SEVDAH

ELEGY FOR A SOUTH IMAGINED
 

by

 

MALINA STEFANOVSKA

(UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
 AT LOS ANGELES, USA)

 

ISBN: 978-1-952-799-47-1

 

FRENCH VERSION:

ÉLÉGIE POUR UN SUD RÊVÉ

 

   (Mary Adelaide Walker, 1864 Benaki Museum Library)

                                             (Bitola Old Baazar, Nineteenth Century)

                                                                                               The Author's Father's Home                                                                The Author's Mother's Home

 

Peoples of South-Eastern Europe sometimes nurture through their music and poetry a feeling of intense longing that brings them at the same time sadness and happiness.  Sevdah, the Balkan version of the famed Portuguese saudade, encompasses nostalgia for a lost homeland, youthful dreams, past loves, or even for things that never were. This autobiographical narrative of a Macedonian woman recreates her beloved South through childhood memories, family portraits and legends, and the history of an ill-fated love with a man from that region. The rich account of a vanished political and cultural world is revealed through sensual reminiscences, tales of homicidal patriarchs, hospitable matriarchs, and existentialist smugglers. The poignant anthropology of displacement that it constructs by weaving together American, Macedonian, Greek, Vlach, and Roma cultures, opens onto a radically different, imagined South: that of her adopted daughter who, in her turn, is destined to leave her roots.

 

   
The Author's Paternal Grand-Father The Author's Paternal Family

(Photo: BYU Humanities)

 

Malina Stefanovska grew up in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, to where her family came from the extreme South of the country. Having spent her summers in Bitola, a once opulent city of the Ottoman empire, she retains vivid memories of a world rich with multi-ethnic traditions, and of her own roots as the offspring of an ethnic minority, the Vlachs, and a Macedonian peasant family. Following undergraduate studies in the Congo, and in France, and after several years as an interpreter for the Yugoslavian government, she left the country before its break up in the 1990s. She currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA. Her personal memoir is born of a long-term interest in writing about memory, nostalgia, exile and the self.

 

    

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