Safeta Obhođaš

Safeta Obhođaš (* 1951 in Pale ) is a Bosnian writer. She has lived in Germany since 1992 and has emerged with works in Bosnian and German that deal with the problem of women between cultures.

Life

Safeta Obhođaš attended schools in her hometown and Sarajevo. Despite early marriage, she managed to study journalism at the University of Sarajevo, alongside raising two daughters and working as an office worker. 1979 appeared as a first work nine stories under the title The woman and the secret . In 1987 she received the Republic Prize of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the story contained therein, The Australian Finch . Radio plays and plays followed. Older works have been translated into German; Revenge and Illusion, a Bosnian banquet appeared in German. In 1997 she received a grant from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for the Stuttgart Writer's House , where she wrote the novel Scheherezade im Winterland . The result of Islamic-Christian encounters was the book Legends and Dust , which she wrote in 2002 together with the Christian Iraqi Sargon Boulos. After the end of the Bosnian War , Safeta Obhođaš undertook several reading trips to Bosnia. Her book, the novel The Belly Dancer , was published in 2006 in Bosnian.

Works

• The secret - the woman, stories, Melina-Verlag Ratingen 1996
  • Bosnian: Zena i tajna, Verlag Veselina Maslesa, Sarajevo 1987
• Hana, Roman, Melina-Verlag Ratingen 1995
• Revenge and illusion - a Bosnian feast, Melina-Verlag Ratingen 1997
• Scheherezade im Winterland, Roman, Melina-Verlag, Ratingen 1998
  • Bosnian: Seherzade u zemlji dugih zima, Verlag Bosanska rijec, Wuppertal 1999
• Legenden und Staub, a Morgenland-Abendland-Arabesque (with co-author Sargon Boulos) LIT-Verlag, Münster 2001, 2nd edition: 2007
  • Bosnian: Legenda i prasina, Verlag Bosanska rijec, Wuppertal / Tuzla 2001
• The belly dancer, Roman.
  • Bosnian: Trbusna plesacica, Verlag Bosanska rijec, Wuppertal / Tuzla 2006

The broadcasters of Sarajevo, Belgrade, Zagreb, Podgorica and Skopje have broadcast the following radio plays (1980 to 1992):

• The hot water , The witness , The little island , The little wing , The woman and the secret , The Balkan plague

Radio Zagreb broadcasted its radio play From the waiting room of the displaced in 2000 . In February 2007, the ORF broadcast her story The Friend .

Appreciation

Safeta Obhođaš was known in Bosnia in literary circles when she and her family fled the terror of "ethnic cleansing" to Germany in 1992 and lived in Wuppertal. Her works have been published in Bosnian and German. Growing up as a Muslim in a world dominated by politicians, she mainly describes the journey and experience of women in novels, radio plays and stories. She depicts their self-discovery and self-assertion in the area of ​​tension between religious tradition and modern life. Her topic is also that of women who have to create a distance between the role expectations of tradition and the socialist state system in order to advance to independent thinking and feeling, to moral autonomy . This leads to a drama of feelings, which is represented with the means of professional writing. The inability of the ethnic, religious and political groups of the former Yugoslavia to create peace among themselves is depicted in the fates of their characters.

Characterization of individual works

The Naza Jusufova's union leave (story from The Secret - the Woman )

Naza, a single mother of two children, works for starvation wages in the union kitchen and has to defend herself against sexual stalking of comrades. After her failed marriage, she struggles hard for self-respect. For a long time she does not want to get in her head that she was chosen for a union holiday on a Mediterranean island. On the island you will encounter a world that is incredible for you. Her children ask her for ice cream and melons, but her money is barely enough for her own cigarettes. An apparently wealthy bather observes them and buys the children ice cream, which points them in the wrong direction. A conflict arises out of this, told in the first person with enormous density and emotional intensity.

The Abyss (story from The Secret - The Woman )

Who is the greatest nationalist? An intellectual politician asks this question in a rehabilitation center for victims of accidents. Since too many respond to the topic, the order must be drawn. The Christian bus driver Sreten reports on his short marriage, which tore him and his "Turkish" wife from their respective families. He has laboriously raised German marks, which he needs, among other things, as a bribe to get the new bus that the municipality will buy. This is the only way he can improve professionally. But the heavily pregnant woman Maida takes advantage of his absence, takes the money and spends it on urgently needed baby items, curtains and household items. It comes to a catastrophe. He sums up that his ex-wife is the greatest nationalist.

Nana (novel)

Nana, who doesn't know her father and mother, first grows up with an uncle and is his pampered darling. She is fine. But when the uncle dies, she has to leave the house. A Beg (Turkish for higher-ranking person, a kind of mayor) takes them into his house. When she reaches marriage age, she is coupled to a half-deaf clumsy man, a man of strength with huge hands and two horses, with which he earns a living. He adores the beautiful young woman and submits to her will, but she finds him repulsive. The common home is a neglected hut. Hana applies all the skills she has learned to make her habitable, while she keeps her husband at bay for a long time and also humiliates him in other ways. Little by little, she learns who the woman is whose illegitimate child she was. In order to be able to get married despite this mistake (the father was perhaps a German Nazi), according to custom, her mother had to hide Hana and renounce her forever as her child. Hana also becomes the mother of twins. At a village festival she meets Halif, her crush again, and gets involved with him. The Balkan tragedy is entering its final stage. In the form of a framework narrative, the novel vividly describes how its characters are caught in the Muslim role expectations. The literary design tools include dialogues at different levels of language and internal monologues.

Scheherezade in Winterland (novel)

Nadira grows up in a narrow Bosnian Muslim milieu. The women of the family, with the exception of a modern and easy-going aunt, have no understanding of the girl's eagerness to read and write. At an advanced age, she fought for the freedom to submit a story to a competition. But when she actually wins first prize, it leads to unexpected conflicts in the home environment. Such an award could lead to the seriousness of writing, which is viewed as a mere quirk. And with a woman that is not in the intended realm of realization. In a dense network of relationships, Nadira has to learn to live with corrupt circumstances, to recognize lip service as such and to experience that the political thicket of relationships has an impact on families. Logically, Nadira gets caught in the undergrowth and, to her own detriment, fails to recognize people who are well-disposed towards her. Everywhere in the background there is also a threat of machinations that reveal themselves as preparations for war. A complex novel. The author knows how to create an inner tension through hints, assumptions, interruption of episodes, open questions in dialogues, interspersed thoughts of Nadira, which requires little external action. The individual episodes often lead the reader in unforeseen directions, expectations are not met. Here, too, the author has succeeded in expressing what one could not call the “small difference” in the way men and women think and feel.

Web links

• Literature by and about Safeta Obhođaš in the catalog of the German National Library
• Portrait of Christian Röther on Deutschlandfunk, June 28, 2016
• Safeta Obhođaš website