other hand, was associated with a larger milieu, both urban and rural, and was not
intended for private performance. It was communal, performed in a kolo (circular
dance), instrumentally accompanied, like the sevdalinka, by the long-necked saz,
or more elementally, by the sound of a revolving pan ( okretanje tepsije), and by
combining old-Bosnian and Islamic forms of chant.21 Circular dance has been
noted in the performance of French and Greek ballads as well.22
In both the sevdalinka and the ballad, the favorite theme is unrequited love
that leads to a crisis. In the ballad, that crisis tends to be not only emotional but
also social, brought about by the conflation of patriarchal norms, Islamic values,
and local amatory sensibilities. In the sevdalinka, the crisis is more often than not
only emotional, and it is intimated in a way that leads to no explicit resolution.
In contrast, the ballad is built around an inevitably tragic resolution to the social-
cum-emotional crisis. Therefore, while the themes may be similar, the internal
dynamic of the songs tends to be different. Moreover, the sevdalinka, the shorter
and more melancholic of the two genres, contains very specific references to the
setting and the situation. The framing of the love relationship in a recognizable
landscape, neighborhoods, families, and other familiar topographical markers,
make the story into a seemingly intimate social event. Associations with specific
individuals, their courting, evolving feelings, amorous exchanges, are all intimated
in the sevdalinka with so much lyrical and emotional candor that, at times, the
song appears to function very much like a confessional log, a lyrical diary in
which poignant and delicate emotions are shared with the listener in minute
detail. The sevdalinka lacks dramatic force; it flows as pure lyric, making the
listener feel like a fly on the wall, a voyeur secretly observing the lovers in their
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81
amatory pathos, listening to the quiet pulse of their affair, empathizing with their
longing, and imagining their future. The listener is thus drawn into the intimacy of
the relationship as if walking into the sanctity of a sacred space, moved and awed
by its delicate vibrations, and incited to thinking of her or his own emotions.
The ballad, on the other hand, removes any topographical familiarity from
the story’s framework or reduces it to minimal references, allowing the story
to embed itself within different places and times. It too speaks of unrequited
love, but its narrative style is much more abrupt and impersonal than that of
the sevdalinka, turning the event, rather than the sentiment, into the focus of
the listener’s attention. As mentioned earlier, romantic love in the ballad is not
sententious; it is destructive. Passion is fateful and doomed, oblivious to the
mores of society. It inevitably ends in tragedy. Like medieval European ballads—
in which sentimentality results in loss of property and life, and religion or family
offer little comfort23—the Bosnian ballad too resorts to pragmatism as the only
way out of social crisis. It is thus unclear whether the ballad treats the fateful
ending of the romance as happy or sad. In many ways, then, the intertwining of
the sevdalinka and the ballad is like the mirror-imaging of two facets of love.
One pursues its inner, emotional dimensions, while the other is concerned with
its outer, social aspects. Given the mutual influence of the two genres, however,
these differences are not to be understood as simple birfucation or opposition,
but as variants that take into consideration the different factors that make love
possible or impossible to sustain.
Appropriate for its generic features, the ballad of Meho and Fata takes us on a
bumpy narrative journey full of abrupt transitions from one scene to the next. We
are offered no pause before poignant inner turmoil and emotional experiences that
underpin the course of events, and are robbed of clues for sympathy or empathy.
Stock epitaphs abound and the style is at times painfully simple. Looking at the
dynamic of the relationship between Meho and Fata, for example, we are struck
by how little we are told about its inception and development, and how much we
must engage in our own cultural decoding to imagine the pathos of two youths
who, under pressure from social codes, must curb their desire to unite. We resort to
one kind of imagining, born out of the cultural context of Ottoman Bosnia, which
is assumed to be accessible and familiar to the ballad’s audience. The ballad is
thus more of an abridging rather than explicatory narrative, at times obtuse, and
by and large uninterested in directing the listener’s own ideas and feelings. Events
unfold quickly, but we are not told how to read them. As such, the inception,
dynamic, and modality of the relationship of Meho and Fata remain couched
behind the basic enunciation of intimacy and affection, and we are left to fill in the
absence of information with the memory of our own experiences, or, if we have
no such memories, by engaging our imagination. What is important, however, is
that Meho and Fata’s affection, despite its doom, is not presented as scandalous,
illicit, or surreptitious; on the contrary, the narrative treats it is as nothing out of
the ordinary or socially reprehensible, despite the tension that surrounds it. In
fact, the relationship is publicly acknowledged, even if not condoned. The fact
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that Meho walks over to meet Fata at her house, in broad daylight and with his
mother’s knowledge, with the intention of speaking to her about his predicament,
prompts us to imagine a community which is not completely prohibitive of
unmediated interaction between the sexes or unsupervised presence of women
in public space.
