Friends beyond the mountains

Evîndarê Zimanê Kurdî *

I first heard of Michael Chyet while listening to the weekly Kurdish broadcast on Voice of America. I still remember the initial shock I felt after hearing a Western person speaking impeccable Kurdish. I remember very well how excitedly I waited until the next Saturday for his weekly programme “Zimanê Me”. The next week, the programme started with the unforgettable music of Yilmaz Guney’s “Yol” film, then Michael began his programme at which point I made sure that his name was really Michael and that he was an American. I was astonished and extremely proud that a non-Kurdish person could speak such beautiful Kurdish while many Kurds preferred to speak in any other language but their mother tongue. I wanted to know who Michael Chyet was and how it came to be that he learned Kurdish so flawlessly.

Michael L. Chyet was born in 1957 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of a Jewish American family. His father, Stanley Chyet, was a poet, historian and rabbi. After Michael finished high school, he continued his education in Los Angeles. He got his BA in Arabic in University of California, LA in 1980. In 1991 Chyet earned a PhD in "Middle Eastern Languages and Folklore" from the University of California at Berkeley. His father and a professor encouraged him to pursue his interest in the Kurdish language. He studied Turkish at the University of the Bosporus in Istanbul and spent the 1987-88 academic year at Ataturk University in Erzurum focusing on Turkish dialects and styles. It was during his stay in Turkey that Chyet experienced firsthand the linguistic repression. Resisting the pressures, he chose to write his dissertation on 18 versions of the Kurdish epic Mem û Zin, a beautiful but sad love story resembling Romeo and Juliet. He titled his dissertation, "And a Thorn Bush Sprang Between Them." The thorn bush personifies the inability of the Kurds to unite, he explained. The most modern version was available on cassette, which Chyet had to smuggle out of Turkey. Between 1991-1995, he worked in the University of Berkeley. full text