When certain communities are excluded from the main stream historiography, language becomes a valuable medium both in constructing the “other history” and in preserving the culture. This is especially true for the Assyrians. As a stateless people, and an ethnic and religious minority in the Middle East, Assyrians in the 20th century have been subjected to various methods of persecutions (i.e. displacements, massacres, and lingocide) which aimed at eradicating their existence. In consequence, although Assyrians have had strong literal traditions in the Aramaic language over the centuries, they came to see such milestones almost shattered in their modern history. This in turn creates a new chapter in Assyrian history, one aiming to preserve the culture, the language, and most importantly present Assyrian historiography or the ‘other history.’
In response, Assyrians resort to various methods of defiance including the use of oral history and the development of home schooling. Oral history, gives a voice to the voiceless Assyrians. Under its umbrella a range of practices can be included and will be discussed in this panel. Foremost among those practices, were the folk songs/poems of “Rawe” and folk tales which evolved centuries ago and have been orally transmitted and preserved among the Assyrians throughout South Eastern Turkey, Northern Iraq and Western Iran until this very day. The second practice, perhaps a modern development of folk songs or “Rawe” for the Assyrians, is music. This form gains much popularity and begins in the late 19th century in the Eastern Assyrian community (Iraq, Iran, Syria), and middle 20th century within the Western Assyrian community (Turkey and Syria). Through this medium nationalism is strengthened, and finds an audience in every Assyrian household due to the aid of mass production. Thus, oral history becomes a significant method in collecting data and making history not only aiming to preserve the past but also responsible in shaping the future.
Alongside oral history, home schooling develops in response to the atrocities Assyrians experienced in the 20th century. In various Iraqi Assyrian communities, such schools aim at restoring the language and fostering a sense of nationalism among the Assyrians. Since Assyrian civil society is never truly allowed to function independently and Assyrian schools are not supported by the state, oral history and homeschooling take on such roles.
This panel will discuss the various methods of defiance Assyrians used in the 20th century. Papers will be contextualized within a historical framework.
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Prof. Geoffrey Khan
This paper will report on a project that I am currently undertaking on the language of a corpus of Modern Assyrian folktales. These folktales have been transmitted orally for many generations in numerous Modern Assyrian communities. The traditions are gradually being forgotten and are not being passed down to the younger generations. For this reason there is an urgent need to record them. Over the last five years, I have undertaken fieldwork in numerous diaspora Modern Assyrian communities, in Western Europe, North America, Australia and the Caucasus. Until the first half of the twentieth century the vast majority of the Modern Assyrians dwelt in rural communities in villages throughout South Eastern Turkey, Northern Iraq and Western Iran. In these villages the folktales were generally told by a small number of story-tellers. In many cases there was only one story-teller in a village or group of villages, which has made the traditions more vulnerable to loss. Since the communities were for the most part illiterate, the orally transmitted folklore, such as the folktales, played an important role in preserving cultural traditions.
The language of the folktales exhibits various distinctive linguistic features that are used to enhance the dramatic presentation of the events in the stories. Some of these features distinguish their language from that of everyday conversation. This endows the tales with a status of legends, separated from the realities of daily life, which is likely to have been a factor that helped strengthen the conservativeness of their transmission. The linguistic features distinctive of the folktales include special narrative verbal forms and a range of devices for marking episodic boundaries and narrative high points. One of the central linguistic features of the narratives is past verbal form that has an evidential function of presenting the events as reported tradition rather than reality observed by the speaker. The paper will give examples of these linguistic features.
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Mr. Nineb Lamassu
The Female Voice in Rawe and the Strive for Gender Equality
Up on embracing the Christian faith the Assyrians incorporated the melodies of their temple hymns and chants into their Christian liturgical music. The zealous devotion of the early church fathers led to the suppression of everything that is not confined within the church and monastery walls (see the canon laws of Odisho Bar Brikha and Bar Salibi). This fact affected Assyrian laity music and heritage, almost leading to its total loss among most of the Assyrian communities, whose culture eventually came under the influence of the neighbouring peoples. However, the obstinate mountain dwelling Assyrians of Hakkari, isolated in their difficult mountain ranges, not only maintained much of this heritage and transmitted it orally from generation to the next but their isolated environment and semi-autonomous status helped them preserve an undiluted and organically evolved culture.
The orally preserved heritage of the Hakkari Assyrians can be categorised into various genres. This paper will study this oral heritage, in itself construed as an act of defiance in light of Church policies towards laity music and culture. I will primarily focus on the female voice in “Rawe”, a genre loosely defined as Assyrian love poetry. This genre seems to have offered a rare vista of self expression for the Assyrian women in a highly patriarchal society.
Therefore a detailed study of this genre can shed light on the status, role, and life of the Assyrian women in Hakkari. Indeed Rawe seems to be the only medium of expression for spirited Assyrian women that strived for gender equality in a closed and conservative Christian community. This paper will make use of these female voices to demonstrate the strive of the Assyrian women as manifested in Rawe couplets, which remains a genre that has not yet been reduced to sound scholarly research, something which this paper aims to achieve.
