Poetry and Dramatic Work of Alija Nametak

Abstract

In the Bosnian-Herzegovinian literary field, Alija Nametak established himself as a storyteller and novelist, but not as a poet and playwright. In this paper, for the first time, the poetic and stylistic-formational features of Nametak's poetry published from 1925 to 1932 in the magazines Jugoslovenska njiva, Književnik and Novi Behar are fully presented. His youthful poetry, stratified into an intimate and social thematic-motive register, flirts with contemporary modernist and avant-garde poetic tendencies, which we find in the poetry of Muse Ćazim Ćatić and Hamza Huma. The second part of the paper deals with his dramatic work: from historical drama (Narodna vlada), to comedy (Omer za naćvama and Abdullah-paša u kasabi), all the way to the holy-historical legend (Jusuf and Zulejha). Except for the last play, which remained in the manuscript legacy, in all the others there is a critical attitude towards certain social deviations. While in the drama Narodna vlada Nametak develops a patriotic discourse as a form of anti-colonial resistance, in the comedies Omer za naćvama and Abdullah Paša u kasabi, in the spirit of folk and palanquin carnival culture, he undermines primitivism and stereotyped roles in society. In the drama Jusuf and Zulejha staged the Qur’anic-Biblical historical story about Yusuf a.s. (Joseph.) As a folklorist, Nametak introduced various elements from folk life and customs into the drama, not only to create a context for shaping the character of his characters but also to use their potential for popular, carnival, and subversive distortion of established social and cultural norms and patterns. The poetry and drama of Alija Nametka, in a literary-historical sense, are significant because they reveal this writer to us as the protagonist of a multiple literary identity – it is a kind of identity of resistance which, apart from the already established religious and ethnic one, is realized in the social and feminist dimension as well.