Meryem Xan: The Voice That Broke the Silence
- Sherko Sabir
- 26 minutes ago
- 13 min read
Introduction
In a tradition long dominated by the voices of men, one woman's voice rang out and changed everything. Meryem Xan, who lived in the first half of the twentieth century, was the first Kurdish woman to have her songs set down on record, a pioneering singer and dengbej who broke through a wall of silence and prejudice to claim her place among the great voices of her people. In an age when it was thought shameful for a woman to sing in public, she sang, and her courage opened a door through which generations of Kurdish women would afterwards walk.
If Evdale Zeynike is remembered as the king of the dengbej, Meryem Xan deserves to be remembered as the woman who won that art a new freedom. Hers was a life of wandering and hardship, of a marriage given up for the sake of her music, of long roads from her mountain homeland to the recording studios and radio stations of distant cities. And out of that hard life came hundreds of songs and a voice that has never been forgotten.
Her story is, in the end, a story of courage: the courage to sing when singing was forbidden to women, to choose art over comfort, and to send a Kurdish woman's voice out across the airwaves to her people for the first time. To remember Meryem Xan is to remember not only a great singer but a quiet revolutionary, the woman who broke the silence.
Contents
Who Was Meryem Xan?
Meryem Xan, who lived from about 1904 to 1949, was a pioneering Kurdish singer and dengbej, celebrated as the first Kurdish woman to have her songs recorded and preserved. Born most likely in the Botan region and trained in the dengbej tradition, she defied the social taboo that condemned women's public singing, gave up a marriage rather than abandon her art, and made her way through Zaxo, Mosul and Baghdad to become a recording artist and a voice of Kurdish radio. In a short and difficult life she created hundreds of songs and opened the way for the many Kurdish women singers who followed her.
A Voice Against the Silence
To understand the greatness of Meryem Xan, one must first understand what she was up against. In the Kurdish society of her time, as in many societies of the age, it was considered shameful, even sinful, for a woman to sing in public or to make a profession of music. The dengbej, the singers and keepers of the oral tradition, were overwhelmingly men, and a woman who sought to take up that role faced disapproval, obstruction and the loss of her good name. The art was, in practice, closed to women in the public sphere.
Yet the truth was that women had always sung. Within the home, at the cradle and the loom and the graveside, it was very often women who sang the lullabies and the laments and who carried many of the most beautiful melodies of the tradition; a great part of the music belonged, in its origins, to them. What Meryem Xan did was to carry that hidden, domestic voice out into the open, onto the record and the radio, and in doing so she challenged the silence imposed on women and claimed for them a place in the public life of Kurdish music. It was an act of real courage, and it came at a cost.
Key Takeaways
Meryem Xan was the first Kurdish woman to have her songs recorded.
She lived from about 1904 to 1949 and trained in the dengbej tradition.
She defied the taboo that condemned women's public singing.
She married into the Bedirxan family but left when forbidden to sing.
She recorded for a British company and sang on Baghdad Radio.
She opened the way for generations of Kurdish women singers.
Quick Facts
Name: Meryem Xan (also written Mariam Khan)
Lived: About 1904 to 1949
Origin: Uncertain; likely the Botan region, by some accounts of Armenian descent
Type: Dengbej and singer, a pioneering Kurdish female artist
Distinction: The first Kurdish woman to have her songs recorded
Family: Married into the Bedirxan family; left when forbidden to sing
Journey: From Botan and Syria to Zaxo, Mosul and Baghdad
Famous for: Her recordings and her song Domame, among hundreds
Platform: Sang on the Kurdish program of Baghdad Radio
Legacy: Opened the way for generations of Kurdish women singers
An Obscure Beginning
The early life of Meryem Xan is wrapped in obscurity, and the accounts that survive do not fully agree. It is generally said that she was born around 1904 in the Botan region, the country of Cizre and the upper Tigris that has given the Kurds so much of their music and legend. By one striking account, however, she was of Armenian or Christian origin, a child orphaned in the catastrophe that befell the Armenians in 1915 and taken in and raised by a Kurdish family, an account that, if true, would make her life a remarkable echo of that of the great dengbej Karapete Xaco, the Armenian who became a master of Kurdish song. The truth of her origins is uncertain, and it is most honest to say that they are not securely known.
What is clearer is that in the 1920s her family resettled in the Kurdish region of Syria, and that she grew up steeped in the dengbej tradition, learning the songs and the art of the sung word that she would carry with her for the rest of her life. From these obscure and difficult beginnings, a child of uncertain origin raised amid the upheavals of the early twentieth century, there emerged one of the most important voices in the whole history of Kurdish music.
The Bedirxan Marriage
In the course of her life Meryem Xan came into contact with the leading figures of the Kurdish cultural revival, above all the brothers Celadet and Kamuran Bedirxan, the aristocratic intellectuals who founded the famous journal that helped to shape modern Kurdish writing and who laboured to preserve the language and the heritage of their people. She married into the distinguished Bedirxan family, entering the very heart of the Kurdish cultural elite of her day.
