{"id":145814,"date":"2025-03-20T14:18:01","date_gmt":"2025-03-20T14:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/activist\/bodur-ive-always-spoken-out-rather-than-assimilating\/"},"modified":"2025-03-20T14:18:01","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T14:18:01","slug":"bodur-ive-always-spoken-out-rather-than-assimilating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=145814","title":{"rendered":"BODUR: \u201cI\u2019ve always spoken out rather than assimilating\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"


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What Made Me<\/strong> \u2014 In this series, we ask artists and rebels about the about the forces and experiences that shaped who they are. Today, it\u2019s SWANA-championing pop experimentalist BODUR.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

To open \u2018MORNING [9-8]\u2019<\/a>, the lead single from BODUR\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0debut album MAQAM<\/em>, twanging strings are plucked in an oddball, triplet rhythm. Recorded by BODUR herself playing the Oud \u2013 a traditional middle eastern lute-adjacent instrument, which she learnt how to play for the album. Over it, she sings: \u201cI watch your fingers slide up and down the strings \/ I wish you\u2019d play me like the songs that I sing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The song is fun and lustful, but also serves as an introduction into her distinctive style, as she blends experimental pop aesthetics with musical influence from her SWANA upbringing. Born in London, the Irish-Turkish-Sri Lankan singer\u2019s album is as much a middle finger to injustice as an expression of herself as an artist \u2013 the album\u2019s opening and closing tracks were written in response to the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, and the displacement of the Palestinian<\/a> people.<\/p>\n

To find out more about how she became the musician that she is, we asked BODUR: \u201cWhat made you?\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 14 years old, in my school uniform, arguing with a boy in my class that has a St George\u2019s flag in his Twitter username, about the name \u2018Mohammed\u2019 being on the top 10 most popular boys\u2019 names in the UK list for the first time. He says something about terrorism and how they\u2019re \u201cclearly not British\u201d. Mo Farah had just won gold for us at the Olympics<\/a>, and I asked him if he was British and what he thought Mo was short for. He said Mo wasn\u2019t British either. Our white teacher told us both to stop shouting at each other, and he didn\u2019t face any further punishments for his racist remarks than I did for simply countering them. Even when there was an educated adult in the room, I realised it would often be my job to \u201ceducate\u201d in these types of rooms where my heritage made me a minority. <\/p>\n

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  • Read next:\u00a0Nxdia: \u201cPoems became an escape for me\u201d<\/a> <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    I am part Irish, so my skin is lighter, especially in the winter. I have a particular White privilege that grants me access to specific spaces that others from the Muslim or Arabic-speaking community don\u2019t have access to. Unfortunately, this means I\u2019ve lived a life where people have felt safe to spill their casual racism and Islamophobia<\/a> out in front of me. Often. <\/p>\n

    Although my trojan-horse entry to these spaces is traumatic for me, I\u2019ve always spoken out and had difficult conversations rather than rolling over and assimilating. Now, I have a different kind of privilege in my position in the music<\/a> industry. <\/p>\n

    I have some power over thousands of my followers and their followers’ algorithms. So when I release a song with [HIJAZ] in brackets in the title, it means that the following video that plays on YouTube is an Arabic video with ‘Hijaz’ in the title. The archive material I share on my feed means the people who interact with it will get fed more content from the SWANA region; I feel like I am doing my part to help build bridges between communities globally. I am having dialogue and presenting people with a consistently beautiful representation of my culture. My brother is an actor and was asked to audition to be a suicide bomber twice before he’d even turned 12. My parents didn’t allow him to do that. Still, I won’t stop doing what I do, and\u00a0will continue to\u00a0have positive political messaging in my music and visuals until those racist and Islamophobic stereotypes no longer exist. I expect this very much to be my life’s work.<\/p>\n

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    \u201cMy brother is an actor and was asked to audition to be a suicide bomber twice before he’d even turned 12. I won’t stop doing what I do, and will continue to have positive political messaging in my music and visuals until those racist and Islamophobic stereotypes no longer exist.\u201d<\/p>\n