Meral Polat

TRANSCRIPT

Hello everybody. My name is Meral Polat. I was born in 1982 in Amsterdam, from a mother and a father with Kurdish Alevi roots from Dersim. Dersim is, at this point located in East Turkey, and the official name is also not Dersim anymore, because after a genocide on Dersim in 1938, they changed the Kurdish name Dersim into the Turkish name Tunjele, which means “iron fist.” So this is the place where my roots are from.

I graduated in Amsterdam as an actress 20 years ago, so I play and make theater, I play in movies, in television shows, and music was always – before I went to the theatre school, before I chose this to do as a profession – music was always a part of me. I think before I could speak I sang and it was the connection with my parents, the connection with my family because of my Alevi and Kurdish roots. And in my profession I also did many different things music, theater – I tried everything – tango, the blues, jazz.

And in 2020 when it was Corona, when every plan everybody ever had was like canceled, then became the space of “Hey, this music, there's something inside of you that you still have to do, that you still have to like dive in and learn and make more space for it.” So for me, my identity, my music, my work, it is really one thing. And so how I approach the personal, that is how I approach the music also. That is who I am.

Being who I am, having the experience of being a Kurd, being Alevi, being a woman, being a child of migrants, being a diaspora artist, it inspires me and it is a force for me to talk about it, to tell it, to help it, to share it. And at the same time, it's.... So how do I explain it? So being an artist, it's like jackets you put on and you can put off. So we are not our identities. They're not stuck to us. It is a part of us that we can also maybe take a distance and see and compare. And behind there, there's the soul. There's the human.

Everybody would always, you know, have an opinion. Are you a singer? Are you an actress? Are you a writer? What are you? Everybody has to put you in a box. It's my whole life, like, in every way.

So, yes, I do define myself because people ask “define yourself,” but it is one part. It is not all that defines who you are. Everything, nothing.

So being a female is a part of an identity. What I feel biologically, but also what is told to me. And being a female what is told to me in my eastern background is sometimes totally the opposite of what is told to me in my western background.

So yeah, we are just walking conflicts. [Laughs]

I guess as long as I can remember, I asked questions like, “Why are we here? Who are we? What are we doing? What does it mean to be me? What does it mean to be you?” One day, I asked my grandfather when we were in Dersim, sitting in his house in his garden: “Grandfather, what is the meaning of life for you?” [Laughs] And both my grandfather and my father were when I asked those kind of questions like, “Pfft! This is impossible to answer. Why are you asking this kind of questions to us?” But I, yeah. I think maybe that is why I also became first an actress. I'm curious about humans and who we are and why do we do what we do and why, you know? And I guess it is also a link with my Alevi culture, with my Alevi roots.

So it wasn't really odd that one day, I think I was like, I was in my thirties. I think I was like 35. I just asked my father when – I don't know we were eating like fruit or something – and I said: “Baba, What does it mean for you to be a human being?”

I wanted to know his perspective and because maybe I just wanted to get to know him. He was a beautiful, interesting, amazing human being, and I wanted to get to know him as much as I could. And he laughed at me. He said, “I don't know! Don't ask me these difficult questions.... Just, you know.... To live and to become a whole human." But I said, “Baba, I really want to know it. I'm serious. This is a serious question. Like, think about it and answer me.”

And then a couple of weeks later, I just found in my mailbox an envelope, and in that envelope, there was this poem that he had written in Kurdish, and that was his answer to my question. And when I said, “Thank you very much. Wow, you wrote a poem as an answer.... But can you translate it for me? Because I understand it a little bit, but I have no idea what this means.”

And then what he said then was like, “What do you think? That if you really ask this question, that the answers will just drop in your lap? No, if you are truly asking this question, it's a search, it's a path. Don't ask me to translate it. Go find what your mother tongue, the Kurdish, what it is. Go learn it. First, learn about the language, and then you can read the poem.”

And with that, he had opened a door of a new – I don't know how to call it – a new quest or era that eventually also led to this album.

Ez kí me means “who am I” in Kurdish, and in the first sentence he writes “I am a human being, a possibility of freedom. Or you can translate it as a monument of freedom. And in my essence, I do not know separation. There is no discrimination.” And then the poem continues with a man and woman. We are equal and talks about that humans have a gate around their heart. And it's like winter, and this is why human is sometimes blind or deaf. So he enters a lot of states about what this being human is. But at the end, his last sentence of the poem is: “I am a village, I am a city, I am a land. I am the world. Who am I? Human.”

And what this means for me is, like, it is very practical, like, okay, we are all, we are equal here and We have to, you know, stay with an open heart. You have to stay with hope. You have to stay with empathy towards each other. Like, you have to not judge somebody who is different than you, all these kind of things. But when he says, “Oh yeah, I am the village. I am the city. I am the world,” is everything we see around us is who we are. Everything that is outside is also the inside. Like this hate or this judgment or whatever. It is first something that is inside of you. You have to see and understand or heal or reconcile with. Yes, but also something bigger. Like, as a human, I am also the time that is passing. As a human, I am also everything that is around me.