But the marriage foundered on the very thing that made her great. Her husband, it is said, was uncomfortable with his wife being a dengbej, a public singer, for the old shame still clung to a woman who performed, even in so cultivated a family. Faced with a choice between her marriage and her music, Meryem Xan chose her music. She left her husband rather than give up her art, a decision of extraordinary boldness for a woman of her time, and one that tells us everything about the strength of her vocation. Her songs mattered to her more than comfort or respectability, and she would not be silenced.
The Long Road
The rest of her life was a long road through the cities of the Kurdish and Arab world. She went to Zaxo in the 1920s, then to Mosul in the 1930s, and at last to Baghdad, the great city that was then a flourishing centre of Kurdish music and culture. In each place she sang, and in Baghdad in particular she entered the company of the renowned dengbej and singers of the age, performing alongside celebrated Kurdish artists and taking her place among the stars of the era.
It was a hard and wandering life, marked by the insecurity and dependence that so often fell to musicians, and to a woman musician most of all. But it was also the life that carried her to the studios and the radio stations where her voice would be captured and sent out to the world. The long road from the mountains of Botan to the recording rooms of Baghdad was the road by which a Kurdish woman's voice reached, for the first time, an audience beyond the gathering and the home.
The First Recordings
The peak of Meryem Xan's artistic life came when she recorded her songs for a British music company, which pressed and released them on disc. With these recordings she became the first Kurdish woman whose voice was preserved on record, a milestone in the history of Kurdish music. Where the songs of earlier singers had lived only as long as memory and performance could keep them, hers were now fixed in a form that could outlast her and travel far beyond her presence.
Among her recordings, the song known as Domame became especially beloved, one of the finest examples of her art, and she is said to have created hundreds of songs in the course of her career, accompanied by ensembles of strings such as the violin and the lute. These discs are precious beyond their music, for they are the first recorded voice of a Kurdish woman, the sound of a barrier broken, and they preserve for us the very tones of a singer who would otherwise be known only by report. Through them, Meryem Xan still sings.
The Voice on the Radio
Beyond the gramophone, Meryem Xan found an even wider audience through the new medium of radio. She joined the Kurdish-language broadcasts of Baghdad Radio, whose Kurdish service became, from the late 1930s onward, one of the great lifelines of Kurdish music and culture, carrying songs across borders to Kurds who could hear, in their own language, the voices of their own singers. Over its airwaves the voice of Meryem Xan travelled to towns and villages across the Kurdish lands.
The importance of these radio broadcasts, from Baghdad and later from Yerevan, can hardly be overstated. In a period when the public use of the Kurdish language was restricted or banned in several of the states that ruled the Kurdish regions, the radio was a precious channel through which the songs of the dengbej and the great epics and laments could still be heard. Meryem Xan was among the voices that filled that channel, and through it she became known and loved across the whole of Kurdistan, a woman's voice carrying the songs of her people through the air.
The Kilam and the Lament
The art that Meryem Xan practised was the art of the kilam, the sung narrative and lament of the dengbej tradition, and here the contribution of women was especially deep. The female singers were known above all for their kilam laments, their songs of pain, loss and longing, closely bound up with the funeral lament and the lullaby, the most intimate and emotional registers of the tradition. In the hands of a great singer, the kilam could express the whole weight of a people's sorrow and love.
Meryem Xan's repertoire ranged across this rich tradition, the love-songs and the laments, the songs of longing and the songs of the great tales. She would have known and sung from the world of the famous destans, the tragic loves of Mem u Zin and Siyabend u Xece, and the mountain epics like Cembeli. In carrying these songs in a woman's voice, and in setting them down on record, she gave the whole tradition a new dimension and a new reach, and she proved that the deepest expression of the Kurdish soul in song was not the province of men alone.
The Trail She Blazed
Perhaps the greatest measure of Meryem Xan's importance is what came after her. By breaking the taboo and claiming a public voice, she opened a path that a long line of Kurdish women singers would follow. The great Eyse San, who rose to fame in the decades after her and who endured her own hardships and persecutions for the sake of her art, looked back to Meryem Xan as a forerunner, as did many others. Her own cousin, Elmas Xan, was also a singer, and across the Kurdish world a generation of female voices began to be heard on the radio waves of Baghdad and Yerevan.
These women, the female dengbej and singers who came after Meryem Xan, carried her achievement forward and made the once-unthinkable presence of a woman's voice in public Kurdish music into something established and honoured. Every Kurdish woman who has since taken up the song owes something to the one who went first, who bore the disapproval and paid the price so that those who followed might sing more freely. Meryem Xan did not merely sing; she cleared the ground for others to sing after her.
Symbolism and Legacy
Meryem Xan has become a symbol of the courage to break silence, and of the power of a single voice to change what is possible. In a world that told women to be quiet, she sang; in a society that attached shame to her art, she made that art her life; and in choosing her music over her marriage and her comfort, she declared that a woman's voice was worth any price. Her life embodies the truth that the preservation and the growth of a culture depend on those brave enough to defy its narrowest conventions.
