Published: 2020-12-30

The tree, the shrub, the blood. Figures of genealogy in the works of Mehmet and Hasan Karahüseyinov

Sylwia Siedlecka
Zeszyty Łużyckie
Section: Articles
DOI https://doi.org/10.32798/zl.722

Abstract

This paper examines the works of poets belonging to two generations of the Turk- ish minority in communist Bulgaria: Hasan and Mehmet Karahüseyinov, in view of Michel Foucault’s theory of genealogy. The context of their poetry is the events of the so-called “Revival Process” – the mass changing of names in the Muslim minority in Bulgaria. A communist politician and, at the same time, a talented poet, Hasan Karahüseyinov (1925–1990) supported Todor Zhivkov’s policy of assimilation of the Muslim minority and voluntarily adopted a new name of Asen Sevarski. Mehmet Karahüseyinov (1945–1990), Hasan’s son, attempted self-immolation in 1985 in protest against the changing of names. The imagination of both poets, embedded in the Bulgarian cultural imaginary, use a similar assortment of forms, but fill them with different meanings. A key figure in both genealogical projects is the tree as an anthropological pre-image. In the father’s poetry, images that naturalize the vision of the Bulgarian past and the current assimilation policy are prevalent, and history is naturalized through a sequence of organic metaphors focused around the theme of “revival” of the nation. The son’s poetry, on the other hand, historicizes nature – the biological, including the body which is marked by history, becomes unstable, while the cultural, stored in the fabric of language, becomes all the more important in the face of nature’s ambiguity.

Keywords:

Turkish minority, Bulgaria, communism, revival process in Bulgaria (Process of Rebirth), Karahüseyinov

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Siedlecka, S. (2020). The tree, the shrub, the blood. Figures of genealogy in the works of Mehmet and Hasan Karahüseyinov. Zeszyty Łużyckie, 54, 81–96. https://doi.org/10.32798/zl.722

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