Die Demokratie

From Oxford to Anatolia Despite living in Oxford, I became one of the first listeners of Ata Canani's new album. While listening to this work in which Anatolia merges with Germany, a question came to my mind: Can one change the world with a bağlama, the Anatolian long-necked lute? This is the question that Ata Canani asks us with his new album. Ata Canani, one of the legends of Anatolian Rock, shows us the possibilities of coexistence in our age of polarisation. A coexistence that is made of songs and dances... Ata Canani not only switches back and forth between German and Turkish. This album is a call for empathy and engagement with the experiences of others. When he describes the experiences of the Gastarbeiter and other migrants with compassion and humour in German or recalls the Sivas massacre of 1993 in Turkish, Ata Canani succeeds better than any historian in making us feel the significance of those events. But he also invites us to appreciate some universal values that we sometimes take for granted in the West, such as democracy and peace. It is obviously impossible to answer the question asked above in so few words. What is certain, however, is that this album can inspire us to imagine a new world. Laurent Mignon