''If you spoke out, they’d cut out your tongue''
"They said the black sheep would bear the burden of plenty, / But seeing how fat the black sheep was, they devoured it..."
An art critic living in Europe quoted these lines from a protest song he had recently discovered.
"They told us to bow down for prayer / Yet those very people devoured the prayer rug, too..."
After citing these verses, he shifted from music to recount an interaction he had overheard at the airport in Ashgabat. While waiting for his flight, he found himself listening to two women sitting in the row behind him.
One had just returned from the Hajj pilgrimage. From her account, it appears that women returning from Mecca routinely host lavish restaurant receptions where relatives and friends drape ceremonial robes over their shoulders.
"It's a fantastic arrangement," the woman—addressed respectfully as Hajy Ene—said with a laugh. "You fly on a state-subsidized plane, bring back goods to resell, and collect gifts from your relatives."
She went on at length about another woman who had made the pilgrimage three times, throwing an expensive party upon every return. This was done not merely for commercial gain, she noted, but to buy prestige and social standing.
The woman beside her laughed and asked, "Isn't it a sin to gossip about someone like that when you are a Hajy Ene yourself?"
"Of course it's a sin, but who doesn't gossip?" she replied dismissively. "I asked the woman who went three times, and she just laughed and said, 'You just repeat Astaghfirullah [God forgive me] three times—God is merciful...'"
At that point, after I cleared my throat a couple of times, he abruptly dropped the subject, murmured, "Right, right," and turned hiz attention to a protest song.
"The number of teenagers across Ashgabat and the regions who pick up acoustic guitars to hum original songs is growing," the critic observed, playing the track for me.
"Among them are quite a few young men and girls who have mastered English or listen to foreign artists to learn the language. It gave me real hope. In five to ten years, the audience for shallow, state-promoted pop will shrink significantly."
In his view, "Diýdiler, Iýdiler" ("They Said, They Devoured") stands among the most uncompromisingly honest songs written about modern Turkmen reality—specifically the spiritual decay and moral crisis that have overtaken the country in recent years.
"I don't know who wrote the lyrics, but every other line delivers a stinging slap to those superficial court singers," he said. "Listening to it, you realize how thoroughly independent-minded Turkmens grasp their own plight:
''They said not to smoke or use nas,
Yet they deemed it forbidden, and ate the pig, too...''
"What else could this be," my interlocutor asked, "if not a direct unmasking of the hypocrites behind the regime's anti-smoking campaigns and forced healthy-lifestyle propaganda?"
With brutal directness, the song dissects the breakdown of traditional Turkmen values, shaming the regime's sycophantic court poets:
"They said the people's word holds sacred power,
Yet if you spoke out, they’d cut out your tongue.
They said the righteous path leads far,
But set traps to devour those who walked it."
Targeting state propaganda about integrity, the song offers its own grim definition of civic virtue:
"They preached earning honestly and living honestly / Yet they cast integrity into the embers and devoured it..."
As previous protest songs have shown, modern Turkmen society has become so stratified that a poor person hesitates to offer a greeting, unsure whether it will be met with disdain or ignored entirely.
"Diýdiler, Iýdiler" drops all metaphor to state a hard truth: individuals who once commanded respect by throwing lavish banquets find themselves metaphorically torn apart by the very same community the moment they fall into hardship.
Ultimately, the song warns that official promises in Turkmenistan carry no truth, and that believing state rhetoric carries a grave risk of ruin. Anyone acquainted with daily life in the country would find it difficult to dispute the message of this guitar-wielding generation.
"Welcome to a new era for Turkmen talent—an era defined by struggle!" the critic said with a smile as we parted ways.
"May we live to see many victories in this 'guitar war' waged against hollow art; may our children grow up in freedom, and may we listen only to songs that speak directly from the heart."