signification is reduced to a fixed and transparent meaning assumed to be either
submitted to the reader through proper language or discovered by the reader
through proper reading. Such an assumption tends to oversimplify the complex
relationship between history and its cultural record. Despite numerous attempts
to nuance this complex relationship, no satisfactory answer has ever been offered,
mainly because cultures shape and are shaped by art in historically specific ways.
In an effort to recognize this complexity, for example, Jacques Derrida speaks of
the process of inventing the reader as one aspect of the complex labor of assigning
textual meaning.5 He draws attention to the capacity of any cultural text to induce
the reader into an array of readings of the historical context, most of which may not
have been considered prior to the act of reading. The reader and the text are thus
not joined in a simplistic moment of discovery of fixed meaning, but are incited
into a dynamic unfolding of signification that loses sight neither of the tension
inherent in the act of textual representation, nor in the act of its interpretation.
Taking a cue from such observations, one can postulate that, while inextricably
linked to the milieu that produced it, the ballad should not be seen as a forthright
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source on social history, nor can it serve the purpose of faithfully reconstructing
it. Yet, the dynamic in gender and other relations that the ballad explores is not
removed from that history. To assume, then, that as folk material the ballad provides
no useful information on gender relations would be to deny the importance of
folk renditions in preserving and perpetuating social mores. The ballad genre,
as Gwendolyn Morgan postulates, is a form of “oral newspaper” that reflects the
general attitudes and sensibilities of the people who produced them, and, as such,
provides the means for common people to “record their opinions, perceptions,
social mores, history, and philosophical outlook.”6 At the same time, however, in
the process of reading the ballad, we are prompted to ask genre-specific questions
pertinent to the examination of women and gender relations in Ottoman Bosnia.
How does the ballad record them? What are the tensions and conflicts? Does
that record differ from other modes of cultural/poetic codification? In addressing
these questions it is necessary to locate both textual and extra-textual clues that
may shed light upon the values dominating gender relations. Otherwise, the
opportunity to understand whether the ballad reflects, asserts, ignores, or subverts
prevailing gender norms may be lost.
Within and Outside of Text
Before exploring the link between the ballad and social norms, it is important to
crystallize the different textual elements that make the poem under consideration
a ballad. As mentioned earlier, in the most common short definition, the ballad
is understood as a song that tells a story, hence its conspicuous narrative quality.
Originally tied to, or even enacted through, dance (from the Italian ballare),
the ballad relies on performative and melodic renditions, which in turn allow
for variations according to different contexts. This combination of melodic,
performative, and narrative elements usually presupposes a particular stanzaic
and metric organization as well as an unambiguous rhyme that enables the
joining of several complex features in a single genre. James Porter argues that the
ballad ought to be considered performative rather than written text: in his view,
conventional literary analysis falls short of accounting for the singer’s individual
renditions in articulating the text, and by default, ignores the synthetic elements
that make each ballad a unique product. The “holistic” approach that Porter
endorses underscores the notion that the ballad’s song is as relevant as the ballad’s
narrative.7 Notwithstanding the importance of viewing the genre’s form and content
as a single unit—for the reasons explained above—this paper places emphasis not
so much on the performativity of the ballad as on its textuality, especially as the
Bosnian ballad tradition has moved away from a singularly melodic mode to a
prosaic (oral and written) and even dramaturgic one. Nevertheless, a few words
on the ballad’s inner composition are in order.
Although the ballad of Meho and Fata does not follow a strict strophic division
and its rhyme is rather loose and inconsistent, it nevertheless contains a distinct
prosopoetic quality that makes it easily rendered in an oral recitation. Like most
ballads in the Balkans, this one too was born within an anonymous folk milieu that
Buturović, Love and/or death?
77
suggests oral transmission. This gives it, as with all other folk ballads, a distinctly
impersonal style. Subjectivity is minimized, if not totally eliminated, so that any
scene, emotion, or act in the ballad is objectified and sanctioned by the community
within which it was born and to which it speaks. In contrast to Henderson’s view
quoted earlier, Gummere explains that “ballads rest primarily on situation and
deed of familiar, imitable type; the popular tale, untrammeled by rhythmic law,
by choral conditions, tends to a more subtle motive, a more striking fact, a more
memorable quality, and a more intricate coherence of events.”8 Yet, as explained
above, the ballad’s intent to create a feeling of familiarity is often coupled with
a simultaneous reminder of the differences between the choices made in real life
and in fantasy—so much so, in fact, that empathy with the characters can go hand
in hand with estrangement from them.