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Dr. Edward Odisho
After the 1915-1918 tragic displacement of the Assyrians living within the realm of the Ottoman Empire, they did not only become homeless and statusless; indeed, they lost their few formal institutions which promoted literacy skills (reading & writing) in their native language– Aramaic. The Assyrians were dispersed as refugees all over the Middle East practicing their Aramaic language orally with minimum literacy interactions. The tragedy to which they were exposed and the bitter taste of losing a homeland gave birth to a strong sense of nationalism and national identity the latter of which inspired some of their literate and conscientious leaders to innovate in reintroducing literacy in Aramaic. Foremost among such innovations was the introduction of the concept of home school which designates in-house instruction run by one instructor (R?bi) who tutored young learners individually or in small groups in return for nominal fees. For instance, there emerged scores of such ‘home schools’ throughout Iraq. These home schools, in turn, led to the emergence of a tradition within the family that its literate member had the social responsibility of instructing the rest of the family members. In the long run, and in the absence of formal schools, this home-based instruction constituted an important resource for the maintenance of Aramaic as a live language. Naturally, these home-schools emerged in areas of highest population concentration of Aramaic-speakers in Iraq such as Kirkuk, Habbaniyah, Doura, Nineveh plain etc…Without the emergence of home schools in population concentration areas the chances of Aramaic survival would have been very slim. Home schools promoted literacy skills (reading & writing) while population concentration activated the daily oral skills (listening & speaking) both of which collaborated in keeping Aramaic in active circulation until the establishment of all-Aramaic cross-curriculum formal schools in the North of Iraq in 1993 which are now exclusively responsible for the maintenance of literacy in Aramaic among the Assyrians in Iraq.
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Dr. Alda Benjamen
Music is a valuable form of oral history composition and formation for ethnic minorities in the Middle East whose language, cultural rights and ethnic identity might be suppressed by the state in which they reside. Music and singing become major media for resisting the status quo and disseminate their ideology, cultural identity, and history from their perspective. This is especially significant when lingocide practices are at play. Thus, when people are not allowed to learn their language at a school setting, or standardize it appropriately a smaller percentage of a “reading public” emerges as opposed to the “listening public” (see Blum & Hassanpour, 1996). Since the listening public does not need advanced reading and writing skills in their native tongue to be able to compose, or listen to music, music becomes the medium where the culture is revived and the community’s identity strengthened.
For the Assyrians, the significance of popular music and musicians became especially instrumental to their national cause during the late 19th and early 20th century. Through this medium, they realized, certain causes could be highlighted and communicated to the public in an effective manner. More importantly, music could be used to challenge the ‘official’ history of the state and replace it with their version or the ‘other’ history. As a result, numerous Assyrian Iraqi singers were tortured and imprisoned for singing patriotic songs in the 1960s and 1970s. With the increased persecution singers faced in Iraq, the attention shifted to the Diasporas, where most notable Assyrian singers escaped, too. Thus, songs of defiance continued to disseminate among the Assyrian population in Iraq secretly. In the early 1980s, cassette tapes of Ashour Bet-Sargis’ and Ivan Aggasi’s patriotic Assyrian songs were copied from household to household behind closed doors. Assyrians enjoyed the affirmation of their identity and the motifs of survival and triumph these songs provided.
In this paper, I will examine some typical Assyrian songs through historical contextualization and thematic analysis and provide an account of the emergence of popular music in the Assyrian communities in the Middle East. Due to time and thematic constraints, the emphasis will be on the Assyrian community in Iraq during the Ba’ath rule (1968-2003).
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Mr. Abboud Zeitoune
Secularism and National Identity in 20th century Western Assyrian Music
For many centuries, folk music was non-existent among the Western Assyrians of Northern Mesopotamia mostly followers of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch. Only occasionally certain familial ceremonies, such as weddings, involved singing in Armenian, Kurdish, Turkish, and sporadically in Arabic, depending of the area of settlement.
Singing in the Assyrian language was traditionally restricted to spiritual ceremonies within the walls of ancient churches and monasteries. Folk music and singing, on the other hand, were seen as acts of heresy contributing to the contamination and destruction of what was considered the holy tongue of Jesus Christ, a belief deeply rooted in church tradition. This was in striking contrast with the traditions of fellow Assyrians of the Eastern Churches, i.e. the members of the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East and the Catholic Church of Babylon, which have a long ancient tradition of folk music.
It was with the advent of modernity and nationalistic ideas in late 19th century that this dogma was seriously questioned. While in the late 19th century Assyrian nationalism had basically been a phenomenon among intellectuals living in urban areas only, it came to flourish in the aftermath of the tragic events of World War I that had been followed by dispersion and despair. The idea of unifying Assyrians from different denominations under one umbrella led to activism among Western Assyrians centered in the town of Qamishly, located at the Syrian-Turkish border. As a consequence, the Assyrian Democratic Organization was founded in 1957 in Syria. It rapidly grew in popularity and within a few years of years, party activists concluded that ways of popularizing political messages of secularism and National identity had to be found. Oral history through music came to be considered a powerful tool and composers, musicians and singers were instructed to prepare the launch of Western Assyrian folk music. After roughly a decade, the revolutionary step was taken in 1968 by launching the very first song in the Western Assyrian dialect Turoyo.
