The Labyrinth of Genealogy: Poetry of Mehmet Karahüseyinov (1980-1990)
The Labyrinth of Genealogy: Poetry of Mehmet Karahüseyinov (1980-1990)

Summary/Abstract: The article analyzes poems written by Mehmet Karahüseyinov (1945-1990) in the context of socio-political phenomena in Bulgaria of the 19980s and 1990s. In Karahüseyinov’s poetry, echoes are found of both the “Revival Process” and the “Big Excursion”, as well as of the fall of communism in Bulgaria as a point in history. Autobiographical perspective is of equal importance in the poems: in 1985, in the wake of the last stage of the “Revival Process”, the poet attempted self-immolation. This liminal experience, set in a wider context of what it means to be a representative of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria in the late socialist period, permeates all of Karahüseyinov’s poetry at the time. The article’s methodological axis is a genealogical approach as formulated by Michel Foucault, who, informed by Nietzsche’s thought, wrote of an image of the body utterly marked by history. The body is thus an area which – also in the non-figurative, material dimension – enters the gears of history and where history leaves its marks, and the scarred bodily area becomes a map of a personal and entangled genealogy.

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