From: Visar Zhiti (preface to the book My university years of Musine Kokalari)
Life broken into pieces of a poem:
IF I WERE A FLOWER
If I were a purple flower among the thorns
to stay hidden, unseen
and one day I was discovered by the hands of two young men.
out of fear
estranged from mankind would tear me apart
I would give myself to each other
as a token of remembrance.
...
Blooming red carnation
and water carefully...
one day to be placed in the collar of the coat.
I would also walk the streets of the city,
I would understand boyhood
and all would look at him and me;
that both were beautiful, they would say.
...
Finally let me be
at least one wild flower,
between the road and the stones
without the care of others.
One day I would be crushed by some human foot,
a man or a woman ... I know but there is nothing,
if I were a flower and not a man...
In these pieces of a poem by Musine Kokalari, as if all the pieces of her life, desires and premonitions are summed up, creed and reality, prophecy and future severity, prison and death, while delicacy and tragedy are juxtaposed there.
They are really the fragments of a poem, less than half of it, from the few heavy poems she left us, with that half life, where more than she sang, she seemed to be telling on the verge of a lament. And, they were written before a great joy, when she would go to study in Rome, in 1937. In this same year, the well-known poet of the Albanian youth, Migjeni, would go to Turin, but to die, without able to start studies. His themes, laconism, would appeal to Musine and he would follow in his footsteps to some extent.
Musineja was leaving its meager capital, Tirana, which had not been declared as such for many years in a homeland that had come out of a centuries-old captivity and had become independent. From a presidential republic, it suddenly turned into a monarchy without any uprising or coup, but the Albanian president Ahmet Zogu himself had passed to the King, Zogu I. Tirana had just begun to take on the appearance of a strange capital, as oriental in people as it is in people. and western in architecture, where there were women with fringes in the hotel salons and on the boulevard, the Middle Ages and bookstores, horses and cars, blood feuds and intellectual life, poverty and opposition, brilliant poets of a people with the greatest illiteracy in Europe. An Arch of Triumph was being erected in the main square. The friendship between the small royal Albania was increasing day by day with the fascist imperial Italy. If Italy landed in Albania, the king would flee and the Arc de Triomphe would collapse.
Musine Kokalari was born in Adale, Turkey on February 10, 1917, when the world would be shocked by Lenin's Bolshevik revolution. The newborn baby would suffer from this revolution, from his Balkan disciples. Her family returned to Albania in 1921 and settled in Gjirokastër, where Musineja attended primary school. Nine years later, the Kokalars moved to Tirana. In 1937, Musineja graduated from the "Queen Mother" high school and decided to go to study in Italy, in Rome, at the well-known "La Sapienza" University.
In the eternal city, in Rome
in The Eternal City, one of the most beautiful capitals in the world, if not the most beautiful, Musine Kokalarin was waiting for a new, modern life, with dreams and studies, with ancient times unfolding everywhere, talking with statues, walls and stones, where The Colosseum would perhaps resemble a mammoth crown, not fallen violently from the heavens, but as if it had emerged from the underground.
She wanted to be a writer. He had entered this dance, he was born to be like this. Her homeland was not known to have had a woman writer. Maybe, but as a princess in Romania of Albanian origin said, who was friends with the most prominent writers of 19th century Europe, Dora D'Istria or Elena Gjika, that Albanians do a lot, but write little. Even Musineja was beautiful like her, she wrote like her. Even more, write, write...
Musine Kokalari's poetry as it was, unlike other Albanian poets, neither with those of the old nor with the contemporaries, unlike with the ancient folklore. Sadness, unhappiness, no love songs, no ringing rhymes, no rhymes at all, rarely any interior, hoarse voice, that should have called once, not yet born, yes, yes, that caused in the soul: the call.
Misery probably reflected misery itself, as direct as the events on the street, even this is life, she says somewhere. Revolting, not only in content, but also in form, the verses lengthen, creeping closer to prose, bitterness, take on everyday speech, a disturbing liveliness, narratives that have terror and hunger.
Surprisingly, they do not resemble the author's past or present life, but her future. He had loved to be a flower among thorns...
Better prose then and there to unfold poetry. From the passion for folklore, rare words and proverbs, Musine Kokalari jumps to the short story, that's how As my old mother used to tell me and this is exactly the title she gave her first book, which attracted the attention of everyone in the country. A woman writer?! Even us?! There are in the world. Was the world turning upside down then... or was it getting better?