As the ballad makes no background statement on the candor of their interaction,
we are led to wonder about the dynamics of premarital gender relations in Ottoman
Bosnia. In his study on the sevdalinka, Munib Maglajlić notes that social space
was so completely segregated along gender lines that Muslim women barely had
access to public space:
Restrained by strict laws of patriarchal morality, the woman was placed
in an unequal position vis-à-vis the man, and was wholely confined to the
house and the children. After coming of age, she was fully veiled under
the feredža, a kind of drape made of black or navy blue cloth, and never
exposed until her marriage. In well-to-do circles of Muslim urban society,
the woman was completely kept away from men, so that her beauty could
have been known only second-hand through stories and rumors spread by
other girls or women who may have seen her.24
While the sevdalinka may indeed contain textual evidence of such thorough
concealment of Muslim women from men that love could only evolve in and
through secrecy, it is important to stress that Maglajlić’s remark may have been
mainly applicable to women of the upper classes, as he himself notes but fails to
elaborate. Indeed, a greater degree of seclusion among upper-class women was
not an unusual situation in traditional Islamic so
cieties.25 Moreover, the fact that
the sevdalinka focuses on the local and the familiar, on “the girl next-door” as
it were, rather than on anonymous and purely fictional characters as is usually
the case in pre-modern romances, may have contributed to the formation of the
trope of female physical inaccessibility whereby a woman’s beauty is known by
reputation rather than through first-hand exposure. In other words, the sevdalinka
functions both as a song of self-exposure in which women are able to articulate
their emotions, usually in the first person singular, and also as a mechanism of
protection from intemperate self-disclosure. For a woman to sing and have a voice
is a mode of empowerment over emotions, which are otherwise made transparent,
in full vulnerability, to both her beloved man and to the audience to whom she
sings.
There is little resonance of this in the ballad under study, however. The class
factor may indeed account for the different modes of physical representation of
women here. While once again the more upper-class the woman, the greater the
emphasis placed on her physical invisibility, the common or unmarried woman’s
physical uncovering to men is not considered blameworthy. The ballad thus
reverses Maglajlić’s observation—the unmarried woman, Fata, is unveiled and
publicly present; the married woman, Umihana, is hidden, in the attic and behind
the veil. In fact, some travel literature and ethnological material dating to the
Buturović, Love and/or death?
83
Ottoman period support what the ballad conveys. Consider, for example, the
writings of Cevdet Paşa, the early nineteenth-century Ottoman administrator who
spent about a year in Bosnia and observed, with astonishment, the practice of
courting ( âşıklık in Turkish, ašikovanje in Bosnian, from the Arabic ‘ashq) among
young men and women in Bosnian cities, taking note that courting happens in
front of girls’ windows, in the courtyards of their houses, or at the front door of
their homes:
Courting is customary among men and women. In this way they engage
in conversation and talk in an extremely free and open way. Fifteen year-
old girls are not considered grown-ups, so they do not engage in âşıklık
behavior. For the most part, they join this kind of conversation after they
reach the age of 17–18, and they spend years in âşıklık. No matter what
age they reach, Muslim girls do not wear the veil and walk uncovered until
they get married. But as soon as they get married, they put on the veil and
nobody can see their faces any more. Their walking around uncovered is
never considered incompatible with their chastity. In fact, Bosnian men and
women are very much chaste and honorable. That is one people whose morals
are still untainted. … Although some ulema [religious scholars] objected to
this way of courting, it was impossible to remove this custom because this
is a behavior to which they have been accustomed since olden times. Since
custom becomes another nature of the human being, it is evident as daylight
how difficult it would be to replace it. While involved in courting, however,
they completely refrain from any situation and act that would be contrary
to chastity. Young men even always come in front of girls’ houses and chat
(with them) by their windows, or the girls come down to the courtyard door
( sokak kapısı) to see the young men. Sometimes they give them water or
coffee, or a young man enters the courtyard and the girl brings him a water
ewer for ablutions or a prayer rug. If, on such an occasion, accidentally,
so much as one finger touches another’s hand, that is usually considered
engagement and immediately the marriage is contracted. In short, by being
involved in a long courting, young men and girls learn about each other’s
behavior and character and they fall in love and decide to marry.26
In addition to presenting us with a topsy-turvy practice of veiling, this passage
is useful for elaborating on the customary practice of courting within clear
spatial boundaries that lie neither within purely private nor public space, but in
an in-between space. Despite its seeming liminality, that space was nevertheless
governed by strict codes of conduct: men as well as women—who are said to be
commonly unveiled before marriage—understood that these codes allow them
to converse, gaze longingly at each other, drink coffee, or perform ritual prayer,
but they also appreciated that even the most innocuous form of physical contact
would result in engagement and marriage. Whether that causality was always
established is hard to ascertain, but its sheer possibility was probably conducive
to both playfulness and self-restraint on the part of the lovers. Furthermore, this
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spatial liminality was gendered insofar as it was associated with the woman’s,
rather than the man’s, house. Such a gendered and morally regulated style of
courting was filtered not through some vague precepts of Islamic law, but rather
through a blend of local customs and etiquette of honor that were specific to
Ottoman Bosnian culture, and, as such, present, if implicitly, in the ballad’s
narrative framing.
