The sevdalinka encodes layered multilingual and gender-crossing identities

Evidence

The specific character of Bosnia’s heritage is reflected in its tradition of love lyric, among the world’s most sophisticated. The native love song is the sevdalinka, which can be composed in Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian and written in either the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, or as Adzamijski (Slavic in the Arabic alphabet).’ The sevdalinka involves the timeless lyrics of unrequited love. It is called “the woman’s song” because by convention it is sung by a woman to her male beloved. The woman poses as a male lover in the song, singing to his female beloved. This complex gender interplay is further enhanced when male singers sing the woman’s song. There is one account of six Muslim ulema or religious scholars on their way to the pilgrimage in Mecca, singing sevdalinkas. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 374

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines sevdalinka and its complex gender/multilingual conventions clearly.
• QUESTION: The gender-crossing convention (woman posing as male lover, men singing the woman’s song) is startlingly modern — worth chasing the literary scholarship on it.