Shefki Hysa

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Wednesday, 11. November 2009, 15:25:56

SHEFKI HYSA: CONDEMNED TO DEATH BY POLITICS

Wednesday, 11. November 2009, 14:21:30

By SHEFKI HYSA
Secretary of the League of Albanian Writers and Artists

Condemned to death by Politics
Requiem for Albanian literature

1
Reason under the hoof of non-reason
Empty-headed countries’ policies of all time (ever since states were created and until life goes on) have condemned to death real art and literature. To all appearances with no reason, Albanian policies, since the beginning of our art and literature and the period following, have proceeded such a way. Reason under the hoof of non-reason is another of life’s great mysteries…

The expectation that post-communist policies would change their mind and would sustain and encourage the development of contemporary Albanian literature, unlike the former communist dictatorship, which only encouraged the Method of Socialist Realism, was worthless (We emphasize literature not unintentionally). On the contrary they have acted, are acting and will act the same as empty-headed, old or new equivalent policies: “Literature condemned to death!”

And the reason of non-reason is known, real literature with the messages it conveys and transmits has never been of use to (non-change) policies, but to development tendencies and human progress and as such it has been, still is and will remain one of the most uncorrupt and uncompromising eternal oppositions.

Unlike art, whose convectional language has been, is and will be difficult to be perceived by the ignorance of politics, literature speaks with people’s language and although it tries to hide with figurative means what it wants to say, is once again perceived (maybe it is perceived late like the anecdotes of police’s mind) and remains uncovered and in danger, at the mercy of unmerciful non-reason. So, literature with its direct language is not only a permanent adversary of politics, but also its enemy. The terms “Dissident Literature” and “Dissident Writer” are exactly derived from this enmity with politics…

In this writing, which is a call for help, a “SOS” for the well-wishers that have ears, eyes and lucid mind, I will try to reason and argue with a simple language (likeable even for politicians) what is happening with Albanian literature, this eternal convict of non-reason of politics.
This writing (I hope the researchers, if anyone is by error alive, will forgive me for possible inaccuracies) has unique values only for the Albanian opinion, has only an Albanian passport and there is no knowing if it will ever achieve to take a visa in any of the foreign embassies or consulates within the Albanian territory, seeing how Albania has descended into this situation from politics of non-reason (Literature is known to be imprisoned)…

2
Literature as a written text
Every literary creation, such as adages, phraseological figurative expressions, proverbs, anecdotes, myths, legends, fairytales, versification, poems, poetries, stories, novelettes, novels, dramas, comedies and so on, is a human work where is compressed with artistry and art the person’s or group of persons’ experience of an instant, of a period of time or of the whole life. It doesn’t matter whether the creator is an anonymous person, a folk rhapsodist (People) or a single person, such as Homer. What matters is that the creator, through the creation has evinced the desire to refer his experience to those who surround him. And in this case the composition plays the role of the last will and testament. And as it is known (not only by lawmakers and law executants) a testament has a unique and legal value only when it is written.
And as a consequence, if I am not wrong, litterateurs might have been those who have firstly think it was necessary the invention of writing to write their own texts (it was an easy matter for naive artists: they used to invent figures of their imagination in the surface of rocks and caves and so, they could transmit to their coevals the messages of their souls, no matter how much they were perceived. I think they have been perceived by their grand-nephews, archeologists or art researchers). And all the evidence takes you to the conclusion that the writers were those who invented writing.
The first inventions of the clayey stones with the ancient Sumerian writing, which document the Epic of Gilgamesh, support this hypothesis. It is one of the most ancient and awesome creations of humanity and we know through it the development history of the quite as well as conflicted, dramatic and tragic life of those ancient pre-Babylonian tribes.
Thus, the Epic of Gilgamesh, this folk creation, this literature of humanity’s childhood that expresses all the spectrum of feelings of the love-hate arch, is already a written text, a testament of the Sumerian human experience that reflects artistically not only creator’s and coevals’ inward world but also the portrait of dominating politics in that time. So, you notice that dominating politics history comes to us in a written form and reflected through the ruled individual, through the creator, writer, litterateur…

3
Literature as an artistic reflection of time reality
Surprisingly, the writer, the man outraged from politics, writes the text of the review of a reality and it primary comes out and features as moving, developing, progressive, educational force, so in fact a decisive force, unlike politics that pretends all these qualities, propagandizing them for demagogy and aiming the contrary, the inclination for non-change, for status quo, stagnation and other political terms of this kind, which are of use to the ruler to restrain the adversaries, the opposition, “the enemies” of his eternal power…

Notice: “Proletarian politics is first priority!”… This was what the communist Albanian dictatorship used to pretend till yesterday and the catastrophe that its blind politics of non-reason brought is well known… Dictator Hoxha’s and dictatorial men’s jobs are being forgotten and the works of Kadare, Fishta, Konica, Xhaferri and other outraged dissident writers are being glorified… The dictator and the dictatorial men are simply demon-characters described in the pages of these writers’ works, writers that had their life in danger. It happened this way and the rapports between politics and literature changed forever. They have changed so radically and diametrically to the contrary that as if Dictator Hoxha wakened he wouldn’t believe that his old-time grandiosity diminished one day and it was converted in some rows of a literary text. It became part of that literature, which was condemned to death by his communist politics, as it condemned even its dissident writers, the Bilal Xhaferrs… So, reason dominated for a long time non-reason, as politics did with literature. But one day order is reestablished and reason and God’s laws predominate… Literature converts politics simply in a raw material, in an artistic material… And the writers are the real kings and emperors of the artistic empires, the politicians are simply plebs, as they deserve to be for life… All policies in power forget this… They forget that the conquering empires are not durable… This fact has been forgotten even by feudal, communist and post-communist Albanian policies…
I will bring you another argument, Homer’s work. It was this genius of antiquity who described with its gigantesque work, in the finest artistic way the history of human world development in Ancient Greece and other countries round it. Through Homer’s work, this marvelous artistic reflection, we watch with our imagination, as in a film, the reality of life of modern man’s ancestor and we make sure that psychology of life in ancient times was as good as it is today, notwithstanding the tools and the primitive war weapons. The primeval human world, the same as nowadays, was governed by policies that used to fight for wealth and power by means of injustice on the back of their citizen’s and neighboring nation’s poverty. If Homer’s work is carefully analyzed, you come to the conclusion that present-day politicians are similar to Menelaus, the king of Sparta, to Achilles, Patroclus or to every disreputable warrior of the artistic testaments of those days… Homers of all times were obliged to take the role of ruled, downtrodden and disdained people, with their life in danger too, although they were kings and more with the gold mind that God had given them. Sometimes they could end up to the position of a slave, with no rights over their own lives, like Aesop. They could end up even with no head, like the Jewish writer Anne Frank, who was massacred by the hitlerian Nazis…
But is there any difference between Menelaus and Hitler?!... I don’t think… Both of them are two demonic heroes, masterly described in Homers’ works, which are studied willingly at schools by all world children, those who will become unfair politicians as well as those who are guided by homerian inclinations to become writers, disdained litterateurs with their life in danger by politics…

4
Literature as mission
Politics ruins the human world with its non-reason. It acts barbarously with every value that derives from God’s reason, violates the intellectual elites, and massacres all the persons that have shined out, who has also shown the way to the truth to simple people, to those blind and poor ones, in order that they can only look at politics and politicians and adore the force of Power and of their families’ wealth…You don’t believe it?!... Let’s refer to the facts then. The Albanian Dictator, Enver Hoxha, fought by all means God’s cults, impoverished economically and mentally the Albanians, invented a brat key, “The New Man”, which closed all the doors of knowledge and tried to instill the cult of the communist leader as the liberator of the world into the programmed memory of this monster. Dictator Hoxha’s family was prospering in luxury, was the owner of the whole Albania; meantime the “New Albanian Man” had to work as a slave and he never filled his stomach with bread… Hoxha interned, imprisoned and shot all the intellectual people that didn’t obey his ideology. He did away with the publication right of those writers that could think differently, censured and stopped the publication of their works and those of other progressive world writers that used to jeopardize the durability of his Power with their democratic anticommunist ideas.
Ismail Kadare, the most eminent intellectual of the dictatorial years, maybe a great deal wiser than Dictator Hoxha himself, one of the most caressing as well as venturesome Albanians, was or wasn’t the owner of a three bedrooms apartment when, according to God’s laws he really deserved to be the first citizen of Albania for the intelligence and intellect he possessed… He wasn’t such a citizen yesterday because the Dictator’s shade outraged him, but he is today for all that politics wants it or not.
Ismail Kadare is the Real Ambassador of the Albanian Culture in the World…
Writers are like prophets. They foretell a society’s fate with their words, actions and work, in an implied or direct way, though they can be in danger and outraged from policies… So they are missionaries and their work is a mission. Homer foretold the end of Antiquity, snatched from political intrigues and from war fevers for wealth and Power on the back of humanity. Other Homers foretold the end of Rome and other empires after it… We read their works and despite the aesthetic pleasure and emotional interest they arouse, we get knowledge and information on history and on human development tendencies in centuries, we learn a lot about the culture of different nations and countries, about leading individuals and heroes, about their language, their psychology and inward construction and many facts on existence, on differences and similarities between human races in the world…

5
The writer as a missionary
Thus, seeing how it reflects the social reality and development tendencies, literature appears as a mission and the writer as a noble missionary, who tries to emancipate human world with his work. But how much sacrifices and efforts are necessary to afford successfully a missionary’s burden? As it is known, Jesus Christ was crucified by contemporaneous politics. Even other prophets Before Christ and after, up to Mohammed, whose life was saved several times by God himself, were in danger. Missions and Christian missionaries everywhere in the underdeveloped countries, as in Africa and elsewhere, even today risk of being raped and die under the hoof of non-reasoned policies, the same as journalists and writers in the front line of the regional wars and conflicts around the world. Prophets and writers are sacrificed and none of them withdraw from the mission to foretell the end of a certain policy. Christ foretold the End of the Roman Empire and of everything that was going to happen afterward for all that the Romans didn’t like his attitude and crucified him.
Fishta, Konica, the Albanian Xhaferrs, Blloshms and Nelajs rebelled against Hoxha’s dictatorial communist politics and they paid the ultimate price for their action. Literature was imprisoned in the coffers of the archives and a part of it still is not witnessing the light of publication. Only this way our children can learn from its truths rather than the manipulations and the fineries that communist yard’s literature served for fifty years, manipulations that are still served by neo-communist politics.
Why is it necessary to see yet literally inventions with “heroic jobs and the glorious victories of communism” in the Albanian literature’s texts?! Who is interested in serving to Fishta’s, Konica’s or Xhaferri’s successors their persecutors’ jobs, described by the graphomaniacs of the communist period?! Official politics, a middle-of-the-road successor of former communist politics, is interested of course.
What about post communist literature?!...Why isn’t it supported, financed and propagandized and in spite, there is a silence about it, like the old-time silence about dissident literature?!... And the worst thing is that it is still forbidden and denied (I hope you remember the way politics acted with the League of Albanian Writers and Artists: The Minister of Culture (without culture) ordered the despoilment of its Residency, the sequestration of all the assets, of its means and equipments, an action that was blindly legitimated by the Prime Minister! Thus, the writers were thrown in the street, were massacred, their work was disdained, it failed, literature was mummified).
And it was created a kind of desert where only the ostentatious dunes of ignorance mutiny like sand-dunes. I don’t know the reason, but probably this status quo, this cultural agony is convenient for the Albanian Government that induces the Minister of Culture (without culture), who appears in television and with Nero’s poses declares competently that there are no writers and literature in Albania anymore, there is no post communist literally creation and that “the last of Mohicans” were Kadare and Agolli and it’s enough! And even his neo communist courtiers, those who dream literature as a cow that lactates with milk their desires and those of their children and who imagine the writer as a shepherd of the bunch appointed and paid by the master (by the Government), try to argue this fact. The same psychology and dictatorial politics as yesterday’s...!

6
Literature as a milky cow that lactates…
In fact literature is even a cow with dietetic milk which can be used to lactate for the child failing the mother’s milk. It is known that if mothers’ breast gets dry they use the cow to lactate for their babies rather than the goat or the jennet… Literature, has nourishing valor, nourishes human souls, and brings them up healthy, nourishes them with the truth of social development tendencies, precisely with that nutrition, which doesn’t interest politics… Here are the origins of politics’ abuses…
We don’t know how (by chance, is understood!) Bilal Xhaferri managed to publicize in “The voice of Youth” newspaper the poem “Cham ballad”, a real hymn like “La Marseillaise”(the song of Marseille), dedicated to martyr Chameria, whose issue was buried by communist as well as present-day politics: it is afraid to affirm and support it. Xhaferri met with it. He was banished from politics but he nourished and kept up the patriotic spirits with that ballad that even today echoes in the intellectuals’ minds that support the development of the Albanian national issue. Politics still doesn’t feel comfortable and gets angry when it hears “Cham ballad”. The status quo established once uniformly in the relations with the neighboring Greece does interest it much more than any sudden development of the Cham issue. Thus, reason, “Cham ballad”, this milk of “cow-literature”, such lactic for the patriots, terrifies the politicians, who are ready to grab the cow and breed it in their stalls, intervening in its genes to adapt it genetically in accordance with their interests (literature of the communist yard or Socrealism), or to do away with it and with its shepherd (not legally appointed!) with every kind of methods, as they did with Fishta, Konica, Xhaferri, writers of the Albanian ethnicity. So they save politics of non-change.
Thus, politics with every kind of demagogic and propagandist means or with the violence of their Power, intervenes and alienates genetically literature, metamorphosing it in a sterile GMO, although it destroys real national literally values and deports them in the sack of anti-values, so that party militants’ and their inheritors’ interests can be fulfilled. So, the means, the ways, the nepotistic methods of political power dominate even the artistic process, damaging the mechanisms and the real nomocracies of literally creation, converting it in a clown-buffoon and everything ends up in a hideous farce, in a graphomania that is served to the ruled reader and to his children as a rare value, whose “sainthood” derives from the top of state pyramid.
Politics can deal more easily with writers because they are economically poor. It invites them to put aside their real mission and sing to its jobs and heroisms, or on the contrary, if they are not convinced, politics disregards them, humiliates and denies their values and in stead of them, it appoints pseudo litterateurs who are well paid by it (See “Tirana Observe” on 31 August 2007, “The 100 best Albanian writers”). Only those who are well paid can play the role of the greyhound or of the shepherd of cows, serving at cow-literature according to the methodical catalog prearranged by the militant state advisers (well paid too).
In the metamorphosis process of cow-literature, whose milk is destined for the official elite and the inheritors, the intention of politics is finally crowned: literature enters in the yard and as a humble courtier it covers with praises and flatteries the monarchs and their children, the immortality of their communist and neo communist power.
And in the course of this sophisticated process monarchs’ children and politicians’ children are about to be decreed and they alone are decreed as litterateurs and artists (you can find a lot of examples if you notice the surnames that have usurped the official cultural and literally-artistic Albanian institutions since 1945 and the years following)…
So, Albanian literature is before two alternatives: condemned to death or a cow of politics…

Translated by: Lorena Uliu

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SHEFKI HYSA: LITERATURE AFTER DEATH

Wednesday, 11. November 2009, 14:10:15

SHEFKI HYSA
Secretary of Albanian League of Writers and Artists

LITERATURE, AFTER DEATH!

