“Every passion or wicked thought”, wrote Ismail Kadare, “every affliction or crime, every rebellion or catastrophe necessarily casts its shadow before it, long before it manifests itself in real life.” First winner of the International Man Booker prize, Albania’s perennial not-quite-Nobel laureate, Kadare died on 1 July at the age of 88.
As sweltering Tirana empties for the summer – as the country gears up to look its best for the tourist trade that is its future – the national bard has obliged his people, perhaps for the last time, to look backwards and inwards. Interrupting their publicity stunts about how to welcome and police the international guests, politicians have issued worthy press releases; from sun-loungers and air-conditioned traffic jams, regular Albanians have reached for their smartphones to post a photo and a few respectful words.
Kadare has been the only Albanian writer to achieve any kind of international profile
The social media tributes are regardless of generation. And as a culture, Albanians still like to think themselves more intellectual rather than less. It’s hard to suggest an adequate equivalent for Kadare’s relative status, his untouchable pre-eminence in the public mind. The greatest of British, American or French authors have generally had comparable contemporaries. Sporting and music idols are not as known across generations; politicians are more divisive. Kadare has been the only Albanian writer to achieve any kind of international profile. Asking someone to name a famous Albanian is almost as challenging as famous Belgians, and an interesting cultural Rorschach test: Mother Teresa, Enver Hoxha, King Zog, Granit Xhaka, Dua Lipa – and Kadare.) The democratisation of writing and publishing in Albania and around the world, and the marginalisation of translation, make it unlikely such distinction will be seen again.
Kadare was given a state funeral and lying-in-state. Whether or not he wanted such ceremonial, he would have appreciated the ritualistic pomposity. The extreme strictures of Albania’s communist-era censorship made him a master of allegory, using Ottoman history to illuminate the twentieth century. The invocations of his talent and truth by (typically mediocre and mendacious) public figures trying to assert their cultural discernment would have seemed nicely ironic. (“Any resemblance to real persons or events is not entirely coincidental. The same events and the same people always have to happen and reappear, because there are very few of them and time is long.”) He would equally have appreciated the resonance of the news item just below the report of his funeral: a 63-year-old took poison and died in front of the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, finally overwhelmed by the despair of a sixteen-years-and-counting legal process. Kadare was the poet of the human trapped inside the machines of society and destiny.
Kadare was the poet of the human trapped inside the machines of society and destiny
The Facebook commemorations of Kadare have each attracted a percentage of jeers: “The most famous communist” was the third comment on my own. There have long been complaints that any subversiveness in his writing was feeble, that he conformed to the dictatorship and did quite well out of it, that his eventual renunciation and bid for asylum abroad came only when it was safe to speak out and safe to stay.
Those requiring neither hero nor traitor point instead to the reality of life in the most isolated regime in Europe. There was no model of bravely publishing the truth and damn the consequences; because the truth would simply not be published and the consequences would still be damning. A writer could renounce writing (as did the poet Poradeci) and be voluntarily silent; a writer could try to say the wrong thing and be forcibly silenced. Or a writer could be Kadare, determined to write – “The young artist”, he said, “is drawn towards his art as he is drawn towards sin” – and find a way to stay alive while producing novels that were individual, true, challenging and brilliant. Ask any Albanian today about the communist period and they will describe their frustrations, their revulsions, their burning inner dream of liberty. The reality is that everyone adapted, shut up, did what was necessary, made it work. One of the defining differences between Kosovo’s Albanians and Albania’s is that the former suffered under foreign oppression, while the latter’s oppressors were themselves. And by a thousand silences and conformities we stay alive. Surely no one who has not been forced to the extremities of survival is entitled to heckle.
After the regime collapsed in 1990-91, Albania plunged cold turkey into capitalism. Ignorance, greed and corruption enabled a flurry of pyramid/Ponzi schemes to collapse the state in 1997. Western diplomats rushed to endorse and praise anyone who claimed to be anti-communist, however cynical their conversion and however much they were stealing. Half a dozen old people received token prison sentences for their involvement in the dying phase of the dictatorship, and the rest of the country hurried to catch up with the twentieth century. Albania’s version of dealing with the past, its alternative to any serious truth and reconciliation process, has been a collective “least said, soonest mended”; notoriously, the former political prisoner may still bump into their former torturer on the street corner.
Today the game is European integration, and almost anything goes as long as it is couched in the terms, and ticks the boxes, of progress towards EU membership. Just so did British and American agents try and fail to provoke Albanian risings against communism around the beginning of the 1950s, and just so a few years earlier did they try and fail to provoke much resistance against the Germans.
A new government came to power in 2013, with New Labour consultants and blueprints and an unprecedented level of international and domestic goodwill. It has spent this on capturing every possible institution and on a rash of banal and skyline-busting building projects. Just as Rwanda – another regime that became an international darling for superficial commitment to stability and can-do economics but finds media freedom tiresome – agreed to host Britain’s asylum seekers, so Albania has signed a deal temporarily to shelter thousands of migrants to Italy.
The taxi driver, the café kvetcher and the conference activist complain that their politicians are all thieves – and they continue to vote for them, and in some cases to become them. Government is by factional or familial self-interest, and everyone else clings on and hopes that some of the bounty trickles down. Albania invented fake news: the slanderous hysteria with which its politicians denounce each other seems bizarre, until you see footage of the communist-era show trials. A prosecutor’s speech was not an evidenced assertion of truth but a melodramatic performance of acknowledged yet satisfactorily shocking lies. The aim was not to prove guilt but to validate hate. I spent seven years failing to inculcate supposed western European values and habits to Albania, and all the time the learning was flowing in the other direction.
By a studied narrowness of vision and lots of concrete, Albania strives to make itself a blank slate for foreigners drawn by the gorgeous coastline and Mediterranean climate – now a regular feature in the lists of this year’s hot/cool places to go. Inland there are communist curiosities, and beautiful Ottoman cities, and remarkably preserved classical sites, and beyond, the eternal glory of the Albanian highlands; but Albania’s businesspeople have studied Turkey’s package resorts rather than her monuments, and dream of the yacht-borne oligarchs cruising just up the coast in Montenegro and Croatia. These fantasy Russians and Arabs are as seductive a get-rich-quick scheme as the pyramid investments that exploded in 1997, and as the EU.
Albanians have endured centuries of diverse oppressions and disempowerments by keeping their heads down, by periodically rebooting and not restoring a back-up of memory. The trauma in society is deep, the old habits enduring. But historical truths – as Orwell pointed out in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which seems ever-more prescient now that the threat of communism has given way to fake news and unfettered capitalism – tend to become inconvenient. It is a fool who hangs on to them past their sell-by date, who looks back too intently.
The last verse of Kadare’s haunting Crystal runs:
I’ll lull you like this, perhaps, and kiss you
And never return to that setting;
And neither we nor anyone will know
Whether this was, or was not,
the forgetting.
Novelist and translator Robert Wilton has lived and worked in the Balkans for much of the past twenty years. He co-authored “No Man’s Lands: eight extraordinary women in Balkan history” with Elizabeth Gowing, and together they founded the Ideas Partnership charity supporting marginalised minority communities. His translations of the poetry of Ismail Kadare and much else are at robertwilton.com
