Aynur İnedi

 

ŞIRNAK - Dengbêj (Kurdish singer, storyteller) Fadile Aydış manages to narrate what she learned from her grandmother. Fadile has recited the resistance of Afrin against the attacks of Turkish army and its backed groups on the city.   

 

The main source of Dengbêj, which is oral literature of Kurdish culture, is love, war and migrations. Dengbêj (traditional Kurdish singer) is called also storytellers or reciters of epics. Dengbêj is a Kurdish term composed of the words "deng" means voice and "bej" means to tell. Dengbêj sign songs about love, poverty, desperation, exile, war and resistance.  This constant culture of the Kurdish people has never come to an end. A voice reveals whenever there is a love, destruction or revival. Fadile Aydış, who lives in Silopi district of Şırnak province, manages to narrate the social events that the Kurdish people have experienced and to carry them from the past to today. Fadile has kept this value alive for 60 years. Lately, Fadile has recited the resistance of Afrin against the attacks of Turkish army and its backed groups on the city.  

 

‘I started to understand the value of songs with the advice of my grandmother’

 

Fadile, who has a very unique style in her daily language by using poetic narrative, told how she began to sing as follows; “I put my head on my grandmother’s knee and I never forget her expressions. I started to understand the value of the songs with the advice of my grandmother when I was a child. She always gave me advices. She told me, ‘Keep my words in mind, and never turn a deaf ear. One day, you will need them. If you need them one day, you will say my grandmother told me that.’ I haven’t forgot her words and kept them alive since then. Dengbêj culture is the tradition of the Kurdish people.”

 

‘Our mourning turned into songs’

 

Fadile Aydış said she grew up with the songs sung by her grandmother. Stating that the execution of Şeyh Sait and his friends after the genocide against Armenians were the most effective events in her childhood, Fadile said, “We were passed through edicts, our mourning turned into songs. We sing for Afrin now. I tell not only pain but also the great resistance in Afrin in my songs.”