1
Pharaohs and devil’s advocates
Albanian politics has chosen the pharaonic governance model taken from Ancient Egypt, with the only difference that a Pharaoh used to govern there once while in Albania a lot of pharaohs (formally) leaded by a Head pharaoh govern together. And this model has been chosen with Majority party and Opposition total consensus (remember the famous consensuses of our politics in the moments of crises that our country suffered in the post-communist epoch, after 1990).
Never forget that in Albania, unlike other countries, Majority and Minority is one thing and they are apparently distinguished from each other by the debate color and severity because democratic Europe calls for this (more precisely mules wants this way their woods). Thus, if you puzzle it out in detail, Albanian Majority and Opposition, which are strongly bound upside down and above like spade king’s portrait, govern together and at the same time and as they have chosen the pharaonic model, as a co-governance model (with consensus), should have absolutely their pharaohs and head pharaohs. And they have this. Here is to them! Here is to us! (It is what it is, we have them)!
But why has this politics run up to Ancient Egypt and has chosen this old governance model, anyone of you will be astonished?! Don’t be astonished because even if you are astonished it is said that the greatest astonishment lasts only three days. The idea is really old, but, elaborated according Albanian politics style it appears as a brilliant, too much impressive, contemporary artistic realization, which firstly satisfies and puffs all Majority-Opposition political egos and leaves openmouthed all the foreign politicians who have been appointed to monitor pharaonic-democratic developments in Albania.
The poor foreigners are shocked today by our pharaonic democracy the same as yesterday by Albanian communist politics and dumb in front of this original discovery, not having what to say, only shake their heads exalted: “Good, good! Albanians are on the right way, as always on unexplored pathways!’’…
And so Albanian politics (Major and Minor) governs comfortably, rising up mini pyramids and macro pyramids on its hardworking and wordless people’s back. It is understood that every pharaoh builds his own pyramid. And all the pharaohs together (Major and Minor), a little easily derisive, abase themselves from their pyramids to their Head pharaoh (appointed by them) in his Head pyramid in order to avoid waves of pharaonic envy which rules everywhere in Albania-Pharaohiny.
Pharaohs can’t govern alone, not because they don’t want this but they are brainless. And they are obliged to keep a herd of courtiers with themselves (well paid), who are called or are just malicious (in Albanian: devil’s advocates and advisers).
Devil’s advocates, although being in shadow in the backstage of courts, are the real power of Pharaohiny. Pharaohs bend their head down, have their ears to the ground, hear the devil’s advocates gibberishes and then they perk like lyrebirds’ sons and give their verdict on the present and future of Albania-Pharaohiny. It isn’t difficult for them to change and rewrite its past from their viewpoint (more precisely). Thus, fortunately or unfortunately, call it as you want, even if we are willing or unwilling, even if you are willing or unwilling, Albanian is governed by devil’s advocates who stay in undercrofts like poison cobras (cobra as a pharaonic symbol).

2
The pharaonic verdict
And devil’s advocates met each other head to head and came to the conclusion that literature existence is deadly for the eternity of pharaonic system, because the writers, being missionaries, incline toward ideas of social development, toward utopias to see the sovereign people and not pharaohs and their power. Being such, literature had to die, to be then replaced with another form, graphomania, well paid, apparently similar to it, but substantially different, in its heart. And who looks in somebody’s heart in turbid times? Only appearance can be seen. And graphomania would be like literature and it would have an only idea in its heart: the immortalization of Albanian pharaonic power.
And devil’s advocates gibbered at pharaohs’ ears and pharaohs at head pharaohs and head pharaohs at the Head pharaoh that Albanian post communist literature shouldn’t be sustained and encouraged, on the contrary it should be impinged, cursed and disregarded as a heretic creature. It should be declared dead, because post communist literature has never existed and if a spark of it has exploded it has been only a naive way of some naive creators who abandoned it and it died from naivety and carelessness, like a malnutried baby (literature in Kosovo, Macedonia, Chameria and other Albanian regions is not considered to have ever existed).
Thus, literature died! The derisive devil’s advocates gibbered this way toward pharaohs’ ignorance, even pharaohs and head pharaohs repeated this way. And the Head pharaoh declared: Literature has died!
And later, after this verdict, in pharaohs’ spare time, the malicious courtiers, reason and argue delicately to their bosses that Albania is what it is: a country with lack of ideas, without intellectual elites, without heroes, without natural sources, economically undeveloped and which will grow and develop only under the domination of shiny pharaonic ideas, because only pharaohs’ power (inspired by devil’s advocates) will do a miracle in Albania-Pharaohiny. May their power be eternal!
And devil’s advocates don’t get tired as they explain their hypotheses, willing to make them pharaonic power nomocracies. And they gibber and gibber and pretend that even heroes like Skanderbeg and had their defects and it isn’t known if they were Albanians or not, the same about Renaissance writer Naim Frashëri and company, about realists Migjeni and company…
Even any politician like Ismail Qemali had a suspect biography, even King Zogu who sold a piece of Albania and so on.
And so, under the reasoning of devil’s advocates all elites begin to dim and they fall from the pedestals of Nation’s Pantheon and pharaohs and devil’s advocates, the only rescuers of Albania, go up. May their power be eternal!
And devil’s advocates, after propounding, multiplying and publishing everywhere their hypotheses in the invisible waves of gossip about the suspect authenticity of Albanian heroes, don’t laze to run to our very dear neighbors, Greeks and Serbs, to flirt with them happily and to say to them that finally Albania has been reduced to an intellectual desert, without history, without past and original present. It is understood that the future will belong to them, pharaohs and devil’s advocates, even under Cesar’s shade (Albanian: Greeks and Serbs)!
And Greeks and Serbs, the poor men, embarrassed by devil’s advocates, not willing to fret them (not for anything else!), stammer out that if you don’t like your heroes, more precisely when you announce them brat, let us give them the paternity. May it not be broken!
It doesn’t matter if our heroes and history have been stolen. We can live without history as we can live without literature. It is enough for Pharaohiny to be safe! And viva graphomania!...
And so pharaohs and devil’s advocates and Caesars bargain on the back of Albanian issue with the unique desire to perpetuate their power, even with devil’s support.

3
Dead literature or …
Dear reader, I am calling to your reason with a big humility to not misinterpret my view about Albanian literature before reading even the last rows of this writing. I know that everyone in the position of an uninformed person about the real situation of Albanian literature, by rights can raise and protest against me and fly at me and swear at me and fling it in my teeth as one of my friends did, saying to me that you, Shefki, are acting dirtily, that you are victimizing so much Albanian literature and that you are dealing so long with agony and its requiem as you don’t deserve to be a writer. And the state did the right thing when he took the edifice of the Albanian League of Writers and Artists, one of whose leaders were even you, Shefki and you have the courage to say that Albanian literature has died…
What can I say to you dear reader, the friend that misunderstood me bothered me. And such a misunderstanding is an unreasonable rebellion and with consequences. I can accept that anyone who is uninformed, the same as my friend, can raise and defend the hypothesis that Albanian literature is safe and sound and its announcement as dead is impudence never heard, an immoral and crazy action that neither an adversary is permitted to do. This is an open intentional and hostile action, my friend dashed, dear reader… And he broke my heart… And it wasn’t my fault…
And he, everyone, my friend and your friend, dear reader, the same as that friend I mentioned, can bring a lot of facts, against my view, how our dear state loves and is keen on literature, sponsors the opening of artistic books fairs at his pyramid or ICC (International Center of Culture!), as Ministry of Culture officials call it, promotes Kadare’s publications (a big library named “Kadare” has been inaugurated at the capital center) and… and…
Even some other books of some others are being promoted, my perplexed friend, who I don’t know how lost the vengeful fury toward me, suddenly said to me… Whose books are those because I can’t remember it now, my friend, Shefki?!... Understand me, dear Shefki, because I can’t remember them in this instant… There are some names, I think famous, but I can’t remember them in this instant and it is said in televisions that they are in high positions and have written once… Actually they have written once and I have read something of it but I can’t bear in mind anything now…
Forgive me my friend, Shefki, because maybe I haven’t paid the right attention to their works or maybe are they really too bad to be remembered?... Then how does the state promote such creations that don’t stay in mind? May it not be real literature?!... But this is a rare madness, Shefki?!... Why do state’s money, our sweat, Albanian taxpayers’ sweat go for the promotion of a literature which is not literature?... Why should my son learn only piffles at school about every kind of vulgar writers who are not writers and who don’t know what they write and not learn what do Fishta’s, Konica’s, Xhaferri’s works say?...
Why shouldn’t my son learn what post communist literature, as you call it, says?!...Why shouldn’t my son and my nephews and nieces learn what has been written about Chameria after 1990 in your interesting storybooks, which made me cry when I read?!... Even Ismail Kadare, Dritëro Agolli, Visar Zhiti and others, whom I can’t remember in this instant because I am a bit confused, have nicely written for your storybook “Chameria flavor”?!... Why doesn’t our state finance such publications and in stead handle inexistent people?!... Why this bad luck for our children?... And do these politicians have children?... Don’t they feel sorry for their children who go at school and teachers persuade them with that straw seed that Albanian literature texts have in stead of having the real grain corns, as it happens with civilized world texts?...
Ask the state, not me, my dear friend that prejudged me as much as you nearly spited me, ask the Ministry of Education, ask the bureaucrats who lead the artistic book boards in stead of leading the real writers, I sopped my friend, dear reader but he didn’t hear me!...
May they be bureaucrats’ or graphomaniacs’ paper-works, in a word cadaver books, as you, my friend Shefki express yourself, he insisted?!... What do you say, Shefki because I am muddle-headed, a little because I am revolted by your extremist attitude and a little because I can’t explain why do they make promotions for some works that neither literature are?!... Why does the state love straw more than corn production?...
Anyway, Kadare’s work rises over those cadavers and this is enough and Albanian literature will not be announced dead. Will not be abused… I please you, Shefki, to not exaggerate with that fabled mortal ceremony of literature … Although now that I am puzzling over and I am judging in cold blood that the masquerade of promotions for those kinds of authors and books which can talk about aliens as well as about nowadays Albanians and about our children’s future, involuntarily, I take your part and I am worried about state’s attitude… Anyway we have Kadare… Literature is kept alive with Kadare and only Kadare…

4
Dead or alive?!...
So, literature is kept alive only with Kadare... My friend was excused this way and he finally silenced... But is my friend’s “postulate” right, dear reader?... Let’s reason together, but at first forgive me, dear reader, for tiring your judgment with my friend’s attitude. Maybe I exaggerated a little, but I had a desire to have an alley in views and not be unfairly prejudiced…
I am going on with my reasoning, dear reader, thinking that we are looking at this problem from the same view. It isn’t me the one who declares Albanian literature’s death but state’s pharaohs and devil’s advocates… It isn’t me the one who announces on television that writers and post communist literary creativity don’t exist, but those, devil’s advocates who try to argue that Albanian literature can still be kept alive with Kadare and every kind of socio-realism cadavers which are highly sustained, financed and propagandized (about works that neither they alone do know and others never written) as cultural monuments, defended by state…
Why do they insist that “the last of Mohicans” for Albanian literature is Kadare (I have nothing against him, according to me he is the greatest Albanian, Ambassador of Albanian Culture!)?... It’s easy… They are the ones who try to persuade the world that Kadare was “an accident”, a fortuity in Albanian literature. They are the ones who pretend that they wanted and invented Kadare myth, that they financed him to be the symbol of socio-realism and that this literature is the flourishing one in these lands. It flourished because they wanted so and even this literary wave is done, dead without Kadare (understand: without those who financed it). We can’t have another literature until they decide for its existence. They are the same who used to yell until yesterday that Kadare was the French’s spy, that the French had bought him, that… as a consequence of this fact we haven’t had, don’t have and will not have an Albanian literature(they say). Albanians can’t make literature if they don’t want. Pharaohs and devil’s advocates.
They are the same pharaohs and devil’s advocates (left and right) who have tried, with every kind of slander, to dim hero’s and Albanian intellectual elites’ values, to say to their Cesar (to whom they sell Albania’s interests and are well-paid) that Albanians don’t deserve any chance from this world because they are of no value, without history, without culture, art and literature, without a past and a future…
This is why our politicians behave this way and try to argue that authentic literature has died, doesn’t exist… The one they want can exist…
In these conditions no one can stop me to say: It is Albanian politics’ right to defend those kinds of “monuments”, those kinds of cadavers, to begin with its pharaonic experience, I suggest it to mummify them and convert “ICC” in a mausoleum with their mummies’ exhibits. It can pay well even docents and train them so they can explain to the Albanian pharaohs and head pharaohs those kinds of values that those kinds of mummy-monuments convey for the past, the present and the future of their Pharaohiny…
It is a right with which state is excusing and motivating itself because we have blindly given to it! It is a right which raises for the simple fact that the Albanians themselves are those who contribute for this kind of pharaonic politics eternity. Then let’s enjoy together this kind of politics which decides according to its interests (not ours) about what is good or bad for Albania…
You have to deal with your state and not mine my friends; you don’t have to deal with my views… Our state misuses the incomes of our sweat’s taxes; at most I can misuse the word, a misuse that can bring only misunderstanding of views and not any slavery, as the misuse of our votes from politics’ pharaohs and devil’s advocates bring…

