crime to sing a folk song”, Kızıl stated.

Five-year prison threat

Kızıl is facing another five-year sentence in the scope of a trial based on a song she sang at the Newroz festival in Erciş / Van in 2010. She is tried before the Erciş High Criminal Court under allegations of “singing a song with separatist contents.”

Metin and Kemal Kahraman – INTERVIEW PART 1 (video)

Sahmaran, the latest work of Dersim born artists Metin and Kemal Kahraman who achieved a durable musical course with former albums Ferfecir and Deniz Koydum Adını, has met with music-lovers as a rich oral history. Compiling different versions of the Sahmaran legend, Kahraman brothers signed under a classical study. Metin Kahraman tells that the Sahmaran is the oral cover of Gilgamesh and the meeting cradle of four sacred books.

With Metin Kahraman, we talked about the Sahmaran album, which is a harmony of epic stories and music, about the Sahmaran legend and its various parameters in religions and cultures, the Kurdish music, oral cultures, the modernism theme and the effects of modernism on Kurdish music and culture.
* To start with, which needs directed you to the idea of harmonizing the Sahmaran legend with music and releasing an album inspired by this legend?
– For about 20 years, we have carried out an oral history research work in the whole Anatolia, in Dersim in particular. We have a relation with all oral narratives and we give an effort to record these stories. In this age, a language is extincting in front of our eyes. If you ask us the reason why we perform this work, we can say that it is the conscientious scruple of us to see the extinction of a language. The album Sahmaran is also the result of such an effort.

Treasures buried in memories, say musicians Part 2

We publish the second part of the Metin and Kemal Kahraman interview.
*And how long did it take to complete the oral part of the work, where did you go and whom did you visit during that process?
– We looked into the local sources and listened to oral sources in Dersim, Erzincan, Mardin, Hakkari, Diyarbakır, Hatay and Tarsus. Our workfellows met with researches in those places and we tried to reach the former records of researchers. However, our work hasn’t finished yet and it will progress until all these works are gathered and published into a book. We will give the information in original languages as it will be comprehensible for the people searching this subject.
* Your brother Kemal lives in Germany and you in Turkey. So, how did you progress this work from separate places?
– Our workings were performed at  Istanbul Technical University (ITU) and mostly in Germany where 90 percent of the recordings were made. Kemal had to take refuge in Germany 20 years ago and he is not allowed into Turkey. So, we made a task sharing; he dealt with recordings while I was gathering the sources. And with Alisan Önlü, we put the work on the stage in Germany, Vienna and Berlin. We don’t interfere in the original telling of the tales, we just tried to create a poetic expression for each song which are fostered with Kemal’s poems.
* In the album, music falls behind the oral narrative and lyrics. The position and duration of music seems to serve for the oral narrative in songs.
– The musical fiction and the array of the album were arranged in accordance with the tale told by Mirisai Süleyman but the booklet of the album was designed basing on the sources which use several languages. The fiction of the album is the fiction of the tale in Zazaki.

Dengbej take the stage again

The Dengbêj House was added to the tourist travel program of Diyarbakır four years ago. For those who don’t know Kurdish, Dengbêj means Kurdish bard, storyteller.
We translated Nilay Vardar’s article, first published in bianet (http://www.bianet.org/biamag/diger/133689-dengbejler-yeniden-sahnede)
The Dengbêj culture was silenced for a long time when the Kurdish language was forbidden, it continued only in houses, among the people themselves. Although accompanied by an instrument in some regions, dengbêj generally sing without an instrument and they are described as those who transmit the Kurdish language, literature and history.
Dengbêj restarted to sing their stran (ballads) in recent years. The Dengbêj House with its 28 dengbej, who perform a musical ceremony once a month, was opened by Diyarbakır Municipality to keep this culture alive and increase the tourism potential. Reviving long-unvoiced traditions may sometimes make these traditions “exotic” and denaturalise them, however the process of reviving a silenced tradition contains different dynamics; only time can show that.
I knew that I was going to feel like an outsider in the Dengbêj House where I went with all these question marks and listened to stran sung in a language I don’t know.
The feeling of alienation I felt was a little bit eased by listening to variety of adventures of two dengbêj, one of them was Seyîdxanê, the eldest among them, and the other was Feleknaz, the only woman dengbêj in the Dengbej House.
“Diyarbakır’s Nightingale”, as Seyîdxanê is called, continues singing stran at his home now, after working as a municipal worker for long years.

Seyîdxanê, who sings in both Turkish and Kurdish, once appeared on a TV channel and announced the nonpayment of his salary to the Mayor singing a stran.
Seyîdxanê laughing tells that he was able to get his salary the week after, while at the same time telling the compliments made by women for the strans he sang while cleaning the ground.
“Women wouldn’t sing near men at old times” says Feleknaz who sings since she knew herself-she says- but sang in the public for the last ten years.
When I ask her what the reason of this change is, she answers “Kurdish struggle”.
I could no doubt have talked to Feleknaz more if I knew Kurdish and wasn’t obliged to a translator to understand her. Feleknaz exerts herself and begins telling word by word;
“Villages were evacuated and we moved to a city. The responsibility of all things was shouldered by women; to send children to school, to earn living and other things. Men left us alone when they saw the courage of women.”
“Stories of love and bravery” she answers when I ask her what she loves singing the most. As she keeps telling, she confesses that she in fact doesn’t like singing about love and starts singing a stran which tells the Kurdish struggle. “It would lose
all its meaning if I translated it into Turkish”, she says.
Feleknaz is a Peace Mother, as well as a dengbêj. She is one of the women who went to Çukurca district of Hakkari and left their white scarfs for nine soldiers who died there. “I can walk day and night and to everywhere for peace”, she tells.
Feleknaz gave concerts in France, Germany and Denmark but she could hardly escape from the police in Turkey on March 8, International Women’s Day. We may perhaps have the chance to listen to Feleknaz and other dengbêj on mainstream television channels and not know beans about this tradition, who knows…