Assoc. Prof. Kata Kulavkova, Ph.D.
Department od General and Comparative Literatute
Faculty of Philology: "Sts. Cyril and Methodius" University
Skopje, Republic of Macedonia

FROM SIMPLIFICATION TO PARONOMASIA:
The Re-semantization of the Paradigm of the Turk in Macedonian Literature
(cont.)

The tragic love quadrant (Roland Barthes creates the following scheme of tragic love: A loves B, B does not love A but loves C...) is fashioned twice in different periods: first, about the end of the Ottoman empire (1887), second, in the interval between the flood and the earthquake in Skopje (1963). Black love is a phenomenon of love not responded to: Karatas-bej loves Gula, Gula loves Sokol, Sokol loves Jana, and Jana loves Karatas-bej... Within the novel love is oriented towards the wrong man/woman, at the wrong time, and the doubling enables the shift of emotions in the opposite direction, yet still with the same, more tragic metaphysical quality than with an aroma of melodramatically fatal love, cataclysm and death. The second quadrant is the ironization and parodization of the first love quadrant.

Karatas-bej, the nickname for Nazmi-efendi Anadol or Nazmi "the Friend," in both of cases is a representative of the authorities and the police, once a 'kajmakam' appointed to fight the 'ajduk'-s endangering the existence of the Turkish Empire, then as a UDBA (trans. note: ex-Yugoslavian secret police) commissioner, who is in charge of the order and the peace in the state. He is a 'walking dread' for the common people, has a 'sulky brow' (33), due to which he gains the nickname 'black stone'. Sokol is an 'ajduk', a synonym for freedom in "that world of slavery where we all, Christians and Turks, and us, the Gipsies" (56). Gula s a plain Gypsy, a housemaid, and Jana - a daughter of the rich tradesman Janickov. The Gypsy-girl's perception of the Macedonian and Turkish women is interesting: "The Christian and the Turkish women were under constant restraint of the family, as if convicts. Even though the Christian did not wear veils to cover their faces, like the Turkish women, they were under the incessant siege of the old women and under the obstinate guard of the male kinfolk (...) And we, the Gypsy women, we were free" (57). Only the Gypsy girls can oppose Karatas-bej, with a song, with a provoking gaze, tête-à-tête, "with a foolish fearlessness," ironically addressing him: "Your horse is very timid, warrior, if you are as heroic as him, I do not know who and how the Sultan will be defended" (60, 61). Out of this labyrinth of fatal passion only through the door of death one can escape, un-reconciled, diabolically, with a mutual execution of the characters... The inherited image of the Turk as a synonym of power persists even in the new social, political and cultural circumstances. History has been transformed in legend, legend in myth, myth in virtual reality...

In Slobodan Mickovic’s novel Change of Cod (1998) is completely concentrated on the re-animation of the image of the Turk in Sultan Mehmed IV’s period. The current of events is located in the distant 1670, in the village of Trojanec in Eastern Macedonia, a part of former Rumelia... Contemporary events simultaneously unfold, closely connected to the mass Muslim conversion of the Christian inhabitants, several months prior to the Sultan’s arrival in Trojanec. Both topoi, of conversion (change of religion and names) and Janissary, bring up, along with the historical, also genealogical, cultural and anthropological features of Macedonians: adaptability, conflict between obedience and resistance, between influences and autochthonity, disposition for intellectual dialogue...

The later altogether set within the context of a global world concept, from the aspect of its archetypal cyclical configuration. The issue of karasevda is revived (Djafer, previously Dime, and his fatal love for Trajanka, sister Magdalena) from the preceding novel History of Black Love, compounding a whole with this one (the author intercedes for the trilogy Double Age, composed of these two novels, and the third one Cannel, 1994.) Conversion (in this novel) is not (comprehended as) a result of a systematically organized and hierarchically controlled imperial project, but rather a consequence of particular segments of the authorities and their representatives, trespassing the borders of the necessary/legal, and entering a sphere of parceled anarchy of powerful individuals (Karatash). A scripture by Abbot Luka in a coded manner describes the arrival of Karadash-bej; "devilishly black rock sent by the devilish foe" (127). The fear of the tyrannical regime stimulates the gnomic discourse. The image of the Turk is balanced and harmonized by pointing out opponent characters: on one side, the character of Karatash (mercilessness, evil, cunning); the one of Mehmed IV (frantic strife for survival of the authorities, and indifference toward secondary issues); the one of Aslan-bej (temperance and tolerance toward non-Turkish population); as well as the character of Djafer (a Janissary in whom in a tragical to irrationality manner, the attachment to his own genesis resurrects)...¹

