BODUR: “I’ve always spoken out rather than assimilating”

To open ‘MORNING [9-8]’, the lead single from BODUR’s debut album MAQAM, twanging strings are plucked in an oddball, triplet rhythm. Recorded by BODUR herself playing the Oud – a traditional middle eastern lute-adjacent instrument, which she learnt how to play for the album. Over it, she sings: “I watch your fingers slide up and down the strings / I wish you’d play me like the songs that I sing.”

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’s album is as much a middle finger to injustice as an expression of herself as an artist – the album’s opening and closing tracks were written in response to the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, and the displacement of the Palestinian people.

To find out more about how she became the musician that she is, we asked BODUR: “What made you?”

I’m 14 years old, in my school uniform, arguing with a boy in my class that has a St George’s flag in his Twitter username, about the name ‘Mohammed’ being on the top 10 most popular boys’ names in the UK list for the first time. He says something about terrorism and how they’re “clearly not British”. Mo Farah had just won gold for us at the Olympics, and I asked him if he was British and what he thought Mo was short for. He said Mo wasn’t British either. Our white teacher told us both to stop shouting at each other, and he didn’t 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 “educate” in these types of rooms where my heritage made me a minority.

• Read next: Nxdia: “Poems became an escape for me”

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’t have access to. Unfortunately, this means I’ve lived a life where people have felt safe to spill their casual racism and Islamophobia out in front of me. Often.

Although my trojan-horse entry to these spaces is traumatic for me, I’ve 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 industry.

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 will continue to have 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.

MAQAM is out on March 21.

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