Manizha will represent Russia on May 22 in the final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2021. However, she will not have all her country behind her to support her. The young woman of 29, feminist, defender of minorities and homosexuals, is controversial with the conservatives. With his song Russian woman, it challenges Russian paternalism and calls for the awakening of women. The text and the militant career of this ex-refugee from Tajikistan, an ex-Soviet Muslim country in Central Asia, are far from the principles usually conveyed by public television. So it came as a real surprise when viewers of state broadcaster Pervyi Kanal chose her to represent Russia at Eurovision.
“Well, past 30 and still no kids?” Basically, you’re beautiful but too fat ”: Manizha chants in rap these lyrics denouncing the stereotypes that women are subjected to. For this, she extracts herself from a heavy dress, dressed in a unisex jumpsuit. Mixing hip-hop and Russian folk motif, this song “targets the prejudices of which I myself was the object”, explained this laughing brunette, receiving Agence France-Presse at the end of March in a trendy studio in Moscow. But these prejudices die hard, and many Russians have felt “insulted” by this Tajik refugee, her promotion of multiculturalism and feminism. It therefore becomes the target of paternalists.
An association of Orthodox women accuses her of “insulting and grossly humiliating Russian women” and of inciting “hatred towards men, which undermines the foundations of the traditional family”. The Russian Investigative Committee, a powerful investigative body, has been examining since March a request from an organization of veterans which denounces the text as inciting “inter-ethnic enmity”. As for the influential president of the upper house of Parliament Valentina Matvienko, she was angry both against “the appearance” of Manizha and his song. ” It makes no sense ! », She was indignant in the middle of the session.
“I put my finger on a wound with this song! “
“It’s because I put my finger on a wound with this song”, commented the singer. A few days before the competition, Manizha is hardly surprised by this crusade against her: the conservatives do not like people “washing their dirty laundry in public”.
Even before her selection to Eurovision, she had already been targeted. Because Manizha puts at the service of her activism the notoriety that she has built since 2013 online, after a failed musical expatriation in London. In 2019, it launched an application in the form of an alarm signal connecting assistance centers and victims of domestic violence, a scourge that Russia has so far refrained from combating. She caused a scandal the same year for having participated in a video defending LGBTQ rights.
Always accompanied by her mother – her “guru”, producer and costume designer she uses the old-fashioned way – Manizha Sanguine has a unique background and emphasizes being a tough guy. From her birth in Tajikistan in 1991, she spent eight days in a coma. Then his house was destroyed by a shell during the civil war which tore his country apart after the fall of the USSR.
From 1994, she and her family lived the difficult daily life of illegal refugees in Moscow, in the midst of post-Soviet chaos. She remembers that a “scent of fear” dominated her childhood as an immigrant. An experience that led her to become in December ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Russia. It collects funds in particular for schoolchildren with an immigrant background.
Manizha says she has “an innate empathy” for the refugees who, she says, live in “legal slavery” all over the world. This 20-year-old psychology graduate, who dreamed of a musical career since she was 7 when she sang Celine Dion, now claims her Russian identity. “I think in Russian, I say I love you in Russian, I want to live in Russia and I want the same for my future children,” she said.
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