Jamala said that she was aware of the political component of her victory, but that’s not the way she wants it to be.
“I’m a musician, a songwriter,” she said. “All these things are not for me. Russia, Ukraine – all this squabbling, it’s out of place here.”
That’s a surprising attitude coming from the singer who represented the country suffering from Russia’s invasion with a song about “the strangers” who come to one’s house to kill.
It would have been a fitting viewpoint if Jamala performed at the Eurovision one of her light-hearted pop-jazz hits. But she entered the contest with a song about the deportation of Crimean Tatars by Soviet authorities, and did so two years after Russia, the Soviet Union’s successor, illegally stole Crimea and started the oppression of Crimean Tatars, forcing many of them to flee the peninsula again in a tragic historic recurrence.
As the votes came in, Ukrainian viewers hardly cared about the quality of the songs. What was happening on the screen was a small yet sweet victory of Ukraine over Russia, symbolic revenge that came two years after Russia started its war against Ukraine.
The politics, or as Jamala puts it, “squabbling,” was a component of her win. Eurovision, besides music, has always reflected politics.
As Ukraine analyst Timothy Ash has written: “For the Eurovision novices out there, a tip: it is not really about the songs. It is the one chance in the year when you find out what nations really think about each other.”
Denying the political angle isn’t just inaccurate. It minimizes that special night when a suffering nation found itself in unfamiliar position: As winners.
