‘Music is the language of the world’: how a Syrian refugee became the toast of the Irish folk scene
At Lankum’s sold-out concert at Cork Opera House last summer, their sharpsuited support act had the crowd in the palm of his bouzouki-strumming hand. It was Kurdish Syrian singer and musician Mohammad Syfkhan, whose debut album I Am Kurdish has become part of a thriving, collaborative music scene in one of Ireland’s smallest counties.
A 57-year-old father of five whose music is a thrilling mix of electrified Kurdish, Arabic and Turkish traditional songs, covers and originals, Syfkhan arrived in Ireland as part of a refugee settlement scheme in December 2016 with his teacher wife, Huda, and young daughter, Noor. “I love music that reminds me of the past,” he writes over email (spoken English interviews are tricky for him, but his written English is expressive and warm). “I usually love music that brings joy because it makes me forget a little of the pain of the past.”
In Syria, music fitted around work. He began learning the bouzouki (a longnecked Anatolian lute) while studying to become a surgical nurse in Aleppo, moving to Raqqa in his mid-20s after he qualified. He then founded the popular Al-Rabie Band, playing festivals, concerts and parties throughout the ensuing decades. Then, in 2011, the Syrian civil war began. Two years later, Raqqa was taken over by the Syrian National Coalition, and then by Islamic State, which murdered one of Syfkhan’s sons, Fadi, a year later.
Syfkhan was told the news by one of the jihadi terrorists, calling on his son’s mobile phone. “When I try to relax, I look at pictures of my children when they were young and try to draw a beautiful future for them,” he writes. Not able to flee Syria together as a large family, his three other older sons found refuge in Germany while Mohammad, Huda and Noor made it to Greece by February 2016. This trio arrived in Ireland 10 months later, housed in Mosney Village, a former Butlin’s holiday camp repurposed as an asylum centre.
Syfkhan played his first gig there a few weeks later. “It was during Christmas and approximately 100 to 150 people attended it. It was nice to see this audience. It was a special and unforgettable party.” Singing was his way of communicating, he says. “I did not speak English well, so music was the language I spoke to everyone because music is the language of the world. It talks about love of all kinds, the love of people for each other, and love of the homeland.”
Seven months later, he settled in a council house in Carrick-on-Shannon in County Leitrim and started introducing himself to other musically minded people. He met Nyahh Records’ Willie Stewart in 2018, who was DJing at a local event celebrating the culture of new international communities in Country Leitrim. Syfkhan asked Stewart if he could plug his bouzouki into his mixing desk so he could play, which filled the room with adults and children doing traditional Syrian and Kurdish dances. “I was both stunned and excited,” Stewart recalls. “I immediately began to start booking him gigs.”
Stewart also runs experimental alldayers called Hunters Moon with sound artist Natalia Beylis, where Syfkhan watched improvising cellist Eimear
Reidy and saxophonist and sound artist Cathal Roche perform. He later asked them to play on his album; Reidy learned about his use of precise glissandi – glides between notes – and the 24-tone Arab tone tuning system, calling their collaboration “intense, musically enriching and joyful”. Concertina artist Cormac Begley, singer-songwriter Ciaran Rock and Alan Woods of the Traditional Music Archive also get mentioned warmly in Syfkhan’s email (“I have met wonderful musicians”).
I Am Kurdish includes luscious covers of 1970s Turkish hit Leylim Ley, Baligh Hamdim’s A Thousand and One Nights and Kurdish songwriter Mihemed Elî Şakir’s gorgeous Put a Coffee in a Glass. The title track, an original with Syfkhan’s deep, husky voice in full flow, is also a highlight. It’s made Stewart reflect on how the Kurds, who now number up to 45 million people worldwide, “have been brutalised and scattered throughout the Middle East and have never had a place to call their own. The fact that Mohammad chose this title for the album has a lot of power behind it.”
Another friend that Syfkhan calls “a brother whom I cherish”, the wellknown Irish poet and playwright Vincent Woods, agrees: “I think he really misses the depth of that connection.” Syfkhan, Huda and Noor act in a 2021 film Woods made with choreographer Edwina Guckian, Hunger’s Way/Bealach an Fhéir Ghortaigh, commissioned for the Strokestown international poetry festival. It begins with the Syfkhans walking to the National
Famine Museum, where Noor, 11 at the time of filming, does Irish dancing at the door. The film ends with them entering.
Woods hopes it underlines how displacement continues to be part of Ireland’s history, as “so many displaced people now are coming to Ireland in search of a new home”. He and Syfkhan have also discussed the common ground between Kurdish and Irish cultures. “They both have storytelling at the heart of them and are a key part of a cultural identity that had to struggle to preserve itself.”
“I love these beautiful people,” Syfkhan writes when I ask him specifically about Ireland. “I love music that talks about its cultural heritage, and music that is accompanied by dances, agility and footwork. I thank Ireland, the wonderful country, and the government, for everything they have done to support people.” For the many lives he has already touched, that gratitude flows both ways.
