SONGS ABOUT A DISGUISED GIRL IN BOSNIAK ORAL TRADITION

Abstract

We encounter songs about a disguised girl in our oral tradition throughout the history of its recording – from Erlangen Manuscript, over Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic's collection, to the collections made in the second half of the twentieth century. In those songs a girl disguises as a man in most cases to replace her aged father in a battle. She fights and lives a life of a warrior side by side with men, but manages to keep her female identity hidden from male comrades, going wisely and skillfully through all ordeals by which they try to uncover her. In the end she reveals her identity in order to mock them and escape as a winner. The paper presents such songs included in the collection by Alija Nametak Od bešike do motike. Narodne lirske i pripovijedne pjesme bosansko-hercegovačkih Muslimana published in 1970. In addition to comparing them with songs from other collections we will discuss a literary-theoretical determination of these songs. We will also point to the picture of male-female relationships in them, which differs from the well-known stereotypes present in our oral literature and our folk tradition in general.