Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History

by Amila Buturovic

  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.

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  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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  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