A new wave of Kurds fleeing Turkey bring their own sound to Nashville’s Music City

Plucking at a stringed instrument called a santur, Nesrin Simsek tells her students to get ready to practice an old, tragic love song called “Malan Barkir.” It tells the story of a Kurdish couple, separated and forced to flee their homes after the 1937 and 1938 Dersim massacres, in which the Turkish military killed at least 13,000 Kurdish civilians and displaced more than 11,000.

“When I play this song, it makes me sad, but we have to show ourselves to people,” she explained. “This is Music City. We want to add a new style.”

Simsek is an instructor with the Kurdish Culture and Music Association, a brand-new group dedicated to teaching Kurdish dance, music and language. The association is located in the Nashville neighborhood of Antioch in Tennessee, in a newly refurbished basement decked out with colorful scarves, photos of famous Kurds, and lots and lots of musical instruments. They just kicked off their first round of classes in June.

Like most of the group’s founding members, Simsek is from the Turkish part of Kurdistan, also known as Bakur.

Kurdistan is not an internationally recognized, sovereign country but rather falls across four countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. Kurds have a history of persecution in each of these countries, and their culture and language have often been targets for repression.

Nashville has the largest Kurdish population of any city in the United States, and most are from the Iraqi region of Kurdistan, known as Bashur. They arrived in waves starting in the 1970s, with the largest influx prompted by Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaigns in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Since the coronavirus pandemic, there’s been an uptick in Kurds coming to the United States from Turkey. Many of them make their way to Nashville, where they know there’s already a large community.

Bager Chelik, who arrived in Nashville two years ago, is one of them.

A former middle school teacher, Chelik now volunteers with the Kurdish Culture and Music Association, teaching a Kurdish dialect called Kurmanji. He couldn’t do that as part of his old job in Turkey because Article 42 of the Turkish Constitution effectively prohibits teaching Kurdish in schools.

“We don’t have a state. And we are under pressure,” he said. “We have to protect our language, music and culture. That’s why I want to teach.”

Local resettlement efforts

Mehmet Ayaz came to the US from Turkey more than 20 years ago. For the past two, he’s been in Nashville, working with the influx of new Kurdish arrivals as a volunteer with the Salahadeen Center and a program director with the American Muslim Advisory Council.

He said seeing other Bakuri Kurds openly celebrating and embracing their culture is exciting.

“Seeing them discovering America, the freedom of the United States, it makes me happy because that’s why I came here,” he said. “And now you’re discovering it. Now, pass this to someone else, you know, let them know that this is a free country.”

However, Ayaz said these new arrivals need more support than Nashville’s nonprofits are currently able to offer, especially when it comes to learning English, finding jobs and finding housing.

Since the pandemic, most of the Kurds coming from Turkey have come across the US-Mexico border as asylum seekers. As a result, many find themselves in a months or yearslong bureaucratic limbo, waiting for work visas and status updates while their applications process.

Ayaz says this makes all the usual struggles of living in a major city — such as paying rent, finding affordable childcare, and getting healthcare — that much harder.

Crossing the southern border

That was certainly the case for Mohsum Dag, who crossed the border into Texas with his wife and 1-year-old son in November 2022.

The journey was extremely difficult: They had to swim across a small river and spent several days in a detention center in poor conditions, eating food that made his son physically ill.

It took months to get a work permit, and then it was hard to find childcare so that both he and his wife, Zehra, could work. The first year and a half in Nashville was financially harrowing. It’s only been in the past two or three months that he said he feels like he’s gotten his feet under him in his new home.

Dag spoke in Kurmanji, while his friend Kadir Gür translated into English. Gür works with Tennessee Resettlement Aid and Catholic Charities, and has been working with this latest wave of Kurdish arrivals.

“They would still choose to go to US. No matter how difficult it is, they would choose to go to the US,” he said.

Dag said that in Turkey, he was a member of Kurdish political parties and was very involved as a student and teacher of Kurdish music and dance, which attracted attention from the authorities.

“For the government, whoever supports the Kurdish and Kurdistan, they’re terrorists,” he said.

Police were constantly calling him and coming to his house. He was arrested and beaten several times, and his brother was tortured. And 20 years ago, his father disappeared while in government custody.

Dag and his family never found out what happened to him.

“He doesn’t want what happened to his father and his brother to also happen to him and his family in the future,” Gür translated. “And he doesn’t want his kid to be with no father.”

Now, Dag is a board member of the Kurdish American Community Association, a new community center in South Nashville designed to give new arrivals a place to meet each other and hold cultural events. And his greatest hope for the future is to raise his son in Nashville with a strong connection to his Kurdish heritage and language.

The Kurdish American Community Association held its first concert on June 30. Zehra was among the performers.

This story was originally reported by WPLN, an NPR station.