SHOUTS - Music from the Rooftops!

Her songs provide solace and strength to women and girls

Zere performing songs from her new album. Screenshot from Zere Asylbek‘s YouTube channel. Fair use.

This article was written by Nurbek Bekmurzaev and originally published on the Global Voices (GV) webpage on August 7, 2023. It is republished here according to the media partnership between GV and Shouts.

Last July, Kyrgyz singer Zere Asylbek, widely known as Zere, released a new album called “Men Kaidamyn” (Where Am I) with 12 songs in the Kyrgyz language. It became her third album since her musical debut in 2018, when she made headlines for the music video of her song “Kyz” (Girl) and became famous overnight.

Here is the music video of the song “Kyz.”

“Kyz” was as famous as it was polarizing due to the feminist message it relayed by encouraging girls to be free of restrictive social norms and live their lives as they like and see fit. The new album picks up where her two previous ones from 2018 “Bashtalos” and 2021 “EKEK” albums left off. It continues discussing gender inequality while exploring other social and political problems in Kyrgyzstan against the background of her intimate and personal experiences and stories from childhood.

There are several personal stories told throughout the songs in the new album. Through them Zere shares her childhood memories of spending summer holidays in her maternal grandparents’ home in Jalalabad in southern Kyrgyzstan, listening to fairy tales, the words of wisdom shared by her late paternal grandfather, and the conversations she held with her mother about famous historical figures from the past. These intimate stories serve as parts to songs about gender inequality, discrimination, corruption, domestic violence and other issues in the country.

In the song called “Jangak” (Walnut), Zere shares her childhood dreams and says that she thought she could be anybody and do anything with her life. However, adulthood and restrictive social norms surrounding women taught her that she should have been more careful with her dreams. In another song called “Men Kaidamyn,” she starts off with the fairytale she heard often during childhood and goes on to question where she and other people were when the country witnessed major incidents of injustice and abuse.

Here is the audio version of the song “Men Kaidymyn.”

She then asks Kyrgyz people where they were during the “voting fair” when peoples’ votes were being bought and the future of the country was being decided — it is common in Kyrgyzstan for politicians to distribute money during elections and collect votes. She also asks where people were at when female activists were attacked during a feminist march by the members of the nationalist group called Chorolor while the police officers present just stood and watched. The incident took place on March 8, 2020.

In “Jakshy Kyz” (Good Girl), Zere tackles gender inequality and domestic violence. She asks her listeners if there is a word “human girl” between the two terms “good girl” and “bad girl,” referring to the two labels women and girls in Kyrgyzstan society receive most of the time, instead of being looked at as a human. She fails to find an answer to this question using the old Kyrgyz proverbs and asks what kind of wisdom will the men who beat their wives today leave for the next generation.

This is not the first song in which Zere talks about domestic violence. Her song “Jeneke” (Sister-in-law), which came out in her second album in 2021, tackled the similar issue. Although domestic violence is criminalized in Kyrgyzstan, the situation continues to deteriorate with the number of domestic violence cases growing.

Here is the music video of the song “Jeneke.”

One of Zere’s main messages is hidden in the song called “Vau” (Wow) in which she invites listeners to imagine a future in which she has achieved all her dreams. She pictures a society where all the problems have been solved and she has no haters and everybody likes her. The song ends abruptly with the reminder that even then there will still be people who will call her “bad girl.” It reminds women and girls in Kyrgyzstan that there will always be people who will try to shame them for their behavior and they should just ignore their criticism and live their life beyond restrictive norms.

Hockey has changed my life forever

Screenshot from Manizha’s YouTube channel showing her latest song, “Now or Never” about a young rural Kyrgyz woman learning to play ice-hockey

This article was written by Filip Noubel, the managing editor of Global Voices. It was published on the GV webpage on October 14th 2022 and republished here under the media partnership between GV and Shouts.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were recently embroiled in yet another deadly border dispute that led to a massive wave of refugees. But for Tajik-Russian singer and Eurovision star Manizha, Kyrgyzstan is where girls learn to play ice hockey and get empowered, as she shows in her latest music video.

Manizha is a phenomenon in the post-Soviet music scene: born in Tajikistan, she had to flee the country’s civil war with her family to Russia, where she became a hip-hop singer, mixing Tajik, Russian, and English to eventually gain international fame when she represented Russia in the 2021 Eurovision contest.

What sets Manizha apart from other pop artists in Russia is that she openly tackles issues that remain taboo for mainstream Tajik or Russian society: the rejection of the patriarchy, the place of women in traditional societies, the acceptance of LGBTQ+ persons, and the recognition of the key role played by millions of Central Asian migrants who remain largely invisible in Russia. Many were outraged that she was representing Russia at Eurovision, and called on parliament to ban her from singing under the Russian flag, while the head of the culture committee of the State Duma criticized her song with an outspoken title “Russian woman” for not representing Russian values.

On October 12, she released a music video for her song called “Now or Never,” where she mixes Russian, Kyrgyz, and English. The video’s main character is a rural Kyrgyz girl who, despite all the home chores that are traditionally attributed to women, finds the courage and energy to learn ice hockey and joins Kyrgyzstan’s only women’s ice hockey team. The production of the video, which Manizha directed herself, was contributed by a number of women, including the Kyrgyz filmmaker Aya Ibraeva as film director and co-producer.

The video describes in detail the daily life in a mountainous region, the basic conditions to train and the determination of the team play.

A scene from “Now or Never “song showing the reality of daily life for Kyrgyz rural women., Screenshot from Manizha’s YouTube channel.

As the main character concludes, this experience has empowered her to now study coding, a profession still dominated by men around the world, and as a means to support herself and her family. But as she concludes in the song: “Hockey has changed my life forever, it turns out the world is bigger than my village.”

And while Manizha does not make any mention of the latest conflict between Tajiks and Kyrgyz, the song comes at a crucial moment with a message of women’s solidarity and shared hardship. Find Global Voices’ playlist with Manizha’s top feminist hits here: