You don’t need to go to Albania to read Ismail Kadare, but it helps
You don’t need to go to Albania to read Ismail Kadare, but it helps.
For, the world Kadare portrayed through allegory and myth revolved around the Balkans, more particularly Albania.
It is Communist Albania that he examines closely, interrogating contemporary society, expounding on history and culture and linking everything up to the country’s reality: more than 40 years under dictator Enver Hoxha.
In A Girl in Exile: Requiem for Linda B., which Kadare published in Albanian in 2009, the country’s capital Tirana is minutely detailed. It starts as it means to go on:
“Until he reached the end of Dibra Street, it seemed to him that he had succeeded in thinking of nothing at all. But when he found himself next to the Tirana Hotel on the north side of Skanderbeg Square, he felt a sense of urgency, even panic. Only this square lay between him and the Party Committee building”.
Again, in Chapter 3:
“He found himself on the main boulevard opposite the Dajti Hotel. Drinking coffee there among foreigners seemed even more unwise than ever. Don’t pretend life’s still the same, he told himself. It was Llukan Herri who had invented what their circle of close friends called the ‘Dajti test’. When you’re not sure you feel totally safe in your own skin, pass in front of the Dajti Hotel. If your feet hesitate even for an instant before entering, forget it. Admit that you’re no longer safe, to put it mildly”.
And so it goes, throughout the novel, whose plot is about the questions that arise when a young woman from a “bourgeois” family commits suicide. Her despair at life interned in a provincial town makes the relatively big-city vibe of Tirana seem a lot bigger.
In The Siege, Kadare recreates the central Albanian town of Kruje, or at least its 15th century version. The castle of Kruje was repeatedly attacked by the Ottomans until they were finally able to take control after their fourth siege in 1478.
And then there is The Traitor’s Niche. The novel, published in the 1970s, was translated into English less than a decade ago. It alternates between mighty Constantinople and crushed Albania, often referred to by the Turks as “that old troublemaker” or “truly a cursed country”.
For, it is the 1820s and the Ottomans are in control. Special traitors are given special treatment by order of the sultan — their heads are put on public display in “The Traitor’s Niche”, set in a wall in a Constantinople square.
Kadare writes: “Perhaps nowhere else could the eyes of passers-by so easily grasp the interdependency between the imposing solidity of the ancient square and the human heads that had dared to show it disrespect”. He also notes the elaborate rules and rituals for the proper transport, preservation and display of heads. Ice, salt and honey are used, and everything is written down, in impeccable bureaucratic fashion, in “Regulations for the Care of Heads”.
Eventually, Albania’s sporadic seditions cause the sultan to decide it must be stripped of its national identity. The job is led by the “Director of Caw-caw” or “The Big Raven”. The idea is to erase Albanian culture (including wedding rites) and to reduce the Albanian language to “Nonspeak”. Kadare describes how a language can be destroyed: “the ruin of grammar, the withering of particles, especially prefixes, and the coarsening of syntax” until the language thickens, stutters and dies.
If you’re actually in Albania while reading The Traitor’s Niche, it’s a relief to know that part at least was only in the novelist’s imagination.
As for the rest…well, for so many powerless peoples in so many places, Kadare’s Albanian stories continue to have great and dreadful resonance.
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
