Sevdah, or the Art of Longing

My mother sang sevdalinke while washing dishes in a flat in south London. She never sang them at weddings or at the community centre, where the other Bosnian women gathered on Sundays. She sang them alone, to the window, with her hands in hot water. As a child I thought they were sad songs. It took me thirty years to understand they were something else.

The word sevdah comes from the Turkish sevda, love, which itself travelled from the Arabic sawdā’, the black bile that medieval physicians believed caused melancholy. Love and melancholy, in other words, sharing one root. By the time the word reached Bosnia it had settled into a meaning of its own: a longing so complete that it becomes a kind of pleasure.

A song is a room

A sevdalinka is usually short. A girl at a window, a young man passing on horseback, a garden of roses, a mother who says no. The melodies bend in ways that Western ears hear as Ottoman and Turkish ears hear as Slavic. Both are right. The songs belong to the courtyard, the avlija, the space between the house and the street, between what is private and what is shared.

When my mother sang, the kitchen became that courtyard. I did not know the words, but I knew the room.

What longing keeps

People who leave a place often say they miss it. Sevdah suggests something more careful: that the missing is itself a way of keeping. You do not stop longing for Mostar or Višegrad because you cannot go back; you keep longing because the longing is where the city now lives.

I learned to sing one song, Kad ja pođoh na Bentbašu, badly, with a London accent my mother finds very funny. When I sing it, she corrects my vowels. Then she stops correcting and simply listens. That, I think, is sevdah too.