In that respect, Meho’s visits to Fata needs to be situated within the accepted
modality of courting in the prevailing culture of Ottoman Bosnia, and not viewed
as dishonorable or unacceptable behavior.
Meho set off through the narrow streets
to the house of Fata, his fair beloved.
Young Fata walked down to greet him
The ballad hints at their repeated meetings and interaction, the exchanging of gifts
and messages of love, yet it never anchors them in detailed imagery or a plot.
This is not deliberate suspense; quite to the contrary, the events seem exposed
beyond any shroud of mystery, condensed to the minimum, and pending events
hasten the narrative rather than evoking the anxiety or excitement characteristic
of suspense.
The ballad’s elliptic quality does, however, create an ambiance of secrecy, by
suggesting that some form of physical contact may have taken place between
Meho and Fata (as echoed in Meho’s last words), and by giving us little reassurance
regarding the nature of the contact:
my hair for which Fata cared so dearly,
three ivory combs did she break on it,
three jars of oil did she spread on it,
before she managed to make it so fine.
While the ballad tentatively eroticizes the act of combing hair, it also evokes the
feeling of ritual intimacy characteristic of the ancient Bosnian practices of hair
combing and hair cutting that was considered a central ritual of bonding amongst
kinfolk. Furthermore, it intensifies the emotion about their lost bond: did the act
of combing raise hopes, in either party, that they would be united in marriage? Did
it generate guilt or shame? The answer may be implied in Meho’s suicide, but the
ballad moves on without offering so much as a hint of either moral reassurance
or reprimand. In fact, as the funerary procession approaches Fata’s house, her
self-sacrifice is not perceived
as a shameful moment but as an act of emotional
strength and a confirmation of love. Again, that act happens in her home, with her
mother by her side, confirming the role of her house as a sanctuary for her love
and not her shame or dishonor:
Fata was doing her embroidery with her yarn
in the bower, on the tallest turret;
just then a cool wind began to blow,
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85
carrying a scent that perked her up.
When fair Fata looked down,
she saw something very strange:
a procession led by unmarried men,
who carried her young Mehmed,
and behind them came the hodžas and hadžis.27
Instantly she knew what had happened,
she knew it was Meho, woe unto his mother!
She fell down onto the embroidery frame,
as she fell, she never rose up again.
Her mother rushed thinking Fata had fainted,
but Fata had given up the ghost.
Fata’s mother cried thus:
“Wait, wait o you hodža s and hadži s,
Wait and carry this lifeless body too.”
In contrast to the dynamic of premarital courting in the ballad, where passion is
allowed to reign and extreme actions can take place, the rules governing marriage
appear quite different. For one thing, they are ostensibly patrilocal. Brought to the
house on a horse and ceremonially carried into her husband’s residence, the new
bride is veiled, muted, and praised insofar as she can bear sons of noble lineage.
Her entire being seems to shift to a different kind of moral, emotional, and spatial
framing. The ballad gives us a strikingly different picture between premarital and
marital conditions, and forces us to come to grips with the changing nature of a
woman’s role, but once again without providing us with sufficient commentary.
This is where Maglajlić’s observation quoted above finds more resonance: the
woman’s attitude shifts from an active to a passive mode, from vocal to silent,
from passionate to dutiful. The roles of two women, Fata and the bride, epitomize
the tension that builds up during this shift, but the narrative hardly expresses its
gravity or implications. Yet it is the violence of Meho’s martyrdom in the name of
loyalty and love for another woman that creates a rupture in her self-identity—so
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