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Who owns sevdah If it's important to you, it's yours!
When people ask me if sevdah is Serb, Croat, Bosniak, Muslim, Bosnian,
or from Sandžak, whatever, I usually say that it is.
What we call sevdah in Bosnia and Herzegovina today
is this mostly Bosnian repertoire, with facets of different smaller repertoires
and units of genre, and they include Bosnia and Herzegovina,
parts of Montenegro, Serbia, Sandžak, all the way down to Macedonia;
it's all in some way, generally speaking, the same or a similar type of music.
However, it's a problem only if you deny someone else the right
to think of it as their own as well.
The entire history of the genre is in fact a story of appropriation,
because for the most part of that history, the scholars who worked with
traditional culture in general - not only with sevdah - from carpetry and crochetry
to traditional dances, they all had the same destiny
of being tied with political identities.
The most banal example is names, so you have different versions of names in songs
with the same text: there's Mara, there's Kata, there's Fata...
The language that sevdalinka was written in - and it's sung in today -
has changed a number of names in the past centuries
precisely because of the political appropriation of this entire
artistic side, among other things.
Sevdah is beautiful exactly because it contains all the layers of this language.
From the oldest variant, which is replete with Turkish loanwords,
and later on, where you have songs with both German and Turkish loanwords,
and from all that beauty, when someone asks, "Whose is it,
which language is it in?" To me it feels like when you go to space
and you look at this planet that's gorgeous, with so many possibilities,
so many wonderful things, so it makes me sad to think how
some people, when thinking about art such as sevdah,
have narrow-minded views on life and the world...
...and what they consider important.
I want to believe that we can understand sevdah as an art form,
that we can talk about it as an art form, and that's when
this question of ethnic and national belonging
becomes completely irrelevant. I think that sevdah as a genre
is strong enough to survive everything,
so I believe it will outlive the issues that we have today.
"Is it Serb?" Yes. "Is it Bosniak?" Yes. "Is it Croat?" Yes.
If it's a part of your identity, if you think that's why it's important to you,
it reminds you of your grandma who used to sing when you were little,
it reminds you of your hometown that you were displaced from...
Is it yours? Do you feel it's yours? Then go ahead - think of it as yours.