Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History
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63. “Cinderella
Maritsa”; “Giannits and Maritsa”; “Kyrlovits”; “The Scaldhead
and the Chance Find”; “Almsgiving Bride.”
64. “The Scaldhead and the Chance Find”; “Shihouna”; “Almsgiving Bride.”
65. Cf.
Toelken 1976: 155.
Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy
69
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3
Love and/or Death?
Women and Conflict Resolution
in the Traditional Bosnian Ballad
Amila Buturović
As a type of narrative song, the ballad tells a story, typically on a tragic theme,
with an intensity, simplicity, and immediacy of narration that is rarely found in
other poetic forms. In folk ballads of anonymous authorship, poetic material is
commonly drawn from local and community life, although detailed descriptive
elements of the setting and action are usually absent. As a poetic genre, the
ballad was established in much of the Balkans by the fourteenth century. With
the arrival of the Ottomans in Bosnia in the mid-fifteenth century, the ballad
began reflecting the conflation of Slavic customs and Ottoman Islamic values,
especially as regards gender relations, cultural norms, and social responsibilities
and aspirations. This study analyzes the lyrical and dramatic elements of the
Bosnian ballad tradition, focusing in detail on one ballad—loosely entitled In
This World They Could Not Unite—which derives from a larger and very popular
cycle of stories and poems named after the two tragic lovers Omer and Merima
that was first recorded in writing in an eighteenth-century anthology.1 I argue that,
although the main protagonists of the ballad are women whose actions reveal
subjectivities and experiences rarely enunciated in the “high” literature of the
period, the worldview of the ballad is nevertheless regulated within and by the
patriarchal order. In and of itself, the ballad is neither reactionary, nor subversive.
Rather, it records the nuances of a community in which women engage in critique,
divulge ambivalence, oscillate between resistance and subjugation, and forge
new forms of gender-based alliances, but still safeguard the patriarchal norms as
consolidated in pre-Ottoman and sustained in Ottoman times.
Let us summarize the basic plot of the ballad In This World They Could Not
Unite. Young Mehmed (Meho) and Fata are in love, but they are not allowed to
crown their love by marriage. Opposition comes from Meho’s mother, who rejects
Fata on the grounds that her modest background does not make her a good match
for a man of such stature and wealth. With the aim of securing noble lineage,
Meho’s mother decides to marry her son to a woman named Umihana, daughter
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
of the eminent Filipović family of Zagorje. Indeed, marriage arrangements
are already underway. Pressured by his mother, Meho is forced to abandon his
beloved Fata and marry a woman he does not love. Initially hesitant to follow
his mother’s demands, Meho gives in after she threatens to put a curse on him.
He reluctantly helps the bride dismount the wedding horse and carries her into
the house as per customary ritual. Once in their bedroom, the newlyweds are
expected to consummate their marriage, but that does not happen. Instead, Meho
leaves the girl intact under full veil, fetches his lute, and delivers a sorrowful
elegy to his beloved Fata, confessing that he has refused to unveil the bride and
take possession of her. He then asks his bride to lift her veil ever so slightly so that
he can catch a glimpse of her countenance. Her beauty lights up the room, but that
does not lessen Meho’s love for Fata. In a moment of suicidal despair, he grabs a
dagger and pulls out his own heart, lamenting that the only life he is able to share
with Fata will have to be the afterlife. His last words are detailed instructions
destined for his mother on how to carry out the burial rite, which the bride is
to convey in the morning. At breakfast, worried by the fact that the couple has
not joined her, the mother decides to check on them. As she opens the door and
steps into the room, she finds herself in a pool of her son’s blood. Amidst cries of
sorrow and pain, the widow-bride conveys Meho’s dying wishes and reprimands
her mother–in-law for marrying him off to a woman he did not love. The carefully
choreographed burial procession passes by Fata’s house, and she senses that the
body the men are carrying is her beloved Meho’s. She drops dead on the spot. Her
body is promptly prepared for burial and added to the funerary procession. Two
graves are dug next to each other, an apple is placed into a hand of each lover, and
the hands are pulled out and intertwined through an opening in the stone, so that
the lovers can be united in death and resurrected as they play.
Of Text and Context
In stylistic and thematic terms, this ballad, like most traditional amatory ballads,
is a form of soap opera. Love is configured in a number of intertwined ways,
and its tragic and melodramatic components are highlighted at the expense of
joyous ones. The ballad contrasts the fatefulness of passion to the realities of life,
depicting that tension as a struggle of unbridled passion against class difference,
family responsibilities, and social commitments. The world of the ballad is an
unhappy place for unwavering romantics. If unconditional, pure, and juvenile,
love cannot survive. But the ballad does not completely negate such passion;
rather, it allows it to ripen in another lifetime, in otherworldly bliss and eternity.
Romantic lovers in this and other Bosnian ballads—very much like other
famous tragic couples in literary history such as Romeo and Juliet, Majnun and
Layla, Tristan and Isolde—are not only connected by love but also by death.
As Satu Grunthal observes, this is a common feature of the ballad worldview:
there is no love without death, and no death without love.2 Death in that sense
signifies the continuity of love, its transfer onto a plane that can ensure eternal
> happiness for tragic this-worldly lovers. The ending of the ballad of Meho and
Buturović, Love and/or death?
75
Fata deploys imagery found in the ending of many medieval European ballads as
well, commonly referred to as the rose-and-briar motif,3 which symbolizes the
metaphysical transfer of a romance unsustainable by social conditions to a space
liberated from the laws of this world. As the tree growing out of the two martyrs’
graves blends their bond into the natural world, its cyclical regeneration ensures
the renewal of Fata and Meho’s love even as they rest still.
Of course, the representation of passion and self-sacrifice in the name of love,
beguiling as it is, hardly fits everyday life. In fact, Henderson argues that the
ballad often engages the listener in a condition, or event, that is strange to her
or his experience.4 But that is only partially the case here. The ballad, operating
in the domain of both fantasy and reality, incites the listener to sympathy with
its characters. It conjures up the pathos of unfulfilled love that is by and large
a familiar experience, across status and class, but it also creates an alienating
effect by directing that experience into a tragic ending which may be secretly
desired by desperate lovers but is rarely materialized. It is the feeling of uncanny
sympathy that pulls the listeners into the emotion of the ballad and then expels
them from the narrative orbit by its extreme force. In light of this at once engaging
and alienating effect of the ballad, we are left to wonder about the process of
extrapolating social norms from it, as well as understanding its value as evidential
or historical material for the gender relations of which it sings.
At the theoretical level, the relationship between real life and works of art—
including poetic texts—is neither simple nor straightforward. No poetic text can
be assumed to bear a fixed mimetic value in relation to the historical context
within which it was born. In many ways, the extent to which we can rely on
cultural material to draw conclusions about historical conditions is a question
linked to our views concerning the relationship between a text and its reader.
If this relationship is conceived in such a way that either the text or the reader
is given authority in the production of meaning, then the process of cultural