5
Clinically dead…
The terror that pharaonic state has practiced on writers and literature has finally succeeded. Writers of post communist period feel anathematized, disoriented, tired, neglected, neither buried nor alive. And the man in agony thinks more about death than life and work… And devil’s advocates are right when they mention death. Literature already has a dead man’s face. It is experiencing clinical death. The devil’s advocates have temporary won the battle against it. And they celebrate literature’s death as a gift for their bosses. Anyway devil’s advocates are devilishly wise. Unlike their bosses, devil’s advocates know exactly what “clinically dead” means. Clinical death is a long coma, an inward darkness and the spirit’s run toward a light tunnel which takes you in paradise. Hereupon, in this period literature is more than ever near God (devil’s advocates know exactly this fact but this is a situation beyond their opportunities). It is said that clinically dead men contemplate a while paradise and then they come back in this world with a clean spirit and with bigger desires for life after they have experienced God’s experience.
Even literature that is experiencing God’s and Paradise experience maybe will soon wake up. It will come back in life with those forces and magic it possessed in its origin. Then poor pharaohs and devil’s advocates…

6
Albanian aeds
Albanian writers will revive, will rise and will be implacable like the aeds, the first rhapsodists of humanity. The aeds! A-E-ds! The aeds are the first sounds of alphabet, are the first human world’s scream with musical tones, its echo and reecho. They are a poetic shouting, a song and its chorus. Aeds are those who weave the Epic of Gilgamesh, sang the wonderful Nibelungenlied (the song of the Nibelungs), the first sagas in the margins of legends about man’s birth and childhood and the coexistence with gods of his imagination, which narrate and intone pre-Homeric world’s jobs and which inspired the magnificent Homer with their spiritual potentials.
Aeds are the first rebels toward naivety and monotony of primitive man’s life. They are not only rhapsodic artists, poets and singers who used to weave, interpret and sing magically their verses but also the first polymaths, philosophers, historians and sociologists of humanity. Chieftains and kings, all the powerful men of pre-antic world used to abase themselves before the talent and power that magic of art possession gave to them. Even the king of kings of human world, the wonderful Homer, abased himself and was inspired before their power!
Pharaohs and devil’s advocates and the vicious politics which has produced the tyranny and the terror of their power, which has usurped Albania, will absolutely abase themselves once before the young Albanian aeds of post communism. Before the magic of their literature, the sand buildings of graphomaniacs’, who go on living and be well paid for their pseudo-creations, dedicated to the jobs of Pharaohiny, this temporary literary-artistic desert that has plagued Albania, will fall in and disappear.

Translated from the Albanian by Lorena Uliu

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