Meanwhile, Mussolini's Italy had invaded Albania. There had been gunfights in the coastal cities, even fallen ones, as the King fled the homeland and the pregnant queen held her newborn son in her arms. Parties and giving flowers to the Italian authorities would be prepared, but when King Viktor Emanuali would come to visit Tirana, the boy Vasil Laçi would be hanged in the middle of the square for daring to insult the king. The assassination failed, but not the death of the assassin.
Musine Kokalari in Rome is not quiet. She is writing the book My university life (1940-1942), facts and history, ethnography and meditation, that as it seems, as if the conquest also passes through her body as a woman, but she will not give up, she even stands much higher than the ambitious possessor. Studies and hospitals. Her little grandson is sick. Or Albania? Who will be operated on, who will be stabbed? Is it time or the poor, thin-boned baby?
Musineja hangs out with anti-fascist youth in Rome. Organizes cultural meetings with Albanian students; the clubs happened to be booked by Dane Zdrave, who had studied at the Naval Academy in Naples - he was also involved in business; would open the first cinema in his city, in Berat; he would drive the first combine harvesters, power plants, sponsor the weddings of his friends' daughters and open a fashion store in Tirana. To be freed through conquest. After the end of World War II he is arrested and he dies in prison. The communist officers who tortured him probably went down to the cell in the uniforms he had once bought for them.
Diploma with Naim, war and books...
The time came when Musine Kokalari had to defend her university degree at "La Sapienza". Which writer should she choose for her study? The great Dante? He was now the national poet of the Albanians. As the writer Ismail Kadare, fellow citizen of Musine, explains, Under the common crown, Italy was bringing as a dowry its first poet: Dante Alighierisystem. (The inevitable loss, p. 23, ed. "Onufri" 2005). What if he took Leopardi or from modern Italian poetry?
The Italian poets might indeed have become officially common, but temporarily anyway and remained of another language. Would it be better to ask for an Ethiopian poet, since they were part of the same country now? No and no. Only Naim Frashërin, the national poet of her country, who rebuilt the homeland during the Ottoman occupation. Naim's poetry lit up like a candle. His light trembled, but so did the terror of that light. The Italians saw it too.
His activity as an anti-fascist, started in Rome, continues in Tirana, he writes in anti-fascist newspapers and in 1943 he becomes the initiator of founding a social democratic party with prominent intellectuals such as Skënder Muço and Sorbonne professor Isuf Luzaj. He lives and works with the nationalist youth. She transforms her brothers' "Venus" bookstore into a cultural center.
The Second World War continued. The mountains of Albania fought against the fascist and Nazi invaders. At first together, nationalists, monarchists, communists, but the latter were coming out first and were leading the country to civil war. As in Spain, revenge for Spain.
Musine Kokalari was fighting with other weapons, with books. And, against the most severe rule - the ignorance which among women multiplied and became more threatening in silence. The Albanian woman was closed within the walls of a barbaric fanaticism. The Albanian Mona Lisa was wearing a headscarf. It had been 500 years since the farce had entered with the long night of conquest. The bare-headed girls, with their hair blowing in the wind, who, while dancing and singing, were thrown into the abyss in order not to fall into the hands of the conqueror, have now entered into legend. At the time when ancient Rome had emperors of Illyrian origin, on the opposite coast, the ancestors of the Albanians had a queen, Teuta, but she was completely forgotten, except her name was still given to girls, perhaps without knowing why.
Musine Kokalari was feeling like a writer. This mission had to be fulfilled in the best possible way. Too bad that this country had not had a woman writer, even though it was the 20th century. There should have been, they will have been forgotten ... disappeared ... as women run away when they are not loved ... Anonymous singers of nina-nanas yes, even wailers definitely yes. So when people were born and when they died. And those wonderful love songs that we put in folklore, who created them? There definitely had to be anonymous women poets. When our castles fell one by one and their stacks were crumpled by the flames, only the teeth were left. Women's mouths preserved their language, while men led them through wars everywhere in the Balkans, even further, beyond Europe, the deserts of Asia and Africa.
Musine Kokalari should talk about all of them.
In 1944 he published books Around the hearth and... Slife shakes. Enthusiasm all well-known Albanian writers, albanologists and researchers in Italy, in Germany, in the diaspora up to the USA. Now she is truly a writer, mature, with authority. The first...
Writes studies, collects folklore, publishes articles about Kosovo.
Her novel Aunt Nurije remains half. But, and her life. Within herself she felt the elegy, which she would never be allowed to write. But everything about her is poetry. It's a red carnation on a coat collar, as she used to say. So, torn…
When the Second World War was ending, when the Nazi invaders were being driven out and leaving the capital, the Germans were fleeing to the North and battles were taking place street by street, walls were collapsing, roofs were on fire and people were being killed, the victors, the partisans, were knocking on Musine's house. and by the order of Kokalare's cousin, the future dictator Enver Hoxha, they take two of her brothers, Mumtaz and Vesim, the third, Hamit, no, because he was very sick, with a fever, he was dying himself and there was no need to the lead was spent on it. Where did they take them? Or did they want them for some service or would they ask them for anything? That freedom begins with the book and those who dealt with books. It was a war, it was not known.
And, they would find them killed among many other bloody corpses, shredded by the volleys of the firing squads. The victors had gathered well-known intellectuals, journalists, who were not communists, but bourgeois, according to them, had locked them in the underground cellars of the hotel "Bristol" and carried out the massacre before the celebration of the liberation of the capital.
Blood had begun to flow, not because of the invaders now.
A martyred woman in front of the dictator – her fellow citizen
The first Albanian writer, a woman with a high consciousness of creation, is only 27 years old. The star. Her work would be full of living words, from those of the people, old, full depth, that the outstanding linguist, professor Eqrem Çabej, her fellow citizen and contemporary, would seriously deal with Albanian as a scientist and it would be researcher and etymologist with international authority. The local scenes and characters of Musine Kokalari's work, Gjirokastra e santica, would take on unprecedented growth and development in the novels translated all over the world by her fellow citizen, the world writer Ismail Kadare. That reality, that Oriental and Western life that was moving towards cultured Europe, that pluralism and money democracy that would be shaken by the Second World War, would be overturned and destroyed by the red ruler, the dictator Enver Hoxha , also this fellow citizen of Musine Kokalari. Their houses are not far between them, the windows look at each other, but people cannot look into each other's eyes.
The future dictator had traveled in Europe, in Italy, Belgium, France, etc., so he kept traveling, followed fashion, he was also enrolled in a university in Montpellier where he did not take any exams and never graduated and when he took power, he introduced in prison the Minister of Education, a poet himself, Mirash Ivanaj, among the most cultured in the Balkans who knew 11 languages, as revenge for not being able to complete school and hating him all his life. Not passive hatred, but with cruel actions, persecuting them regularly. Taking help of other intellectuals, from those who would denounce their colleagues and steal their works and would apply Albanian socialist realism by praising the dictator with poems and novels.
Four days after the murder of the brothers, they also arrest Musine and keep him in prison for 17 days. In the middle of the chaos, when the winners still don't know what to do, apart from shootings, occupying offices and opening prisons, when churches are also turned into prisons, Musineja acts, joins the intellectuals who create the "Democratic Coalition". She writes the program, notes are sent to the USA and England for the observation of the political elections of 1945.
Complete writer now, with authority. More than poetry, now it is the elegy that is beginning to be felt within her, more powerful than the marches of the victors. A year later, on January 23, 1946, Musine was arrested again.
They bring him to the military court with 36 other intellectuals.
The trials were held in the theater that the Italians had built during the occupation. On the stage, where any of Musine's works were to be played, the jury, the accused, the policemen were placed. Real actors of a real drama. Enver Hoxha himself happened to attend the trial in the lodge. Maybe he wore a monocle in his eyes like in the operas in Paris. On the loudspeakers that were placed outside on the street, the gathered people hear Musine's voice: I'm not guilty. I am not a communist and this cannot be called a fault... I am a student of Sami Frashër. With me you want to condemn the Renaissance.
Maybe Enver Hoxha remembered that his mother in Gjirokastër had asked Musina's mother for a daughter for her son, to marry them... Are they cousins?! Musineja absolutely did not want to. He was horrified by the cultural and moral change with him.
A letter from Musine's brother had fallen into Enver's hands, where he spoke badly, very badly about Enver, calling him cruel, mediocre, revengeful, vagabond, woe to the country if he comes to power...
Here he came!? She didn't want to be my wife, bitch, I will wipe out all the Kokalars from the face of the earth...
Meanwhile, someone called out in the courtroom that she, Musineja, should be sentenced to death on the rope. The president of the FN court said: Well, you heard what the people wanted? Musineja calmly answered him: Tomorrow the crowds will say the same about you.
He was sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment, as old as he was.
Colleagues of the dictator, his ministers, visited him in the cells of the Burrell prison and told him to apologize to Enver. The tortures began, from the most banal ones, to inserting a cat into the body to tear it with its nails, then a naked policeman in front of her... Musine fainted, but did not give up.
Her prophecy came out in poetry: It became a wild flower among the stones, not without the care of men, but under their violence. One day I would be crushed by some human foot, wrote Musineja, but he was trampled by the terrible boot of the dictatorship.
Hard years passed surrounded by barbed wire, within the immutable walls of the prison, the same stains and sorrows and corrosive hunger and the fatigue of the soul and the screams of policemen and guards. What about poetry? She is also in prison. We don't know if he secretly wrote poetry or kept notes, if they found it, confiscated it or burned it. But, Musineja tells something or others about her, a poetry of the eyes... When the prisoners came out to the square for airing or to wash, separated from the women prisoners, she met someone, loved him strongly like the impossibility, a dream came true and concern with the power of death...
After 16 years in prison, he was released in 1961, taking him to another type of punishment, exile, in the north in Rrëshen, from there in the mountains. Lonely. Again with police. And in heavy work, very heavy and for men. He worked in construction, with bricks, made mortar...
No one spoke to him. More than police, she was surrounded by spies who have filled the files with reports of where she walked after sunset, what book she got in the small town library, how she combed her hair, how she was dressed, simple but still beautiful , challenging ... what she said to her neighbor, to the ruined house in the mud. The next day, he sat on the bench in the flower garden alone, where no one greeted him. She wrote, dealt with folklore, but also a diary, about 1000 pages... One of her nephews, Platori, came to see her.
And, it is amazing how she gets to know a young writer, Bilal Xhaferri, also from the south, but deeper than her Gjirokastra: he came from Çameria. His father was shot by the party as a nationalist. Therefore, he was not allowed to study, to go to university. Worked in road paving, laborer. But he wrote excellent poems and stories. Musine was next to him. He became his spiritual patron, guided him. He started to publish, but it was banned. And, he escaped to the USA, but there the spies hidden in the diaspora made a hole for him. They hit him on the head with an iron and poisoned him in a hospital in Chicago.
Another miracle, in 1972 Musineja finished the manifesto book How the Social Democratic Party was born secretly. And, the dictator Enver Hoxha, with great fanfare as usual, adds the book to his publications When the Party was born, but in 1981. Meanwhile, in the chest of Musine Kokalari, the cancer has spread its metastases. They take him to the Tirana hospital; his nieces and nephews came to see him there, always secretly - characters in the book of Rome's memories. She herself became the hidden flower of her poetry. Through invisible tears, he remembered his dead mother, how they had given him permission from the exile to meet her once and how they didn't allow him. He could no longer come to the hospital in the capital either. Although there was so much need. Necessary. But enough. Let him die. They couldn't waste it on an enemy. It was orientation from the Party. The pains multiplied. Terrible. He leaves a gift for his grandson: Let's get rid of moral values as much as we can. Musine.
Through the suffering, which she endured without complaint, stoically, her heart stopped beating. Her neighbor blinked. The surrounding mud turned blacker.
The gravel car, without a funeral, with the poor coffin on it, sped away to the town cemetery. Two workers with picks and shovels quickly cover it. It was 1983.
Dictator Enver Hoxha dies two years later. Buses from all over Albania unloaded people throughout the week of national mourning; they came in long lines to pay homage to the corpse covered with wreaths and perfumes and men and women wept aloud. Poems flooded the newspapers about that...
If I were a flower and not a person
This is what Musineja wrote in her first poems, in the first half of the last century.
Today, when all the dictator's statues have been removed, they were dragged from the squares, broken and with their marble they became nude girls who were not allowed by him in the dictatorship, while I miss the beautiful, smiling Musineja, eternal student, she in court, who accuses and now, courageously, as marble plaques, memorials have been put up for her, not only in her homeland, her complete work has been published, she has been given the high title "Honour of the Nation" as the first woman writer in modern Albanian literature and as the first female dissident in the entire communist empire.
Her suffering, endurance and dignity over the general mud are the greatest poem. If I were a flower and not a man, she cried. Man wearied him in the struggle to remain human. All of us. To be free in a free homeland together with the world. But She wanted to be a flower. It is. Now She is the beautiful flower of man, of humanity.
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