“Memory and music are as inseparable as they are elusive.” (Natalie Marino on Sevdah)
Natalie Marino is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal Opus II, Issue II: Sevdah. A poet and practicing physician, her work appears in Heavy Feather Review, Pleiades, Rust & Moth, Salt Hill, wildness and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She lives in California. You can find her at her website or Instagram.
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 Natalie Marino’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…
The word sevdah refers to folk music in Bosnia and Herzegovina that usually has a slow tempo and intense melody. With themes of love, loss and longing, it is often characterized as melancholic. Closely related are the Turkish sevda, meaning love, and the Arabic sawda, meaning black bile. Before the discovery of microbiology in the 17th century, physicians understood disease as being caused by an imbalance of the four humors—as the Greek physician Hippocrates famously said, “The body of man has in itself blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile; these make up the nature of his body, and through these he feels pain or enjoys health.” An excess of black bile was thought to be responsible for a melancholic nature.
Melancholy and despair have long recurred in poetry. John Keats’s “Ode to Melancholy” admits the ubiquity of despair, but also argues that the world’s beauty can be a salve:
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose
Towards the end of the poem, Keats admits that “beauty must die”—melancholy exists because of every living thing’s impermanence.
In his remarkable short poem “Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba,” James Joyce evokes the melancholy of time passing:
I heard their young hearts crying
Loveward above the glancing oar
And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
No more, return no more!O hearts, O sighing grasses,
Vainly your love blown bannerets mourn!
No more will the wild wind that passes
Return, no more return.
To be young is fleeting. Love and life pass like the ungraspable wind, never to return again.
Lucille Clifton’s poem “oh antic God” describes grief at the loss of a mother figure:
I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.
The speaker regrets not remembering the sound of her mother’s voice. Memory and music are as inseparable as they are elusive.
In my poem “hell is a nursing home’s eggshell walls” in Half Mystic Journal Opus II, Issue II: Sevdah, I wanted to combine the musicality and melancholy of the inevitable loss of youth, while also showing the capacity for joy as we experience lust and love in the present moment. As a practicing physician, I am an almost daily witness to life’s brevity. In caring for the sick and dying, I have developed an intimate knowledge of death as undignified, particularly when the end is slow and withering rather than sudden. I wanted to convey this knowledge in my poem, while also showing an urgent need as a middle-aged woman to experience the intensity of sensation that is possible in the here and now.
Natalie Marino’s “hell is a nursing home’s eggshell walls” 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.