In the "Avanos" short story (1994) by Petre M. Andreevski (1936) the Turkish toponimoi Avanos and Kapadokia are thematized, with their subterranean churches and abodes from the period of early Christianity. The names of the two female characters suggest also etymologically retained Turkish traces: Guvezija Dubrovska and Sija Hadjibanova. The plot is situated in some inter-space, Kapadokia-Macedonia, and emanates the mystic symbolism of each search and attainment of longing for eternity: a peculiar potter in an even more peculiar cave from Avanos cuts off a lock of Guvezija's hair, promising her "eternity" in return. That deposit is equal to making a deposit of her own life and personality. She becomes doubled: a "new" Guvezija is born in the deserted and ghostly Avanos, the other is slowly dying, in Macedonia. When she returns to the place where, apart from her hair, her soul/life had remained, Guvezija encounters her own self--the same, yet different, other Guvezija: the first one is utterly unnecessary, a surplus inevitably evaporating. A little bit of life in exchange for plenty of shadow! Life and death have only to them known way of settling accounts, severely secret transactions! Avanos is merely a mysterious intersection wherein life and death for a moment gaze at each other's eyes, as is having something of importance to communicate! This awry look at the Turkish domain introduces not only the fictionalized, but the mystical description as well of the Turk in the contemporary Macedonian literature.

The invariable of Luan Starova's "father's library" (1941) symbolizes the intercultural and inter-subjective tradition of communication, migration, assimilation, trans-coding and tragic craving for one's own identity, as if a seal of the Primordial Principle, the archetypal structure which cannot be escaped, and Balkan nations, in each new epoch, in accord to the laws of metaphysical necessity, repeatedly are driven to. Writing realistically as memoirs about his father and mother (1992, 1995), the author (an implicit author and the narrator) emphasizes the father's attitude toward "new Turkey", his connections to Ataturk and to the new political vision of Turkish development. New Turkey in Starova's writing is a parabola of experience, erudition, tradition, matrial-origins.

Certain entrancing aspects of the Turkish character are brought to life in three stories by Atanas Vangelov (1946) which apperar in the daily newspaper Nova Makedonija's anthology of award-winning stories (Otvoren prozorec, 1994) - "The Petar Mandzukov's Shadow" (1 ed. 1988), "The Tale of Water Pump" (1990) and "Binocular" ("Dulbija", 1993), actualize certain imagological interesting aspects of the Turk. Each one of these short stories serves as a paradigm for the status of the Turk as a character in the contemporary Macedonian prose. A special attention is drawn by the short story "The Tale of the Water Pamp" which is focused on the three years stay of Abdulahman Pasha of Tetovo in the fortress of Bal-Tepe, located under the "cold and dark" Shara mountain and as well on "the day" of his return back to Stambol, at the Sultan's call. In the center of the story itself and of the narrator, whose speech is authoritative is the sad and indicative story of the "Lonely Water Pump" built by the everything, except in one: to make the water tap speak, to make its water run against its will, to break up the peace, to establish harmony between "the purpose and the aim". It is exactly this disharmony that gives a grotesque semantization/stylization of this short story and it announces the Pasha's intimated defeat and transcoding through him also the defeat of one regime of one period.

The paradox, the principle of each grotesque, is that at the very moment when the Pasha leaves for Stambol, the water tap pronounces the words: "I am coming pasha, but you are leaving" ("Sen geldin cesme, ben gittim"). One epigraph or a letter above the water tap is transferred into a parabola of the Christians' quite and natural longing and believe in freedom. The intertextually inserted text of this epigraph - letter introduces ambiguity in the meaning of the unique expression: the interpretation by the Turks is different from the one made by Macedonians. Even though the narrator wants to avoid giving final conclusions, he still faces the historical facts against the artifacts. This is illustrated by the last sentence of this short story: "No one, however, returns back anymore to Bal-Tepe from Stambol."

