Bosnia is the innocuous-looking meadow where fat empires go to die. These empires may be real like Rome or Byzantium, or they may merely be imagined, the wet dream of small, ambitious kingdoms like Croatia and Serbia. They go there to meet and wrestle with other empires. If you stare down that dark pit of her history you hardly ever see her own face alone―no, the leering masks of her self-proclaimed guardians are cramming in there too, those larger neighboring behemoths squabbling, tugging at her limbs, always on the scene, come to watch out for her, unasked. A thousand year old baby, she has been the orphan child of a multitude of demented foster parents. In a neatly symbolic way, Sarajevo 1914 was the end of both Austro-Hungary and the Ottomans―the two continental forces for whom Bosnia was for centuries the meeting place. Empires die, but they all leave something behind. The Romans left some genes, and perhaps their sinuous grammar. The Austrians left the railway, and the accordion. The Turks a couple of mosques and bridges, and their holy book. And one other crucial thing to go with the krautish accordion: a languid, oriental melodicism that has fused with the more local, European sensibility into an authentic Bosnian folk song, sevdalinka.

Sevdah, or sevdalinka, is often said to resemble fado, the traditional urban sound of Portugal. Both have their oriental influence in the way the melodies bend and make odd turns, the way the voice is fluid, and vocal lines are often elongated and demanding exquisite artistry, as well as a pair of capacious lungs, and a keen interpretative intelligence. Both often have a fatalistic sadness, telling stories of grave romantic hurdles. In sevdah, the ballad form seems dominant with its story-telling, and its pessimistic, unresolved codas. You have a young wooer coming a day late to ask for the hand of his beloved (Kad ja podjoh na bembasu), or the young girl who falls ill and asks for quinces from Istanbul and her beloved leaves but returns too late for he finds her already felled by her ailment (Voljelo se dvoje mladih). They are tragedies cushioned by sober, but delightful music. Another lyrical feature in sevdah is the very old Bosnian laissez-faire sensibility, a laidback joy of simple facts of existence, an urban, inclusive delight in the kind of event they would hear about in the street, the market or the coffeehouse. Local events are the marrow of this music. Muslim magnates are drinking wine (Vino piju age), a housewife is infatuated with a young bazaar worker, and ambiguously ends up being sexually assaulted in the back of his shop, or perhaps she simply gets what she’s wanted all along (Mostarski ducani, my personal favourite).

What is rare in sevdah is thrilling darkness, psycho-drama. This is perhaps why the song Mehmeda majka budila (‘Mehmed was being woken by his mother’) is so startling. It stands out as an oddity in the canon, it is almost like a Surrealist poem, ambiguous, endlessly suggestive. It consists of three bare stanzas, with little or no context. Place is perfunctory, no description is given. There is the neutral speaker reporting the speech of a mother and her son. Lines are repetitive, incantatory, adding to the surreal atmosphere of the menace of dreams. It begins innocently with the line:

  Mehmed was being woken by his mother (Mehmeda majka budila)

Notice here the grammatical sophistication of Bosnian―in three words you say and imply even more than seven can express in English. The syntax of the tongue is Latinate, more or less free.

She tells him to get up, saying she has been up for a long time already and that she’s had “neither sugar, nor coffee”. She is gently implying the morning is old enough, son, you might as well end your luxurious slumbers. We do not know the age of Mehmed. For some reason I always picture him as a grown man, not a child. Perhaps come to visit his mother after a long time, or one of those aged momma’s boys. Ageless, forever home.

Then he speaks:

Mother, I cannot get up

I dreamt a dreadful dream [...]

Three fairies were strangling me.

I translate the Slavic word “vila” as fairy here, but it is more ambiguous, it could also be rendered as “enchanters” or “boogeymen”.

In the final stanza mother asks who it was and he replies:

Sis was binding my hands, binding my hands

Father was binding my eyes, binding my eyes,

You were taking out my heart.

And that is it. That final line comes with a cold shiver. Mother as demon― subverting the mother-saint of the poem whose language is mild throughout, caressing, even coddling. I don’t know anything about the genesis of the text, but it could have been written early in the last century, perhaps under the influence of the new Viennese psychoanalytic iconography: the Freudian family quartet in a deadly embrace of impulse and oppression. More likely, it is simply one of those unconscious expressions of folk wisdom. There is nothing like it in the huge repertoire of traditional Bosnian music. Everything outside the dream is tentative, ambivalent, the figures are mere adumbrations in some morning-dark rooms of an old house. The dream becomes the central event, with its myriad morbid implications. This man is reduced to a helpless child, destroyed by his loved ones. But who is the audience? Clearly, this was not written for the mass consumption of reclining customers, drowsy under a vine canopy in some public restaurant by a cool river. It feels personal, tortured, private as the bedroom of the haunted son.

Now, sevdalinka is a Slavic word derived from the Turkish sevda which means love. But what broken, sinister love is this? Curiously, tantalizingly, that sweet Turkish word is derived from the Arabic sawda―which, all too appropriate here, means: black.