Her legacy is double. It lies in the songs themselves, the recordings and the melodies that are still sung today by singers of both sexes and that keep her voice alive across the generations. And it lies in the freedom she won, the open door through which Kurdish women have walked into the heart of their people's music. That she did all this in a life of only some forty-five years, amid hardship and obscurity, makes the achievement greater still. The woman who broke the silence left behind a sound that has never stopped.
Meryem Xan and the Kurds
Meryem Xan holds a cherished place in the story of the Kurds, beside the great male masters of song such as Evdale Zeynike, as the woman who brought the female voice into the public life of Kurdish music. For a people who have preserved their identity, their history and their language above all through song, in the long periods when other channels were closed to them, the addition of women's voices to that tradition was no small thing; it was the recovery of half the nation's voice.
In her, too, the Kurds may recognise the entangled and shared character of the region's heritage, for if the accounts of her Armenian origin are true, then one of the first great voices of Kurdish women's song belonged to a child of another people, gathered in and made one with the Kurds, as so often happened in that meeting-ground of nations. Whatever her birth, she became wholly a singer of the Kurds, and her voice belongs forever to their story. To honour Meryem Xan is to honour both the courage of women and the generous breadth of a tradition that could make a daughter of any origin into one of its own.
Debates and Misconceptions
Was Meryem Xan really the first Kurdish woman singer? It is most accurate to call her the first Kurdish woman to have her songs recorded and preserved, and the first to win wide public fame through record and radio. Women had of course always sung within Kurdish society, in the home and at the great occasions of life, and many of the tradition's melodies originated with them. What was new and pioneering was her breaking into the public, recorded and broadcast sphere from which women had been barred, and in that sense she truly was a trailblazer.
What were her true origins? Here honesty requires admitting uncertainty. Some accounts place her birth in the Botan region and treat her as Kurdish by birth; another account holds that she was of Armenian or Christian descent, orphaned in 1915 and raised by a Kurdish family, much like the great dengbej Karapete Xaco. The records of her early life are too thin to settle the question, and it is better to acknowledge the uncertainty than to assert any one version as fact. What is certain is that she became one of the great voices of Kurdish song.
Why was it so difficult for her as a woman? The difficulty arose from the social conventions of her time and place, which regarded public singing and the life of a professional musician as shameful for a woman, a judgment common to many societies of the age and not unique to the Kurds. It was these conventions that cost her her marriage and that she had to defy in order to sing. Her greatness lies precisely in her refusal to accept them, and her example helped, in time, to change them. It is a story not of a culture's failing alone but of one woman's courage in the face of the limits of her age.
Related Topics
The Dengbej: the Kurdish bardic tradition in which Meryem Xan was trained
Evdale Zeynike: the king of the dengbej, the great male master of the tradition
Filite Quto: the destan preserved by Karapete Xaco, the Armenian-born dengbej
Mem u Zin: the great Kurdish love-epic of the sung tradition
Siyabend u Xece: the tragic love-tale of the Kurdish oral tradition
Cembeli: the mountain love-epic of the prince of Hakkari
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Meryem Xan?
Meryem Xan, who lived from about 1904 to 1949, was a pioneering Kurdish singer and dengbej, celebrated as the first Kurdish woman to have her songs recorded and preserved. Trained in the dengbej tradition, she defied the taboo against women's public singing, made her way to Baghdad, and became a recording artist and a voice of Kurdish radio, opening the way for generations of women singers.
Why was Meryem Xan so important?
She was important because she broke the silence imposed on women in public Kurdish music. As the first Kurdish woman to record her songs and win wide fame through record and radio, she challenged the taboo that had barred women from the public sphere of music and opened a path that many later Kurdish women singers would follow. Her courage changed what was possible.
What is Meryem Xan famous for singing?
She is famous for her recordings, among which the song known as Domame became especially beloved, and she is said to have created hundreds of songs over her career. Her repertoire ranged across the kilam laments, love-songs and the songs of the great Kurdish tales, sung in the deeply emotional style for which the female dengbej were especially known.
Was Meryem Xan Kurdish or Armenian?
Her origins are genuinely uncertain. Some accounts say she was born in the Botan region and was Kurdish by birth, while another account holds that she was of Armenian or Christian descent, orphaned in 1915 and raised by a Kurdish family. The records of her early life are too thin to settle the matter. What is certain is that she became one of the great voices of Kurdish song.
Why did Meryem Xan leave her husband?
She had married into the distinguished Bedirxan family, but her husband was uncomfortable with her being a public singer, for the social conventions of the time attached shame to a woman who performed. Faced with a choice between her marriage and her music, Meryem Xan chose her music and left her husband, an act of remarkable boldness that reflects the strength of her dedication to her art.
What was Meryem Xan's legacy?
Her legacy is twofold: the songs and recordings that are still sung and loved today, and the freedom she won for women in Kurdish music. By being the first to record and to win public fame, she opened the way for later singers such as Eyse San and the many female dengbej who followed, recovering for Kurdish women a public voice in their people's music.
References and Further Reading
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