Nûdem Durak, Imprisoned Musician

In Turkey, musicians who perform Kurdish music are often subject to arrest and imprisonment. One of the most prominent Kurdish musicians to be imprisoned is Nûdem Durak.

Nûdem Durak (born c.1993) is a Kurdish singer and folk musician from Cizre, a town in North Kurdistan. She worked as a music teacher at the Mem û Zin Cultural Center, whre she taught local folksongs in Kurmanci to young children in sing-alongs.

She was also a member of the musical group Koma Sorxwîn. “I always dreamed of having a guitar, but I didn’t have the money for it,” Durak recalled in an interviewer. “My mother gave me her wedding ring and said, ‘Sell this ring and buy a guitar.’ When I had the guitar, it meant the world to me.”

She was first arrested in 2009, during the Turkish state’s anti-KCK operation. Durak spent eight months in jail awaiting trial, then was released.

“They said that she is a senior executive at KCK, the largest organization above the PKK,” her sister recalled. “It’s a lie. . . . They arrested her because she is Kurdish and she sings in Kurdish.” Durak told Al-Jazeera that “singing in Kurdish is my heritage from my ancestors… my only crime is making art.” In 2013, to celebrate Newroz, she sang “Nuda” with Koma Sorxwîn.

In 2015 her case was resumed. She was arrested and imprisoned in April for performing Kurdish political songs, which the prosecution said was evidence that she was a member of an illegal organization. She was charged with propagandizing because she sang songs that were in her own language. She was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison.

In July 2016, her sentence was increased to 19 years, although no additional charges or convictions were brought against her.

When she reported for her sentence, she had beeen allowed to bring her acoustic guitar to prison. But in 2017 her guitar was ruined in a routine cell check when guards broke off its neck. “Because I sang songs, they put me in jail,” she wrote in year later. “They can take everything from me, but never my tongue or my voice!”

She is held in Bayburt M-Type Women’s Closed Prison and is not due for release until 2034. “As the days go by, the conditions become more and more difficult, our living space becomes narrower and narrower,” she wrote to supporters in 2019.  “Our fundamental rights, to which we are legally entitled, such as the right to visit, the right to telephone, the right to receive a letter, etc., are violated.”

International Campaigns

Several international campaigns have been mounted by prominent artists, actors, and musicians to press for her release.

In 2016 the campaign “Song for Nudem Durak” was launched. In November of the same year, the musician Peter Gabriel initiated the Voice Project’s campaign Imprisoned for Art, “to free dissidents who are currently imprisoned for simply having used their art and their voice to speak out.” The campaign included Durak. “It’s shocking to realize that there are still countries in which musicians who want to do exactly the same thing that we do end up in jail with their lives at risk,” Gabriel said. “It’s both a reminder of the freedoms we take for granted and the responsibility that we have to make their stories better known.”

A few years later Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters called attention to her case by donating the black Martin acoustic guitar he had used on his 2017–18 Us + Them Tour. He circulated it to fellow musicians including Nick Mason, Pete Townshend, Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Brian May, Noel Gallagher, Mark Knopfler, and Marianne Faithfull all of whom signed it with words of support. It then reached Durak in Bayburt Prison in 2022.

In 2020 an international group of artists and intellectuals including Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Ken Loach, David Graeber, among others, launched a renewed international campaign for her release. In a message of solidarity, the French-Brazilian ecosocialist philosopher Michael Löwy wrote: “Her songs are part of the tradition of the oppressed and the Kurdish tradition preserved over centuries. For those who still believe in peace, freedom and human dignity, the imprisonment of Nûdem Durak is an unbearable insult. Therefore, an outcry must be raised throughout the world, in Paris, New York, Rio, Santiago, Berlin.”

The “Free Nûdem Durak” campaign can be reached via Facebook, Twitter,  Instagram, and Youtube. More information is available at the Kedistan.net website here, and you can sign an online petition here.

In May 2023 the journalist Joseph Andras published a book about her in French. Half of it consists of her prison writings. You can read a conversation with Joseph Andras here.

Nûdem Durak has now spent seven years imprisoned for singing in Kurdish, but the Turkish state hasd ignored all demands for her freedom. In November 2023 Süleyman Durak, her father, called on the international campaign to redouble its effort. He longs to see her every day, he says, but because the prison is far from her home, he has found it hard to visit her, due to his own health issues.  Moreover, “Nûdem is sick. She suffers from symptoms related to her goiter and osteoporosis,” he said. He asks for more support for his daughter, saying that “every artist with a conscience should protect and support Nûdem.”

Photos are from Free Nûdem Durak social media.