As a boy in a hermetically sealed communist Albania, Gazmend Kapllani grew up in a house with two bookcases. One was a “showcase library” for display, primarily containing works by political icons Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Albanian party leaders. (Three entire shelves were devoted to 80 books by the enigmatic leader of the Balkan nation, Enver Hoxha.) In his parents’ bedroom there was a second bookcase, hidden in two black suitcases. They were “cursed books,” banned by a totalitarian regime so isolated and repressive that Kapllani called it “the North Korea of Europe.”
The same childhood home in Lushnjë had two branches. One of them was on the roof, for the show, oriented to receive official broadcasts from state television. The second, hidden inside, was designed to pick up signals from banned foreign stations. Among these was Italian public radio, to which Kapllani credits the inspiration for his literary education – a consequence of his learning, on the sly, Italian and French.
“I learned foreign languages in order to capture images of this world beyond borders,” said Kapllani, now a novelist and the Rita E. Hauser Fellow at Radcliffe.
During the Iron Curtain era in Albania, the border was a formidable double line: one to demarcate the national border and another to enclose restricted villages, uncomfortably close to freer nations. As a child, Kapllani took a school trip that at night brought him within sight of the twinkling lights of the West. (The story, and its wonder, is told in his 2009 book “A short manual on borders“, which, according to him, is an interweaving of memories, fiction and testimonies that he collected as a journalist, his original profession.)
“I grew up in a small country with a completely closed border,” Kapllani said. “You couldn’t even get close to the border, and you were in grave danger if you even talked about borders. » At age 11, “this terror I started to feel on my skin,” he said. “You understood that the people who ruled your country are violent; they are paranoid. The whole country was like a prison. As a teenager, Kapllani had to undergo two weeks of military training a year, during which young Albanians had to prepare to face hordes of invaders. “You look around,” Kapllani said, remembering that time. “You don’t see any enemies. They are imaginary enemies.
A brief glimpse of this invasion paranoia appears in “A Short Border Handbook,” when the Hoxha regime builds hundreds of bunkers along the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. They remain empty and young lovers soon take advantage of them for romantic dates.
There is a current example of the same intense isolation, terror and paranoia, he said: North Korea, which clings to a national vision of apocalyptic war and omnipresent enemies, a cultural narrative that reason cannot penetrate. “The regimes of these countries cannot live in peace with the world,” he said of the Albania of his childhood and the North Korea of today. “For them, peace means the end of their world. »
Kapllani said his childhood gifted him with his three literary obsessions: borders, books and the Balkans. The latter, he says, is a fractured region that not long ago contained both the physical terrors of totalitarian regimes and the dreamlike proximity of nations representing freedom.
Sound clips: Gazmend Kapllani || Extreme tales
Listen to Gazmend Kapllani discuss the parallel lives of Albanian communist dictator Enver Hoxha and Albania’s first female writer, Musine Kokalari, imprisoned by the dictator’s regime.
“We are all survivors,” he said of those who grew up in places where state-sponsored violence was common. But his upbringing also gave him, paradoxically, a feeling of love, affection and belonging. His father was a surveyor and his mother was a teacher “who taught everything”. Both belonged to the Bektashi Order, a Sufi-inspired branch of Islam famous for its tolerance. They raised him in a home full of warmth and attention.
And Lushnjë itself, a small agricultural town in south-central Albania, embodied an accidental tolerance. His grandparents had been banished there because they were small landowners, and therefore politically suspect. The government exiled many dissidents and political outcasts to Lushnjë, and it became a sort of cultural gulag populated by open minds and world travelers, who celebrated freedom in hidden ways. “There was a thriving underground cultural life in the city,” he said.
The very name Kapllani contains echoes of tolerance. The month and year of his birth, August 1967, Albania – “at the height of its paranoia and repression,” he says – banned the practice of religion and the giving of religious names to new people. -born. (Albania was then an enclave of Christian, Muslim and Jewish traditions.) So his parents invented a new name, “Gazmend,” which in Albanian means “joyful spirit.” His last name is an expression of tolerance since it is widely used in Arab, Jewish, and Muslim cultures. But “Kapllani” is also an expression of power, meaning tiger.
A journalist, poet, novelist and human rights activist, Kapllani remains a tiger with a cheerful spirit. In 1991, at the age of 24, he crossed the border into Greece, one of many Albanians who did not know how long the doors to the West would remain open. (In “A Short Border Handbook,” testimonies reflect the dark side of this massive border crossing. Many refugees were shot at random, and women — suddenly vulnerable outside of a structured country — were routinely raped.)
In Greece, young Kapllani worked as a mason and kiosk clerk, quickly mastering Greek and studying for a doctorate. in political science. He also felt an irony familiar to new immigrants: Things aren’t always so different on the other side of the border. In Greece at the time, he said, Albanians were widely maligned as a dirty, uneducated, seething criminal class.
As a journalist, Kapllani had escaped communist persecution, only to face fascist persecution – from Golden Dawn, an anti-immigrant right-wing party. Kapllani, a journalist and commentator, was targeted for his views in favor of national diversity, justice and human rights. In 2003, two plainclothes Greek police officers sympathetic to Golden Dawn arrested him without a warrant. “I was threatened, I was humiliated, they tried to destroy me and my personality,” Kapllani said. His plight attracted the attention of international human rights groups and he was released.
In 2006, he crossed another frontier, that of fiction writing. “Journalism helped me a lot in learning how to do field research,” said Kapllani, whose three novels since then reflect his love of facts and testimonies. But in fiction, “I learned to activate the imagination,” he says. “I felt the tongue release.”
During his year as a fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Kapllani is working on another novel, “Tales of Extreme.” Starting in 2009, he visited the Albanian state archives to explore the enigma of Hoxha, whom he calls “my tyrant”. The dictator regularly exiled, imprisoned or killed Albanians because of their reading habits, while indulging in a weakness for Western literature. By the time of his death in 1985, Hoxha had amassed a library of 20,000 titles, purchased at the rate of tens or hundreds of titles per month. Kapllani opens the novel with the future dictator entering a Paris bookstore in May 1934 to buy Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “Voyage au bout de la nuit,” “one of the most beloved books of his life.”
Kapllani would know. For four years, he studied 1,000 photocopied pages of Hoxha’s book acquisitions dating back to 1954, featuring obsessions such as symbolist poetry, biographies of American presidents and detective novels. Along the way, Kapllani interviewed people who “belonged in the past to the powerful and ruthless class,” he said. Among them were labor camp guards, state investigators, “other henchmen of a paranoid system,” a daughter-in-law, and Hoxha’s successor. Ramiz Aliasince deceased.
“Judging them is not enough,” Kapllani said during a recent speech at Radcliffe. “I have to understand them.”
Along the way, he discovers what has become a cliché about the demoralized elites of former dictatorial regimes: no one is ready to apologize. “They never repented,” Kapllani said of those interviewed. “They were incapable of feeling a sense of guilt.”
But Hoxha and his class only occupy half of the projected novel. The other belongs to Musine Kokalari, Albania’s first female author, arrested as an “enemy of the people” in 1946, imprisoned until 1964, then interned in a northern town until her death in 1983. During Her last 19 years, she prohibited writing, she was a sweeper. “I got sick,” Kapllani said while consulting her file in secret archives.
The problem in the upcoming novel is that Hoxha and Kokalari both grew up in the same southern Albanian town, Gjirokastër, and were less than 10 years apart. It is a book about double lives and opposing visions: that of the world that became and that of a world that could have existed.
Kapllani will teach at Emerson College starting in the fall. As a writer, he seems ready to cross another frontier. “I’m going through a language crisis here in the United States,” Kapllani said, in his bright, sunny office in Byerly Hall. “I now write mainly in Greek, but with many passages in Albanian and English.”
He sat back in his chair and thought, “Maybe English is my next linguistic utopia.” »
