‘I don’t have a wife or kids. The choir is my new family’
NAWROZ Oranari has enchanted audiences around the world with his stunning voice.
But the 59-year-old’s musical gifts mask a story of hardship and extraordinary heartbreak. As a teenager growing up in Iraqi Kurdistan, the young singer was forced to flee his homeland to escape the violence of Saddam Hussein’s rule – and the threat of execution. His only crime? Being accused of singing songs that were critical of the regime.
“I was arrested and, together with my father, had to sign a pledge that I would never sing again – not even at home with friends. If I did I would be executed,” he says.
Only 17 when he left his family behind, Nawroz spent the next nine years in exile in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, before finally settling in the UK. Now a British citizen, the 59-year-old is one of the soloists with the National Lottery-funded Citizens of the World Choir, which he joined in 2018. This multiracial group of refugees and asylum seekers was started by a British music teacher to promote healing through music, and greater understanding of people displaced by war, famine and persecution.
But the sadness remains. After leaving home, Nawroz saw his parents only briefly on two occasions before they died – his mother as an indirect result of Saddam’s infamous chemical attack on the Kurds – and he has lost contact with his two sisters. “I don’t have a wife, don’t have kids, don’t have that many friends – I don’t even have a dog! So the choir is like my new family,” he says.
No fewer than 28 different nationalities are represented among the choir’s 53 members. And many of them, like Nawroz, have extraordinary and often harrowing stories of the incredible hardships and dangers they faced after being forced from their homelands to find a better life elsewhere.
Founder Becky Dell, a 41-year-old classically trained musician who runs her own music academy in Greenwich, south east London, says: “I have been totally floored many times on hearing what some of these people have been through.”