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Ismail Kadare and the Mythic Consciousness
Morelle Smith
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Morelle Smith 's essay is based on her encounter with Ismail Kadare in June last year at
his exiled home in Paris, France. It also describes her visit to his birthplace in Gjirokaster, Albania, shortly
before meeting him. This is a creative insight into Kadare the man and Kadare the dissident author: his philosophy
and his art.
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The town
of Gjirokaster, in southern Albania, is the birthplace of two of its most famous
sons--the Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha and the writer Ismail Kadare. Enver
Hoxha's former house is now a museum, a most stunningly beautiful building of
the Ottoman type, with polished wooden floors and ceilings, carved wooden patterns
around the stairs and on the ceilings and richly woven Albanian carpets in
traditional designs and mostly in colours of red, black and undyed white.
Ismail Kadare's house, described in loving detail in
his book Chronicle in Stone,
stands open to the elements, a roofless ruin.
Nothing could demonstrate more eloquently I felt, as I looked over the landscape
of the city of Gjirokaster, the difference in treatment between dictator and writer,
during the Communist regime. The physical landscape of the city seemed to be a mirror
reflection however, of the real, for Enver Hoxha's memory, as is the memory of his
hated regime, has been obliterated as much as possible from people's minds, while
Kadare is revered, not just in his own country, but world-wide, for his eloquent
and heartfelt, prose and poetry.
I'd travelled to Gjirokaster from Tirana, on a road that
bends and twists, sometimes coiling through valleys, at others, climbing in serpentine
loops over hills and winding down the other side, sometimes sidling up to rivers and
accompanying them, as if the road had followed a donkey path. It is beautiful, with
views of forests and mountains, but it takes about 5 hours. I spent a few days there
in May and it rained most of the time. Not showers, or light drizzling rain, but a
consistent, heavy downpour. The clouds moved along the valley between the two mountain
ranges, like water-bearing boats, and the rain poured steadily from them.
In Chronicle in Stone Kadare describes the city
of Gjirokaster as being like 'some prehistoric creature that was now clawing its way up
the mountainside.' The setting is certainly dramatic. The buildings are perched precariously
on a series of steep slopes, with a view down into the flat plain below, as if they were
the audience in an amphitheatre, gazing at the stage. These stone roofed houses of Ottoman
design lean out over narrow streets laid with thin cobbles, grey, yellow and pink, arranged
in patterns like marble mosaics.
Kadare was born in Gjirokaster in 1936 and remembers, as he
recounts in Chronicle in Stone,
| "Kadare's writing is full of the power of the mythic
consciousness, not just as some remembered stories from some distant era, but as it affects
us here and now in our lives, whenever that 'now' may happen to be" |
the Second World War, the dizzying changes in occupying
armies (they checked the flags every morning, to discover the current allegiance of their
city) and the corresponding changes in the nationalities of the aerial bombardments. He
attended secondary school in Gjirokaster, a building of Italian design, where today there
is a plaque on the wall, commemorating his attendance. He later studied at Tirana University
and the Gorky Institute in Moscow and became known in the West after his novel The General
of the Dead Army was translated into French. His output is prodigious and although his
work has been translated into many languages, only a few are available in English.
Kadare's writing is full of the power of the mythic
consciousness, not just as some remembered stories from some distant era, but as it affects
us here and now in our lives, whenever that 'now' may happen to be, whether in 1389 on the
plain of Kosovo, in the 15th century in northern Albania, or 21st century Tirana.
It has been said of the people of the Balkans that the past
is very present for them, there is not such a clear line of demarcation between them, and
so, that time is understood more mythological than chronologically. But this mythological
understanding or experience, of time, is also one that is shared by poets and other creative
people and could be said to reflect an awareness of the larger dimensions of reality. It is
quite astonishing then, that someone of Kadare's sensibility could have managed not only
to survive under a repressive communist regime, but to have also written and had published,
such great works of fiction that Kadare produced. As he said in his introduction to
Albanian Spring, 'The writer is the natural enemy of a dictatorship and fights
it at every moment, even when he thinks he is asleep. They are like two wild creatures
locked in combat. The writer submits to only one law, that of Art. In this way, he lives
in a sense, outside of time.'
His survival however, was not an easy one. More than once,
his writing was attacked under one pretext or another. In Communist Albania an attack on
your writing was tantamount to saying that you were critical of the government, potentially
a very dangerous position to be in.
I had no idea, when I looked down at the ruin of Kadere's
house, that a few weeks later I would meet the man who had lived there, and described the
house, the streets, the occupants and the bombardments and chaos of World War II, in
Chronicle in Stone. But, through a mutual friend, I acquired an invitation to visit
him in his apartment on the left bank, in Paris.
The massive wooden doors of the apartment block led into an
inner courtyard. When I closed the doors behind me, all the noise of the busy Paris Street
outside, was blocked off. A second door led to a huge wooden staircase, varnished, carpeted,
and thick with silence.
I rang the doorbell and Ismail Kadare opened it. I recognised
him instantly from photographs but I was surprised at his youthful appearance. It seemed
hardly credible that this was someone who had lived through World War II. We went through
the hallway to a large, elegant living room, with pale yellow sofas and armchairs, varnished
wooden floor and a patterned rug of rich dark colours.
