Mesa Selimovic

Mehmed "Meša" Selimović (Мехмед „Меша” Селимовић; ; 26 April 1910 – 11 July 1982) was a Yugoslav writer, whose novel Death and the Dervish is one of the most important literary works in post-World War II Yugoslavia.

Some of the main themes in his works are the relations between individuality and authority, life and death, and other existential problems.

Selimović was born to a prominent Bosnian Muslim family of Serbian descent on 26 April 1910 in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he graduated from elementary school and high school.

In 1930, he enrolled to study the Serbo-Croatian language and literature at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology and graduated in 1934.

His lecturers included Bogdan Popović, Pavle Popović, Vladimir Ćorović, Veselin Čajkanović, Aleksandar Belić and Stjepan Kuljbakin.

In 1936, he returned to Tuzla to teach in the gymnasium that today bears his name.

At that time he participated in the Soko athletic organisation.

He spent the first two years of the Second World War in Tuzla, until he was arrested for participation in the Partisan anti-fascist resistance movement in 1943.

After his release, he moved to liberated territory, became a member of Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the political commissar of the Tuzla Detachment of the Partisans.

During the war, Selimović's brother, also a communist, was executed by partisans' firing squad for alleged theft, without trial; Selimović's letter in defense of the brother was to no avail.

That episode apparently affected Meša's later contemplative introduction to Death and the Dervish, where the main protagonist Ahmed Nurudin fails to rescue his imprisoned brother.

After the war, he briefly resided in Belgrade, and in 1947 he moved to Sarajevo, where he was the professor of High School of Pedagogy and Faculty of Philology, art director of Bosna Film, chief of the drama section of the National Theater, and chief editor of the publishing house Svjetlost.

His first short story (Pjesma u oluji / A song in the storm) was published in 1948, when he was thirty-six.

His first book, a collection of short stories Prva četa (The First Company) was published in 1950 when he was forty.

His subsequent work, Tišine (Silences) was published eleven years later in 1961.

The following books Tuđa zemlja (Foreign land, 1962) and Magla i mjesečina (Mist and Moonlight, 1965) did not receive widespread recognition either.

However, his novel Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt, 1966) was widely received as a masterpiece.

Exasperated by a latent conflict with several local politicians and intellectuals, in 1971 he moved to Belgrade, where he lived until his death in 1982.

Selimović researched the roots of his family and found out that he originated from the Drobnjaci tribe.

Most members of the tribe consider themselves to be Serbs, while some are Montenegrins.

It is claimed that a part of the family converted to Islam in order to protect their Christian brethren.

In his 1976 letter to the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, Selimović stated for the historical record that he regarded himself as a Serb and belonging to the corpus of Serbian literature.

Selimović was a full member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

In his autobiographical narration, Sjećanja, which Selimović complements with a memoir features thus transforming them into memoir prose, Selimović describes environment and milieu of his Bosnian Muslim origin.

He is using discursive self-perception, and confronts and auto-reflect his identity as a complex and composite.

Since perception of national belonging is distinctly subjective and simplistic, auto-perceptions are considered discursive creations, representamen, where memoirs overlap with socio-historical context.

In doing so, and through lens of imagology, his autobiographical discourse becomes textual construct, or an imaginary discourse.

Selimović's imaginarium turns his cultural self-reflection of his Bosnian Muslim identity into oddity, but he also describes it as a complex.

His memories author then transpose on entire group, with a series of images.

Through the rhetoric of the image, Selimović confirms the cultural differences of Bosnian Muslims, and in that sense, his autobiographical narrative representamen confirms and strengthens the cultural and collective ethnic identity of Muslims.

Selimović clearly define himself by stating, "I am a Muslim", and, "I am attached to my Bosnian and Muslim origins".

On the other hand, when Selimović brought forward the information about his Christian origin, some Bosnian Muslim critics attacked him, claiming that "they also knew about their origin", and asking him what is to be achieved with publicly expressing such information.

Critics consider this to be a rationalization of his choice to seek recognition as writer belonging to Serbian literary circle, by claiming that his paternal heritage was that of Orthodox Christian identity, alleging a conversion to Islam back in the 17th century for pragmatic reasons.

The chapter Parents in his Sjećanje provoked reaction and criticism in his native country, and will be deemed a "constructed phantasm", or imaginary discourse.

Critics contemplated about the reasons for this, as they called, "falsification of one's own family heritage", explaining it as a "vengeful act of defiance", and stating that Selimović's main conflicts trace back to his Muslim roots and his expression of disappointment in Bosnian environment and Bosnian Muslim milieu.

He was a communist and atheist.

According to his grandson Nikola, Selimović considered himself to be a Serbian writer of Muslim origin.

He claimed that his mother received threats from Sarajevo-based organizations because "he (his grandson) did not have a Muslim name", which was the kind of situations which led Selimović to leave Sarajevo and settle in Belgrade in the first place.

Selimović began writing fairly late in his life.

The plot of the novel takes place in 18th-century Sarajevo under Ottoman rule, and reflects Selimović's own torment of the execution of his brother; the story speaks of the futility of one man's resistance against a repressive system, and the change that takes place within that man after he becomes a part of that very system.