Jamala

Jamala: The Woman Who Sang a Deportation

In February 2022, as air-raid sirens began over Kyiv, Jamala had two thoughts in sequence. The first was: where are my children? The second was: where is my album? The master recordings of *Qirim* — years of collected Crimean Tatar folk songs, some of them unreleased and close to forgotten, performed with more than eighty musicians — sat in a studio outside the capital with no copies anywhere else. Her producer, Sergei Krutsenko, eventually reached the building and spent two weeks uploading the files over a collapsing internet connection, waking every three hours to keep the transfer alive. The album survived. The final track carries the sound of real missiles and real sirens, because that is when it was finished.

Osh

Susana Alimivna Jamaladinova was born on 27 August 1983 in Osh, in the Kirghiz SSR, roughly 3,000 kilometres from where her family belonged. Her father is a Muslim Crimean Tatar; her mother is Armenian. Both sides of the family were in Central Asia because of the Soviet state: her paternal ancestors were among the roughly 250,000 Crimean Tatars deported from Crimea by Stalin in 1944, and her maternal great-grandfather, from Nagorno-Karabakh, had his land confiscated and was driven into exile in the same region.

The family returned to Crimea in 1989. What happened next explains a great deal about the songs she would later write: to buy property there, her parents divorced for roughly four years so that her mother could purchase under her Armenian maiden name, because Soviet authorities did not permit ethnic Crimean Tatars like her father to own land in Crimea. Jamala grew up inside a household that had to perform a legal fiction in order to go home.

The Conservatory

Music was the family trade. Her mother taught at a music school; her father was a trained conductor. She made her first professional recording at nine, singing Crimean Tatar folk and children's songs. She went on to Simferopol Music College and then graduated from the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine, where she trained as an opera singer before turning to popular music — which is why the instrument that Europe heard in 2016 does what it does. She is fluent in Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar, Russian and English.

Her recording career built steadily and without international attention: *For Every Heart* in April 2011, a live record from Arena Concert Plaza in 2012, *All or Nothing* in March 2013, the *Thank You* EP in 2014, and *Podykh* in October 2015. By the time Eurovision came she was, in the BBC's description, a jazz artist — not a pop contestant.

"1944"

She wrote the lyrics in 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea. The song is about the deportation, and specifically about her own great-grandmother, who was moved to Central Asia with five children and lost a daughter on the journey. "I had to release their souls," Jamala told the BBC before the contest. "Because they never came back to Ukraine."

She was the first Crimean Tatar ever to perform at Eurovision. Russian media and lawmakers read the entry as an attack on the annexation; Eurovision's organisers initially banned audience members from waving the Crimean Tatar flag during her performance, then relaxed the restriction. Jamala herself declined the political framing with a single deflection: "You can see it in the lyrics." On 14 May 2016 she won the contest with 534 points, and Petro Poroshenko subsequently named her a People's Artist of Ukraine. Three days after her victory the Ukrainian foreign ministry nominated her as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

After the Prize

She did not become a Eurovision alumna in the usual sense. She married Bekir Suleimanov, a Crimean Tatar community activist and a physics and mathematics graduate of Taras Shevchenko National University, in a Nikah ceremony at Kyiv's Islamic Cultural Centre in April 2017; they have three sons, born in 2018, 2020 and 2024. She released *Kryla* in October 2018, *Svoi* in February 2020 and *My* in March 2021.

The 2022 invasion made her a refugee. She evacuated with two young children to Romania and then Turkey, worked with the Future for Ukraine foundation, and returned to perform with Ukraine's National Symphony Orchestra in Kyiv — a concert interrupted when the hall took shelter during an air raid. She sang "1944" again during the flag parade at Eurovision 2023, and served as Ukraine's spokesperson at the 2024 contest, where she announced her third pregnancy on air. In November 2023 Russia placed her on its wanted list.

Why Jamala Is Called a Genius

The strongest case for Jamala is not the trophy. It is the compositional and archival intelligence behind *Qirim*, and behind "1944" before it.

Her training is the foundation: a conservatory-schooled operatic technique, redirected into jazz phrasing and the modal vocabulary of Crimean Tatar folk song. That combination is rare and technically demanding, because opera and folk singing use the voice in incompatible ways, and moving between them within a single performance requires deliberate, controlled reconstruction of how the sound is produced. The specific formal decision in "1944" — English verses that state the history plainly, a chorus in Crimean Tatar that most of the audience could not understand — is a piece of songwriting engineering. It forces a European mass audience to hear a suppressed language as pure sound before it hears it as politics.

*Qirim* extends this into something closer to ethnomusicology. She spent years locating songs held by folklorists and by families who had carried them through exile, describing the material as "unknown, unreleased, forgotten," and then arranged them for more than eighty traditional and orchestral players. Her stated purpose — "my try to give strong voice to my homeland, to Crimea" — is cultural rescue conducted through the discipline of a working musician. Preserving an endangered repertoire while making it listenable is a genuinely difficult double problem, and she solved it.

The honest counter-case is that her global reputation rests on a single televised night whose result cannot be cleanly separated from the politics of 2016. Russia's entry was the bookmakers' favourite; a large European voting public chose a song about Stalin's deportation of Crimean Tatars two years after Crimea was annexed. Jury and audience were making a statement as well as a judgement, and Jamala has spent a decade being read as a symbol rather than as a composer. Outside Ukraine and the Crimean Tatar diaspora, her albums have never approached the reach of that one performance. "Genius" is a heavy word for a career whose most-heard three minutes were amplified by geopolitics. What survives the scepticism is the craft underneath — the voice, the arrangement, the archive — and that would exist whether or not she had ever entered a song contest.

Legacy

Jamala is the reason a language the Soviet Union tried to erase was heard by roughly 200 million people on a Saturday night in May. She is also, now, the custodian of a body of folk music that came within a fortnight of being lost in a studio outside a besieged city. Her great-grandmother was carried out of Crimea in 1944 and never returned. Her great-granddaughter has made the country's songs impossible to lose again.