• I Am Kurdish is out now on Nyahh Records
included film screenings, panel discussions and a film poster exhibition. About 50 film-makers, archivists and curators from around the world, including China, travelled to Newcastle to participate. But publicity was minimal, because of the fear of attracting unwanted attention from the Chinese authorities. “It is a pity because as an archive we do want to encourage people’s use of it and the launch is the best time to do it,” says Yu.
The archive itself is located in Newcastle University’s Old Library Building. On the wall next to a large window overlooking a courtyard, there is a large montage of photographs. Each picture is from one of the dozens of oral histories that Yu recorded with key figures from China’s indie film movement. The film-makers are captured talking over tea and cigarettes in their apartments across China. One of the people pictured is Ai Xiaoming, a renowned feminist documentarian who has made harrowing films about some of darkest moments in modern Chinese history, such as the Jiabiangou labour camps in which 2,500 inmates starved to death. As a result of her film-making, she is banned from leaving the country.
The film archive itself is stored digitally, and is accessed by two monitors that sit opposite each other on the edge of the small room. Visitors can access a world of knowledge about China that is nearly impossible to discover within its borders. There are films about periods of history that the government would rather people forget, such as the The Epic of the Central Plains, by Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie, a harrowing documentary about impoverished villagers infected with Aids after selling their blood plasma to unsanitary, but often government-backed, blood banks.
But there are also plenty of films in the archive that do not have a political bent, such as Therapy, a kooky 2019 feature about a depressed film director who decides to stage a love affair with a friend in his apartment as a means of boosting his mood. Filmmakers are often “just interested in portraying reality through their own independent lens”, rather than specifically challenging the government, says Yu. Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist party views any kinds of narrative expression with suspicion. Xi has specifically warned of the dangers of “historical nihilism” in undermining the party’s grip on power. And the government is intolerant of any groups – whether it is feminists, students, religious followers or film-makers – who organise themselves outside the auspices of the party.
That means that the-grassroots community itself is the topic of many of the documentaries in the archive. Official repression of film-making and festivals has spawned a genre of films that deal with the difficulty of film-making itself. The most notable of these is Wang Wo’s The Filmless Festival. Released in 2015, it documents the preparation and forced cancellation of Biff the year before, a moment described as “the darkest day” in the history of Chinese independent film. A similar theme permeates Our Story, which documents the “guerrilla warfare” approach taken by the organisers of the Beijing queer film festival in 2011.
In recent years small, private screenings have taken the place of official festivals, and many film-makers share their work online. But even that has become more difficult. In 2023, Zhang Mengqi, a Beijing-based filmmaker whose Self-Portrait series about returning to her father’s village is stored at Cifa, helped to organise an online film festival about mothers, but the platform that was used to host the videos soon removed films that mentioned sensitive topics. On 14 December, the Shanghai culture and tourism bureau issued a notice saying that there were “many cases” of documentaries being shown in cinemas and art galleries “without the approval of the film authorities”, warning that they would “intensify the crackdown” on rulebreakers.
“There are a lot of unseen topics in China,” says Li Yifan, co-director of Before the Flood, a documentary (viewable at Cifa) about the displacement of villagers during the building of the Three Gorges Dam. “The question of what is real, and what is truth, is a very complicated question. Little by little, the truth is discovered in the filmmaking process.”
Many of the films in the archive, particularly those made by younger film-makers, focus on their personal lives rather than on society. Some in the industry see that as an unfortunate act of self-censorship, as film-makers internalise the government’s red lines about what stories can and cannot be told.
But Zhang, the director of the SelfPortrait film series, rejects the idea that personal films “cannot represent society”. She is a founding member of the Folk Memory Project, a film initiative that collects oral histories of the famine that ravaged China between 1958 and 1961. “When we are talking about Chinese society, some things are silent. When you put the camera on yourself to involve people in this topic, you can be a key to break that silence.”
Since its opening, Cifa has held an exhibition of indie film posters designed by film-maker Wang Wo and has published bilingual articles about different themes in Chinese film. Yu hopes to host more in-person events, such as panel discussions and film screenings, too. Its significance is already being felt by those interested in learning more about this under-covered corner of cinema. As Yu and I talk in the Cifa space over green tea, a Chinese student arrives; he has travelled from another university, where he is studying film, to watch the works of Hu Jie in Cifa’s collection.
His love of film came from his time as an undergraduate in China, where he was part of the university film society. In April, the group organised a secret screening of The Memo, a 2023 documentary about the extreme Covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai. The film was awarded the best documentary short film at the prestigious Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan. But given its subject matter, it cannot be shown legally in China, and its director’s name has been kept under wraps.
“It was very controversial but it was really worth it,” says the student. “The pandemic generation in university has been through many lockdowns, many depressing times … It might take some time for artists to reflect the trauma,” he says. “The most important thing with the screening is to provide a platform that makes that conversation possible”.
Visitors to the archive can access a world of knowledge about China that is nearly impossible to discover within its borders