Back to index of Nerve 12 - Summer 2008

Talib's Tale

Talib is a musician and singer from Kurdistan. This country, which doesn’t actually exist on official maps, spans parts of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Armenia. It also covers northern Iraq where Talib was born.

I guessed my birthday as 18th February 1970, but my birth certificate says 1st April. This is the date that was decided by the authorities in my country when I was 6 years old.

In 1980 the war started between Iran and Iraq, and lasted for eight years. I can remember when I was a child at school we used to see the Iranian planes bombarding the army units in our village. So I grew up with war. In 1985 we moved to Sulaimaniya.

That year there was a big singing festival. I was only 15 and my teacher, who supported me a lot, told me that I could become a good singer. My song was on TV every night and I became very popular. Suddenly, because of that song, everyone recognised me. After that, I recorded 2 or 3 songs. I studied at a teaching institute and, in 1988, became a teacher. Then in 1992 I joined a band called Mesopotamia, and recorded 2 more songs with them.

I had to leave my home because I feared for my life and I arrived in the UK on 13th September 2000. I didn’t choose to come to Liverpool. But lots of people told me I was very lucky because Liverpool is very nice and it is a music city. I was happy about this. I stayed in a hostel for asylum seekers, just like student accommodation, a small room with a shared kitchen. I applied for asylum, and after 3 years I was sent a refusal.

When you come to this country you have a hope that you will get status. You hope you can build a new life, maybe go to university. But when you get a refusal all your life is messed up, you don’t know what to do. It is very hard to plan. Life is difficult. You can’t work legally, you can’t study. So how are you going to live here. You just have to wait, wait.

What hurt me is that I didn’t feel stable here. As a musician, a singer, I wanted to record songs, I wanted to go to other communities, other countries, I wanted to do concerts, I wanted to record CDs, but because I didn’t have travel documents I couldn’t move.

It seems like Seven years of my life have been wasted. If I had had status the first year I came here I could have been a teacher now.

In 2004 I was in a play as a cast member in a play called The Kindness of Strangers at the Everyman and after this I was offered work full-time work in the box office.

Then there was a new Iraqi judgement from the Home Office. Because I was working I was able to pay a solicitor who took up my case and I was given status. I was lucky because for four years from 2003 I could have been sent back. I am a support worker now helping new arrivals who come to this country as asylum seekers. Actually, I’ve done very well if you compare my life with other people’s.

In September 2006 after playing at a festival in Manchester, we established a Kurdish band called ‘Lostmelody’. We are twelve or thirteen musicians, men and women, all asylum seekers, from all parts of Kurdistan, who live in different cities in this country. Some of us still don’t have status, some still waiting after six-seven years. We have performed all over the country and our next project is to play in Manchester this September again at a festival. We play traditional Kurdish music, or folk music, but also we perform our own music. We are keeping alive the traditions of Kurdish music, there are a lot of melodies in our music and we want to keep these from dying out. That’s why we are called ‘Lostmelody’.