THE EXPERIENCE OF PAIN AND DEATH IN BOSNIAK ORAL POETRY
THE EXPERIENCE OF PAIN AND DEATH IN BOSNIAK ORAL POETRY

Summary/Abstract: Bosniak oral poetry, like that of other traditions, has treated almost every possible topic – joy and sorrow, fortune and misfortune, pain and wellbeing, love and hate, life and death, the family and all manner of relations within it, being born and growing up, dying and passing on to the next world, heroism and the overcoming of obstacles, facing oneself and others, and gender relations – leaving little new for written literature to offer. Still, written forms did appear and spread and came to dominate cultural space, finding reasons for their existence in the various ways in which they affect the readers’ awareness. When we juxtapose the oral and the written in this way and examine their effectiveness, we find that oral literature found its raison d’être in the need to put the world into language, to describe events and experiences in words, and to reproduce to the listener, while also producing.

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