And a half year later, my father passed away. And when my brother and I were cleaning up his house – you know how that goes when you lose somebody and you have to clear the house. So in a drawer, my brother and I, we found notebooks, like five, six books, full of poetry in Kurdish, in Turkish. Sometimes he tried also in Dutch. My father has written all these years. And I knew that he had written a couple of poems also for me, but so much we did not know. And having those notebooks, it was very clear for me like, “Okay, this is my legacy. These are your words about being human, about being migrant, about being Kurdish, about life, about spirituality, about love.” This is, I have to do something with them.

And at that time I have met Chris Doyle from Maine, USA, and Frank Rosaly, he's Puerto Rican but raised in Arizona. And they both lived in Amsterdam, and we became Merat Polat Trio. And I decided to make an album, our debut album, with these poems.

There's this one song, it's called Diya. Diya talks about, well, it's from the perspective of my father, but it talks about, “I can see it. Freedom. I can see it. Equality. I can see a place where my people are free, free to speak their language.” It speaks about you have to have this hope, you know, the belief, the hope it can change for the better, and that you have to add whatever you can to it.

As a child you are not really conscious about that you are the other or that you are different, but when I was really young, I did encounter bullying by Dutch children. They were saying to me: “Go back to your own country, you stupid Turkish girl.” Like, you know, like really like six years, seven years old. [Laughs]

And then I remember asking my father, “We have to go back to our own country? But which country is that? And we're Turkish, but no we're Kurdish, because the Turkish people also I am being made the other because we are Kurdish? But we don't speak everywhere Kurdish? What is that? And that this identity was different than the identity of this child sitting next to me? But also the Alevi aspect? What is this??

So you feel all these things as a child, but you cannot place it. But it did make me really interested in who are we then all, and what are these identities. I couldn't get it what this tension and these narratives of identities were. But it does something to you, because I also noticed as a child how a doctor or somebody spoke to my parents that they were treated like second-class citizens because of the tone of how they were spoken to because they have like accents when they speak. Also, like, I didn't understand when my father told me that he could not speak Kurdish for a long time in Turkey, that as a child they beat him up for it.

What does that do to your being, when your right to exist is constantly being threatened? How do you stand? How do you talk? How do you walk? What does that do to a human being when you had to constantly fight for your existence? When you had to constantly protect your identity?

So language is construct, right? We made it. We created it. When I went into this music world and decided the languages that I'm singing – Kurdish and Turkish – so the languages of my roots, I discovered that I was really naïve and really privileged, like: “Okay, born in Amsterdam. Yeah, I'm gonna sing Kurdish and I'm gonna sing Turkish.” Yeah, I know that the language is sometimes gonna be difficult in Turkey, that people not gonna want us to sing Kurdish, you know, because of the political tensions, which is of course such bullsh**. I discovered that some places will not book you because you sing Kurdish, and you can sing about finding a great green flower and eating it, but it will be judged as being political just because it is in Kurdish. So this is what you are dealing with. And this I was naïve in a little bit, because I am not a politician, I am an artist. And yes, I am an activist artist. But only the fact that it was in Kurdish was enough that some people just don't come or don't want to book it. But the other way also happens. So Kurdish people can say “You are singing in Turkish and this is the language of the oppressor.” And they're true. It is true. They have forbidden the Kurdish language, they have assimilated.... And it is true, but it is also my language. It is also my culture, this Turkish language. It is also something I was brought up in. It is the language that I love, and I was loved in. But then we can also say don't talk English, because it's the language of the imperialist, you know.

So this is also sometimes a thin line to navigate in because of the Kurdish language. It is a language that is still in oppression and that makes it different than if I would have been an English singer. If I would have sing in another language. But this makes it also very important to do so because we need to talk about these things these things, yeah, are important questions to come into the light.

And there's this poem that Nazem Hikmet wrote. There's this sentence like: “Living is planting an olive tree seed in the ground, knowing that you will not ever be able to sit in his shadow. but the generations after you will.” And it is the same thing with us, that we have to have hope. Maybe we will not live this peace, maybe we will not experience this change, but we have to plant a seed in the ground as how big or small we can, you know? This is what Diya talks about.

So we are the first ones reflecting, because my parents didn't have the space, they were surviving. But we feel everything, we have the trauma, it is also inside of us. I feel like I am literally the first one, the first generation, who wants to bring those hidden parts back to life again.

Our first album is called Ez Ki Me. Who am I? It is written on the cover. It is not political for me, but it is like, okay, you don't allow people to speak the language that is like ancient. You don't allow the songs, the culture, the way of expression, the names, you oppress that, but it will come to the surface and it will exist again, because you cannot kill it, you cannot destroy it, because it is in our heart. These songs.... just burn the paper they're written on.

I'm singing songs that my parents taught me, that their parents taught us, and we go back like hundreds of years. I sing them because it is love, because it is passed on for love from one generation to the other generation. It is for love. So this will not die. You cannot suppress it. There is so much suffering and pain for it, which is pffft.

So for me too.... I am so grateful that I can express it with my talent in the space that I am in this safe life in Amsterdam. I am also really conscious about this and really thankful for this and not taking it for granted, because maybe of my parents and my grandparents. And, you know, that I can make this music and that it exists that. Yeah, that is what I can do and I'm doing it. Yeah.