“Bismilahir-rahmanir-rahim!
I call to witness the ink, the quill, and the script,
which flows from the quill;
I call to witness the faltering shadows of the sinking evening,
the night and all she enlivens;
I call to witness the moon when she waxes, and the sunrise when it dawns.
I call to witness the Resurrection Day and the soul that accuses itself;
I call to witness time, the beginning and end of all things – to witness that every man always suffers loss.”
Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish
One hundred and three years ago, one of the greatest BiH novelists, Mehmed ‘Meša’ Selimović was born.
He was one of the greatest writers in BCSM language of the 20th century. His most famous works deal with Bosnia and Herzegovina and the culture of the Bosniaks of the Ottoman province of Bosnia.
Selimović was born on April 26, 1910 in Tuzla, where he graduated from elementary school and high school. In 1930, he enrolled to study the Serbo-Croatian language and literature at the University of Belgrade. In 1936, he returned to Tuzla to teach in the grammar school that today bears his name. He spent the first two years of World War II in the hometown Tuzla, where he was arrested for participation in the Partisan anti-fascist resistance movement in 1943.
During the war, Meša’s brother, also a communist, was executed by partisans’ firing squad for alleged theft, without trial; Meša’s letter in defence of the brother was to no avail. That episode apparently affected Meša’s later contemplative introduction to Death and the Dervish, where the main protagonist Ahmed Nurudin fails to rescue his imprisoned brother.
Selimović started writing fairly late: his first book, collection of short stories Prva četa (The First Company) was published in 1950.
However, his novel Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt, 1966) was widely received as a masterpiece. The novel reflected Selimović’s own torment of the execution of his brother; the story speaks of the futility of one man’s resistance against a repressive system, and the change that takes place within that man after he becomes a part of that very system.
The novel is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish at a Sarajevo monastery in the eighteenth century during the Ottoman rule. The spiritual leader of a group of Muslims, Sheikh Nuruddin has deliberately removed himself from the day-to-day activities of society. This distance is shattered, though, by the arrest of his brother. As Sheikh Nuruddin attempts to find out what has happened to his brother and to intervene on his behalf, he is drawn into the Kafkaesque world of Ottoman authorities. As he does so, he begins to question his relations with society as a whole and, eventually, his life choices in general.
The next novel, Tvrđava (The Fortress, 1970), placed still further in the past, is slightly more optimistic, and fulfilled with faith in love, unlike the lonely contemplations and fear in Death and the Dervish. The novel tells a story of 18th century Sarajevo under Ottoman rule, featuring a soldier returned from the wars. A Muslim, he marries a Christian girl who supports him while he dabbles in politics, eventually leading a raid to rescue a friend from jail.
Selimović’s novels were translated into many languages of the world.
(D.J.)
(photo: wikipedia)
