От „Когато ми отнеха името“ до „Керван за гарвани“ и „Лавандулово момче“: поетики на травмата и на паметта
From “When They Took Away My Name” to “A Caravan for Crows” and “The Lavender Boy”: Poetics of Trauma and Memory

Author(s): Marie Vrinat-Nikolov
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Bulgarian Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Софийски университет »Св. Климент Охридски«
Keywords: Revival Process; The Great Excursion; memory; When They Took Away My Name; Caravan for Crows; The Lavender Boy
Summary/Abstract: The Bulgarian literary space has a rich geo-history, which inscribes it as a place where different cultures and imaginaries – Ottoman and Muslim, Slavic and Christian – intertwine, as do different languages: in it have circulated texts written not only in Old Slavic, Church Slavonic and Bulgarian, but also in Hebrew, Ladino, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Ottoman-Turkish, Turkish, Greek and others. This diversity and the resulting dynamics and tensions were suppressed with the establishment of the nation state in 1878 and during the various nationalist waves common to the other Balkan countries, whose aim was always to erase and even eradicate the Ottoman legacy. This pattern of obliteration culminated in the period 1985–1989, which was marked by the so-called “Revival Process” and “The Great Excursion” that led hundreds of thousands of Turks to flee to Turkey. The present paper examines how the literature written by Bulgarian-Turkish writers recreates those traumatic episodes, specifically in the collection When They Took Away My Name, published in 2015, which gives voice to the generation of trauma. It is also interesting to trace how Emine Sadka and Burhan Kerim, representatives of the next generation, inscribe the memory of these traumas in their novels Caravan for Crows and The Lavender Boy, published in 2022. Also how, in doing so, they return Bulgarian literature to its lost cultural and imaginary multiplicity.

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