Kurdish performer brings Homer to life
By Joshua Thaisen, published @Rudaw
SANTA BARBARA, United States - Readings of Homer’s Ilyad and Odyssey married with the music of Kurdish master tembur player Raman Osman at a performance last week at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, transporting the small audience through time.
The performance ‘Oral Poetry from Ancient Greece to Kurdistan’ thematically united the famed works of Homer—The Iliad and The Odyssey—with traditional poetry and music of ancient Kurdistan.
An ethnically diverse audience attended the intimate performance inside the museum’s marble statue garden, where the soaring vibrato of Osman’s voice transported Californians back to ancient Mesopotamia for the evening.
“This was the first time I’ve ever heard music from the Middle East,” said Brianna Vaughters, who was in the audience. “The way Raman Osman played the tembur was amazing, so quick and precise. I also enjoyed the emotional singing, I felt like I had left the United States and travelled to some ancient land for a brief moment in time.”
Osman has been performing traditional Kurdish folk music around the world for 27 years. He is originally from the region of Hassaka, in Syrian Kurdistan, but has lived in the United States for the past two year.
Osman told Rudaw how ancient Kurdish music makes him feel: “It just takes me, like some kind of trance, like hypnotic, it takes me back through history like a movie. It connects me to my history, and everything related to Kurdish culture.”
“For Kurds the storyteller preserves history. Through story telling you can find out how life was in the Kurdish villages, how life was between the tribes, and about the love stories and nature. It connects and preserves Kurdish history itself!” Osman said.
Dr. Andrea Fishman, an expert classicist at Loyola Marymount University and steward of traditional Sephardic Jewish folk music, explained that the once rich written history of the Kurds was pushed underground by the rise of Islam, which sought to erase any and all traces of Kurdish existence. This is how oral tradition poetry took over as the main form of Kurdish historical preservation.
“Kurdish music is very powerful, it’s hypnotic, it’s trancy. It makes me feel and think about all the people who’ve lived and died while others have been trying to wipe them out. There is a certain amount of power and beauty but also a great sadness.” Fishman said.
Oral traditional poetry relies on the recitation and interpretation of ancient folk stories. This Bardic tradition of verbal preservation creates the structural common ground between Kurdish story telling and Homer’s ancient collection of poems.
“Raman is a living Bard, he is a preserver of these Kurdish epic songs, these long narrative poems,” Fishman said. “Some of the themes are shared between The Iliad and The Odyssey, so I thought why not connect Homer with a modern living oral tradition.”
Osman believes that Kurdish music has a bright future in the United States, for new audiences to explore both its modern and ancient literature and folk music.
“I think it gives people new ideas about Kurdish music and about Kurdish culture. I hope that this might be the beginning of introducing Kurds as a nation and a culture. I think there will be more and more performances in the future.”
