Shingal Lives and the TewTew Archive

Led by poets Emad Bashar and Zêdan Xelef, a team of twelve Ezidi cultural preservationists, funded in partnership with the University of Exeter through a grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, founded Shingal Lives, an oral history project to preserve the endangered oral traditions of the Ezidi community in Shingal. Conducting lifetime interviews with storytellers, singers, and audience members, this team preserved not just the stories and songs, but their ecosystem. @tewtewarchive is our community-driven, memory-based archive of indigenous knowledge. The TewTew Archive will launch in spring 2024, along with our biannual TewTew Festival, the first of which was held at Lalesh in April 2022.