“We are so filled with feeling, even the gods must relent.” (Angela Sucich on Sevdah)
Angela Sucich is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal Opus II, Issue II: Sevdah. She holds a PhD in Medieval Literature. Her poetry chapbook Illuminated Creatures (Finishing Line Press, 2023) won the 2022 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition and other recognitions. She was honorably mentioned for the Pablo Neruda Prize in 2021 and the Francine Ringold Award in 2020. Her work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, and Whale Road Review, and in the anthologies From the Waist Down: the Body in Healthcare (Papeachu Press, 2022) and Rooted2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction (Outpost19, 2023).
We asked three of our Opus II, Issue II contributors for their personal definitions of sevdah: how it’s formed, where it’s been, what it could be. Here is Angela Sucich’s vision of a damask veil, a clipped swan’s wing, a memory of a late-night lake with a long-gone lover, when the sky and water turned the same colour and met at the edge of the world…
While researching the Greco-Roman myth of Psyche and Cupid to write “Psyche Before the Mirror” for Half Mystic Journal’s twelfth issue, I had a vague sense of the voice and rhythm, the mood and music, that I wanted. When I began to listen to sevdah’s melodies, I felt the soul-ache I was after.
Originally sung by women, performed with voices alone, sevdah music in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian tradition later came to include male voices and to feature accordions and violins, sometimes the flute. Ethnomusicologist Zanin Berbić defines sevdah as the “state of the soul.” Bosnian musician Damir Imamovic describes its history as arising from Eastern and Western influences: Slavic melodies, music from the Ottoman Empire’s time ruling Bosnia, European instruments at the end of the 19th century. The genre rose in popularity after the Bosnian War, when expressing intense nostalgia for what was lost became a cultural imperative.
Perhaps that backward gaze is what draws us to myth. The Greco-Roman story of Psyche and Eros (Cupid) appears in Greek art as early as the 4th century B.C.E., but is best known in Roman writer Lucius Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, also referred to as The Golden Ass (2nd century C.E.). My poem follows that narrative.
In Apuleius’ version of the myth, human princess Psyche is given in marriage to Cupid, the god of love, but is not allowed to know his identity. Her sisters’ jealous machinations and her own curiosity compel her to light an oil lamp at night to see her sleeping husband’s face. In doing so, she loses him—the betrayal of his trust and the dripping oil from her lamp scalding him. He flies to his mother, Venus (Aphrodite), who, angered by his unsanctioned marriage to a mortal, assigns Psyche impossible tasks, forcing her even to the depths of the Underworld to win back her beloved. On her way to complete the final task—delivering a portion of beauty obtained from the Underworld’s queen, Proserpina (Persephone)—she opens the box and falls into a deep sleep from which a healed, and perhaps contrite, Cupid awakens her.
It is not inconceivable that parts of the myth were sung long ago in the manner of Homeric epics, set to the lyre. But Psyche’s story has more than music to connect it to sevdah. Its themes of love, suffering, and sacrifice also create a bridge across cultures and centuries. There’s even an etymological link: an Ottoman Turkish word for love, sevda can be traced back to the Arabic “sawda,” meaning melancholy, or black bile. The latter term was central to the ancient humoral system of medicine developed by the Greek physician Hippocrates. As one of the four humors of the body, black bile corresponded to the element of earth in a system that described a person’s temperament and state of health. Over the centuries, black bile grew to be associated with sadness, depression, lovesickness—even the suffering of artists.
I imagine ancient Greek physicians might have diagnosed Psyche with melancholy. Her story is one of passionate love with the most beautiful of the gods; their marriage is the union of human and divine. Sevdah, a music of body and soul, the quintessence of love and melancholy, could easily be the soundtrack to the myth. My own “Psyche Before the Mirror” is a persona piece told from the perspective of Psyche. It is her passion and anguish that drive the poem’s moment of reflection, a song that longs as much for herself as for her lover. I wanted to invoke, or at least intimate, the world of sevdah: the strum and pluck of nylon strings, the wail of the flute, the rich vibrato and microtonal intervals of the saz. I sought sevdah’s fluttering melodies as Muse and musical force giving shape to my poem. Fittingly, in Ancient Greek, “psyche” (ψυχή) is the word for “soul.”
The primary Greek instruments were the human voice—that instrument common to all cultures—along with the lyre, the double flute (aulos), and the pan flute (syrinx), all of which carried over into ancient Rome. In Apuleius’ story, disembodied singing voices and the sound of an invisible lyre are wonders to Psyche, the melodies of performers that neither she nor her sisters are allowed to see, just as Psyche can’t see her husband. Later, those mysterious performers become hers to command:
She ordered a lyre to play, it sounded; flutes to pipe, they trilled; choirs to perform, and voices swelled. Those sounds with no visible musicians caressed the listeners’ souls with the sweetest of melodies. (Book V: 14-21)
After Cupid abandons her, Psyche’s suffering begins, eased to some degree by an instrument that comes to her aid. A reed blown by the breeze, fearing that Psyche might sink into despair and harm herself, tells her how to find a golden wool clinging to bent branches, to complete one of Venus’ arduous tasks. Creatures both natural and divine (a squadron of ants; the goat god Pan; Jupiter’s eagle) assist Psyche on her journey into the Underworld. It is no coincidence that she encounters in her wanderings Pan, who recognizes her melancholic state, telling her that;
by your weak and wandering footsteps, your deathly pale complexion, your constant sighs and those sad eyes, you are suffering from love’s extremes. But listen to what I say, don’t try to find death again by a suicidal leap or in some other way. Cease your mourning, end this sorrow. (Book VI: 23-24)
Pan brings his own myth of song and longing. As told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pan falls in love with the nymph Syrinx, who, with her sisters’ aid, escapes him by transforming into marsh reeds in his embrace:
and while he sighed the moving winds began
to utter plaintive music in the reeds,
so sweet and voice like (ll. 704-706)
In Ovid’s poem, Pan’s unrequited love becomes an origin story for the pan flute, in which joined reeds of different lengths are given the nymph’s name, syrinx.
In Apuleius’ telling, music lends Psyche support or agency, reward or consolation. Her desperate desire for Cupid and her despondency after his flight evokes sevdah, the human condition humming like a sad organ across a mythopoetic soundscape. In the Roman myth, music haunts as a reed instrument does, alerting us to key moments of narrative transformation—for she does not end herself as her allies fear. Instead, with their help, her longing pulls and pushes Psyche through her trials.
Both the songs in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian tradition and the ancient myth set against them stretch the soul into a different shape, expressing deep love for what was and what might be. In such a manner, art reflects back, like a mirror, our fears and desires. It shows us how we too have been transformed. For if sevdah haunts us with the love that’s left after losing, it also demonstrates that we may be so lost from beauty, so broken by grief, and yet so filled with feeling (for life, for the beloved, for the self), even the gods must relent. Jove gives Psyche a cup of ambrosia. Apollo sings to the lyre, Venus dances, a Satyr pipes. The gods not only bring Psyche back to life in the face of her world-shifting love, they also offer her divinity.
Angela Sucich’s “Psyche Before the Mirror” is featured alongside twenty other pieces in Half Mystic Journal Opus II, Issue II: Sevdah, a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, and prose dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. In the mythic yawn between absence and presence, Opus II, Issue II wanders an empty airport terminal like centre stage. Tenderness blossoms fragile and fragrant here, coiled around the thorn of desire. The sevdah issue breathes at once as song and spell: a vow made in a past world, a memory yet to be lived, chords drinking down silence and lingering long after the ghosts have gone. Preorder your copy today.