This mimetic and also repetitive quality perhaps explains the common abruptness
in the flow of ballad narratives. Events related to the climax of the story are often
awkwardly brushed over, and narration lacks gradual transitions, descriptive
details, and rich imagery that could help us situate the story in a recognizable
setting. Moreover, motives for action are rarely explained, and the emphasis is
placed on events rather than the characters’ inner drama.9 Consequently, as a genre,
the ballad lacks moral commentary, or indeed commentary of any kind. Dialogue
and formulaic expressions are often used instead of descriptions. They facilitate
the mnemonic process in the transmission of ballads, but they also rob the story of
personal views, especially in the retelling of highly intense emotional episodes. In
this way, the stock attributes and topoi suggest that the ballad interacts with other
genres of popular expression, and it is often the elliptic gaps in the story line of
the ballad that lead us to other folk genres which help us fill them in.10 Although
these “fillers” are not presumed to be directly relevant for the development of the
story, they are important insofar as they link the ballad to other forms of cultural
signification, indicating its receptivity and openness to the wider cultural milieu.
Tom Cheesman refers to receptivity of this kind as “intersubcultural dialogue,”
which is based upon a continuous process of reappropriation among different
genre of cultu
ral production:
Differing renderings and renditions of the ballad indicate differing positions
in this continuing pan-social discussion ... [and] a typical process of
successive re-appropriations of a ballad in differing contexts, using differing
media. In this case, as perhaps in all cases of significantly popular ballads,
the song’s very popularity can be equated with its ability to traverse social
boundaries, and this ability in turn can be seen as a function of its ambiguous
articulation of conflicts that mattered in the lives of all sorts of people. The
song’s socially disparate real writers and singers, and real audiences, can
be thought of as engaged in debate both with one another, and with the
imagined interlocutors summoned up by the ballad (“the authorities,” “the
lower classes,” “women,” “men”), concerning the conflicts dramatized
in the song. The ambiguous articulation of these conflicts provides space
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for listeners to construct their own interpretations of the story and in
some cases, as singers and writers, to remake the ballad according to their
interpretation.11
So what are these other genres, or fillers, that can shed light on the Bosnian
ballad? While the Bosnian ballad, as folk artifact, stands apart from Ottoman
canonical literature (in which many elite Bosnian writers partook), it does intersect
with it through other forms of poetic art. In general terms, one can identify four
different strands of Islamic literary production in Ottoman Bosnia-Herzegovina:
prose literature (epistles, charts, records) written in South Slavic; poetry written
in Ottoman languages (Persian, Turkish, and Arabic) that conformed to the divan
style of court poetry as well as mystical poetry; Alhamiado literature (Bosnian
language in Arabic script, also known as adžemijski) that spanned both secular
and devotional poetry and prose; and oral folk literature (mainly ballads and love
lyrics).12 These trends coexisted almost throughout the Ottoman period, but they
also converged in a way that infused Bosnian literary culture with a range of
linguistic and metric patterns.
While from a historical point of view the ballad did not originate in the
Ottoman period and can therefore not be viewed as the product of Ottoman
cultural influence, the impact of Ottoman values on the Bosnian tradition of
balladry is profound. On another level, however, the continuity of the genre, and
through it of certain cultural values, from pre-Ottoman well into Ottoman times,
is attested by the balladry tradition in the region at large. Yet, this continuity is
not linear in either form or content. Albert Lord postulated that the arrival of
Ottomans was instrumental in the transformation of a tradition of ballads, short
narratives, and local feuding songs into epic poetry, putting an end to the vitality
of these genres. Where in the past they had existed as an amalgam of Slavic and
Greek traditions, during Ottoman times they became primarily concerned with
heroic themes of resistance.13 In contrast to Lord, however, other folklorists have
convincingly argued that balladry continued not only in an epic mutation, as Lord
suggested, but also as ballad proper. In fact, in some case studies conducted on
Balkan balladry, the folklorist Alan Dundes has offered convincing arguments for
the existence of numerous regional and extra-regional cognates which point to
an unbroken thread of continuity in thematic and historical terms.14 Similarly, the
superb study by the Hungarian scholar Lajós Vargyas on the mediaeval history of
the folk ballad makes it abundantly clear that the ballad tradition had been present
and interactive in the Balkans before, during, and after the Ottoman period, and
points to a number of ballad cognates involving Bosnian texts elsewhere in the
region.15 While exhibiting some of the common traits of the balladry tradition
found in the Balkans, and in Europe at large, the Bosnian ballad also amalgamated
Ottoman cultural formations, reflecting its ethos and social mores. The contents
of Bosnian ballads thus reveal the impregnation of the cultural milieu with several
systems of meaning that created a platform for different interpretive possibilities
in the making of this art.