The short story "The Petar Mandzukov's Shadow" (1994, 131) suggests that the disappeared brother of Dervish-efendy - chief of the Skopje's secret police (at the beginning of the 20th century), recorded under the secret name Ignis Inevitabilis, is an eternal shadow, permanent, mysterious and unidentified company of the revolutionary terrorist and anarchist Petar Mandzukov. Untouchable for the Ottoman authorities in the region of Skopje and Bitola, this Turk is focalized in a postmodern and intertextual manner. The author uses historical matrices, oral and recorded quotations (simulated facts, speudo-quotations) of certain historical personalities (Pavel Shatev, Vojdan Cernodrinski, Solomon Simha). Under a double pretext of an "oriental mysticism" and historical memory, this character-shadow deviates radically from the stereotypical vision of the Turk, as a representative of the Ottoman authority and it coincides with the project of the Slavic (including the Macedonian) liberty movement. This shadow of a man appears suddenly in the Dervish efendy cabinet, immediately after his arrival in Stambol. He disappears again without any sign under mysterious circumstances. The consequence of this pregnant and grotesque reunion of the brothers is the death of the Dervish-efendy. Shortly after his death the Ottoman Empire disappears from the historical scene as well. The "Shadow of P. Mandzukov" marks the self-consciousness in the Turks related to the sterility of the Ottoman regime. Even though individually, they already communicate and correspond with the revolutionary projects of the non-Turkish population in the Ottoman Empire.

The oral matrix of game and outplaying, of humor and mockery, of irony and self-irony, as modes of auto-reflection and carnivalization of reality, is reproduced in the post-modernistic pastiche Jane Zadrogaz (1973) by the play-wrigh Goran Stefanovski (1952). Within the inter-textual meta-mimesis of this dramatic play, the idea of the Ottoman imperial model of tyranny and of the anthropological semantema of the Turk are amorphically suggested in the image of the Dragon and in the metastased impersonal character of the Queen. Within these two figures all modes of torture and the domination over the Macedonian nation of the past can be recognized, in an allusive form, among which the image of the Turk can be discerned. It is faded and deconstructed, while the vision of the supra-ethnical archetypal ruler and nation's enemy, rich with general points and mythical topics, is amplified and almost petrified within a dramatical function concluded from the stereotypical scheme of tales. This dramatical text ironically semantizes also a certain specific anthropological feature of the Macedonian - an inclination toward a particular "nonchalant forgetfulness" (Kulavkova, 1997) and towards forgiveness, perhaps a traditional gift for subliming tragedy into jest of humor. It is a grotesque yet effective mode of survival, catharsis, and transcendence of historical traumas.

The Turkish-Ottoman layer is one of the many imprinted in Macedonian memory, history, culture. language, tradition, spirituality... Each reference to the (relatively recent) past leads to the Ottoman Empire and to its culture which has left deep traces within the text of contemporary culture. It is simply an unavoidable, real inter-text, which is more or less visible in Macedonian contemporary literature and language. There are numerous, purely literary and spiritual reasons for re-evoking the signs of that inter-text. This is exactly what Macedonian contemporary writers are doing. The image of the Turk is poli-semantic: it suggests the idea of power against the skill of slavery and liberation from slavery, an association with another religion and language toward which, in time, neither Christianity nor the Macedonian language have been left completely isolated nor indifferent, and it includes the new myth of that which is someone else's yet ours, ours yet someone else's--the archetype of the mysterious and fateful, the praxis and culture of hybridization and dialogicity...

It gives us ground to conclude that the once-simplified image of the Turk is growing in deseminant complexity nowadays, in such a manner that literary-artistic works are produced, or more freely and figuratively put, their paronomastic meanings: signs close in phonetic composition, while independent in meaning, when textually adjacent, evoke the idea of proximity in meaning. Should we finish again with the allusion about the inseparability of form and substance, or physics and metaphysics?

Translation: Ana Pejcinova

1. The special attention need the Slobodan Mickovic novel To Kill Apostol (1994).

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© Katica Kulavkova, 2001-2007.
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