When I asked him about
the importance to him of the Greek
myths, which figure in his writing, he says it is very important to know about the Greek
tragedies because the Greek myths, the Greek consciousness, 'that is the reality which
shapes our lives. This is true for everyone' he says, 'not just the peoples of the Balkans,'
though he admits that the past and the present are very close for the Balkan people and so
the past there is particularly alive.
We then talk about his book Albanian Spring (Printemps
Albanais). The book covers the events that took place in Albania, from the early months
of 1990 to the autumn of that year. It is as much a chronicle of Kadare's own path and part
in these events, with his intimate involvement with his own destiny as well as that of his
country, for he shows clearly how closely the two are intertwined. His love for his country
is as apparent as his pain at the decision to leave. He outlines the unfolding events that
have the resonance of the Greek tragedies with which he is so familiar. We feel Necessity,
the Fates, and the whispers of the Errinyes stalking the streets of Tirana.
These events include the brief 'spring' that gives the
book its title--a three week period in May of that year, where some democratic changes
were made and the possibility of freedom and respect for human rights hovered like a mirage.
That 'spring' was a direct product of Kadere's intervention, his speaking out against abuses
and violations of human rights and his championing of the cause of freedom.
The second part of the book contains a transcript of the
long letter he wrote to Ramiz Alia,
| "Back outside in the busy Paris street,
jammed with people and the noise of traffic, I feel as if I have come from some Olympian
heights where tranquillity and a profound moral authority reigns, into the chaos of the
modern marketplace of central Paris." |
the then President, as well as his reply. It outlines
Kadare's profound concerns, particularly about the violation of human rights, and cites
some examples of abuses suffered by individuals. These examples give us a glimpse of what
it must have been like for people living under such a regime, with its unpredictable attacks,
cruelties and penalties, when you had no recourse to any real justice. It was not a letter
to which he expected a reply, but when the reply did come, it was clear that the brief
'spring' was over. The mechanisms of dictatorship returned, like an addiction that it
could not break. Because of that, Kadare made his decision to leave, in the belief that,
by this action, and his absence, he could be more effective.
This book is necessary reading for anyone wishing to
understand what was happening in Albania during this vital period of change, from the
point of view of someone who was both influencing it and living through it, as well
as for an understanding of Kadere's own actions and decisions during this time. From
his description in Printemps Albanais, the decision to leave his country, which
he loved, was not taken lightly, on the contrary, it went against his deepest desires.
Far from being self-seeking, looking only to his own safety, it was more self-sacrificing,
believing that his absence could help his country more than his presence. It is interesting
to note that, shortly after he left Albania, the dictatorship did begin to crack and
eventually fall apart. Kadare told me that he was shortly leaving for Albania and that
he spent about 6 months of the year there.
When I leave, he walks back with me down the long carpeted
hall of his apartment. We stop in front of the door. At the end of the hall, there's a
framed black and white photograph on the wall. It's of an old Albanian man, his smiling
face creased and lined with age and life's experiences. It's a face vivid with life and
emotion, the eyes wide open and direct, gazing at you. On his head he is wearing a white
fez, typical of Albanians of the north, and he is smoking a cigarette. 'Taken during the
war', Kadare says, and stops and gazes at it with obvious affection.
Back outside in the busy Paris street, jammed with people
and the noise of traffic, I feel as if I have come from some Olympian heights where
tranquillity and a profound moral authority reigns, into the chaos of the modern marketplace
of central Paris. Yet some of the atmosphere has rubbed off and stayed with me, this peculiar
magic of a slight and quiet-spoken person who lives both within his own historical time and
that other time where myth guides our footsteps and our actions.
I remembered when I was in Gjirokaster, I went with my hosts
one evening up a twisting road even higher than the Ottoman fortress, visiting people living
in one of the oldest inhabited houses. When we came out, there was thunder and lightning,
illuminating the valley and the city, turning it into the essence of drama, with the eerie
greenish light and the loud thunder right over our heads, as we stood in the garden, high
up on top of the world it seemed, with a steep drop below into nothingness. We carefully
negotiated the steps curving round to the path that would lead us back to the track, our
way illuminated from time to time by the lightning flashes.
Gjirokaster is very close to the border with Greece, the
homeland of the gods, so it hardly then seems surprising that Jupiter, god of lightning
bolts, should perform with such drama and vigour--he was in his home territory after all.
Not surprising either, that living in such close proximity to the land of origin of these
timeless myths should have a profound influence on your psyche. Is this, I wondered, why
the Balkan peoples experience time as mythological? Is there energy in the land itself
that feeds them with a sense of timelessness as well as Everyday? The Greek myths are the
reality 'that have shaped and ordered all our lives' Kadare had said. On the mountain top
at Gjirokaster, walking carefully down dark stone steps slippery with rain, the lightning
throwing its shadowless glare over the heavy roofed house, the tangled foliage and the
garden ending over a precipice, I had no doubt that it was true.
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2004-2006 the Dublin Quarterly--to see familiar things with unfamiliar eyes!
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