Buturović, Love and/or death?
79
Related to this question of diachronic and synchronic continuity is the voice
given to women in literature. Certain critics argue that traditional genres are
a historical product of the patriarchal order, insofar as they are forms devised
by men to tell male stories about the world.16 Under such circumstances, one
encounters “female literary sterility,” that is, a lack of participation in canonical
genres. Instead, women have resorted to expressing themselves in lesser, minor
genres. Working with the Bakhtinian proposition that language is always
heteroglot, genre critics argue that generic features are contextual constructs that
must be understood as mediators between society and the text. By the same token,
in societies brought under imperial or colonial umbrellas, or in those subjected to
processes of cultural homogenization and intellectual elitism, the dichotomies to
which we are traditionally accustomed regarding literature’s place in society—high
vs. low, oral vs. written, canonical vs. marginal—seem intensified because here,
the rift between cultural center and periphery occasions the existence of “official”
literary systems independent from “unofficial” or indigenous literary productions.
However, these binaries are far from fixed. In fact, the interpenetration of genres
in Bosnian literature during the Ottoman period is worthy of note: folk expression
and canonical production did not remain completely isolated from each other,
despite the politics of socio-linguistic divisiveness along the lines of literacy,
canon, center/periphery, and religion.17
This is especially important in reference to the role of Bosnian women in
literary production. While literary history has recorded a number of successful
poetesses of “high” genres (especially mystical and divan poetry), we are indebted
to the women of Ottoman Bosnia mostly for their involvement as performers and
transmitters of folk lyrics which, clearly intended for local consumption, deployed
love themes with strong local symbolism. Traditionally, the most prominent
genre among these poems was the so-called sevdalinka, popularly identified in
gendered terms as the “Bosnian woman’s song.” Sevdah, a word of Arabic origin
( sawda’, lit. “black”) introduced into Bosnian through Turkish, is a metaphor
for unrequited love. It seeks to describe pathos in physiological terms, because
it is believed that the misery of unrequited love causes the same symptoms as
the black bile—melancholy, from the Greek μελαν, “black,” and χολη, “bile”.
Hence the “blackness” of love. The love of the sevdalinka is of the kind that
leads to melancholy and affliction. The sevdalinka is called the woman’s song
because it centers on women as the agents of longing and pain, since women have
traditionally been associated with gentle and easy expr
ession, simple imagery,
and the capacity to accept amorous suffering as natural. Often, however, the
sevdalinka s are performed by men as well, or by women singing in the alienated
male “I,” which allows for the transgression of gender codes and the association
of emotional torment with men as much as women.
Because of its role in Bosnian women’s lore, the sevdalinka is essential to an
examination of the dynamic between the ballad, women’s voices, and cognate
genres. While it is certainly possible to trace the ballad through the epic tradition,
as Lord has suggested, it is mainly the similarities between the sevdalinka and
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
the ballad that often leave historians and critics unclear about the markers of their
delineation. Both the ballad and the sevdalinka belong to the “secular” music of
Bosnian Muslims, in contrast to religious hymns ( ilahije), Sufi music, and liturgical
and devotional chants that are classified as “religious” music.18 As regards secular
music—which, with the exception of women’s wedding songs, prevails in Bosnian
urban culture—songs are melodically performed, with or without instrumental
accompaniment, and are often concerned with love themes. Among them, the
sevdalinka occupies the most central place. It embodies influences from both rural
and urban culture, both Muslim and non-Muslim, but is mainly associated with
the Muslim city elite and their life, aspirations, customs, and social and aesthetic
norms. Ankica Petrović notes that before the introduction of Western musical
instruments, the sevdalinka used to be much lengthier. The Western musical scale,
as well the stylistic and melodic demands of Western instruments—especially the
accordion that became popular among Bosnian girls—substantially changed the
performative and compositional features of the sevdalinka by turning it into a
shorter and simpler song.19
In its earlier manifestations, the sevdalinka was often associated with ballads,
and even classified as such.20 The difference between the two genres may have
indeed appeared only stylistic. The sevdalinka was usually performed indoors, to
a small audience, among urban, well-to-do segments of society; the ballad, on the
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