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Tag: Gazmend Kapllani

  • Writing in the Language of ‘the Other’

    In another fascinating piece for PEN Atlas, Gazmend Kapllani recounts his journey through languages, the difficulties and opportunities of being a multi-lingual author and how the language of the Other goes back to Homer and the birth of storytelling

    The “encounter” with your mother tongue is always prearranged, while an encounter with a foreign language is usually a matter of chance or choice. My encounter with the Greek language meant both: chance and choice.

    I was born in Albania, under totalitarianism, when the country was one of the most isolated in Europe, similar to today’s North Korea. Learning foreign languages in such an atmosphere had no practical use. It was impossible to talk to the few visitors who ever managed to enter Albania. They were strictly monitored by plainclothes agents of the secret police. We restricted ourselves to observing them and trying to catch words of their languages from a safe distance. The truth is we watched them as if they were some sort of extraterrestrials.

    However, by adolescence I had already learned two foreign languages: Italian and French. I learned Italian when I was a child, thanks to an older cousin who had studied in Italy in the 1930s. Then, I learned French on my own. Italian and French were not just “foreign languages” for me. They became like underground tunnels or small windows which, suddenly, I could open in the wall of our totalitarian jail. Because of these openings, I could reach the world-beyond-the-border. 

    I could listen to Italian and French radio stations, secretly of course, thanks to a Chinese radio, which further broadened my world-beyond-the-border. All of the ‘forbidden books’, which were banned by the regime, and were so essential in stimulating my creative imagination, I read secretly in Italian and French. I still maintain a special relationship with both languages. In the memoirs of former prisoners of the Albanian gulags, I read how some of them developed a secret code, a secret language, in order to communicate between their cells. They used to form sentences by knocking and scratching on the walls of the cell. The character “A” was one knock on the wall and two short lines. “B” two knocks and two circles and so on. They say that they still maintain a special relationship with this private language. Sometimes, I have the impression I have maintained the same relationship with French and Italian.

    ***

    When totalitarian borders were collapsing in Albania and Eastern Europe, toward the end of the 80s, I was learning English.  But I did not have any more time to study languages. It was time to escape. I was in a hurry to cross the monstrous border – after so many years of closed borders, we couldn’t believe that they would remain open for long. I crossed carrying an English grammar book in my hands.

    I went to Greece though I didn’t know a word of Greek. In my naïve imagination I planned to stay in Greece for 21 days at most and then continue my trip further west, to Italy, France or some English-speaking country. Last January, in 2012, I reached the 21-year mark of living in Greece. Life, often, does not follow schedules and plans. Unpredictable events and coincidences, often, change your travel plans and seduce you the way Circe seduced Ulysses.

    I have written and published three novels in Greek: I decided to write in the language of the country I was living in. I don’t regard the Greek language as my ‘adopted’ mother tongue anymore. Our relationship, I’d say, is that of a man and his lover. It has the passion, the devotion, the element of surprise and small gifts that tend to mark a courtship. At the same time, it carries all the pitfalls, the vacillations, the hints of suspicion and betrayal, the uncertainties and mistrust that are typical of such a romance. Looking back at it now from some distance, I can say it was an ardent yet arduous affair.  I fell in love with a language spoken by people who considered me undesirable, due to my immigrant status. I wasn’t some Western, French or English or German anthropologist in Greece: I was an Albanian immigrant; I was the scapegoat of the time; my mother tongue was the tongue of the scapegoat.

    An Albanian is modern Greece’s country bumpkin. Except that this country bumpkin doesn’t speak the local vernacular; he speaks Albanian; he is the embodiment of the unbearable likeness of the “Other’.  Ironically many of the ancestors of today’s modern Greeks, who show contempt for modern Albanian immigrants, used to speak Albanian themselves.

    It was back then that I fell in love with the Greek language and mastered it. That’s most likely to be the reason that my relationship with Greek became so special. Faced with rejection, many retreat into their shell like turtles. There are also those who face rejection by digging in their heels and developing an appetite for “conquest”. Instead of countering with rejection, they respond to it with a desire to charm. Perhaps they are not comfortable with the status of victim. So the Greek language gave me this ability to conquer, to charm, to amaze, despite a climate of rejection, and my relationship to it became so special because it offered me the means to evolve from “scapegoat” and “undesirable” to interlocutor and storyteller. I wanted to be heard. I wanted to tell stories, mine and those of others.

    My books, written in Greek, are translated into several languages. But they are not available in Albanian. This is a sort of Balkan linguistic nationalism I guess – some of the Albanian publishers feel vexed and can’t forgive me for having written my books and building my career as a writer in a Balkan language other than Albanian. They treat me as a traitor to my mother tongue…

    ***

    When you write in a language that is not your native tongue, you recreate and refresh your identity – your cultural identity, but mainly, the identity of the narrator. Immigration means starting from scratch. To write a narrative in a language that is not your native tongue, is like starting the narration of your life from the beginning. That is why I felt as if the Greek language was a new pair of shoes which gave me the desire to run. Narrating in a “foreign” language, I felt not only like a participant, but like an observer of my own experiences. Greek offered my narration a different style and pace. But mostly, Greek offered me the distance I needed to reshape and re-read my previous and current experiences. And sometimes, this distance is like a savior for the narrator. Probably, because it transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar. The “foreign” language does not carry the historical weight of your native language. When writing in a foreign language, especially about your own life, you feel as if you have acquired a layer of protection from the dangerous weight of your own experiences.

    ***

    I now have read many novelists, of the current and last century, who write in languages which are not their mother tongue, like Conrad or Nabokov. But in the matter of writing in another language I often think about Homer – the archetype of all storytellers*. Who was Homer? Maybe he was a myth. In the imagination of the people he was more of an archetype. A man without a name, a foreigner – Greeks may have found his foreign name difficult or unworthy to utter.  He was, according to legend, a hostage of war, a slave without a past and without rights. It seems that he had a talent for learning languages and telling stories. That’s how he gained his freedom.  The natives were charmed not only by his stories but also by the fact that he could tell the stories so well in their own language.

    Many times, he must have heard compliments such as “you speak our language so well!” I imagine, hearing him telling stories in their own language, the natives must have felt the caress of their own narcissism. By mastering their language, the language of the Other, Homer remained in their history. But we will never learn his personal history. Maybe the no-named “Outis” (“Nobody”) the pseudonym of Odysseus when he fought Polyphemus the Cyclops was a sarcastic comment that Homer made about himself?

    ***

    Currently I live in America – as a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. An ideal place to write a new novel. That’s exactly what I am doing.  I don’t know whether I will extend my stay in America or return to Greece. I don’t feel that I have many good reasons for returning to Athens at the moment. For years now, I have been blacklisted by the neo-Nazi gangs of Golden Dawn and fascists, which unfortunately are gaining support and having a huge impact in Greece. Moreover, after 21 years of living, writing and paying taxes in Greece, the Greek state has repeatedly refused to grant me Greek citizenship.

    On the other hand, being in the US has caused a “language crisis” for me. Will I continue to write in Greek or will I start writing my novels in Albanian? My books have been translated from Greek into several languages and it’s important to me to know and work with the translators. If, from now on, I write my books in Albanian, where will I find translators?In the meantime I feel more and more tempted to write in English. Since childhood I’ve been drawn to the languages of the Other. Above all, I like writing in the language of my everyday life. So, living in a kind of linguistic suspension, the new book I am writing is becoming a patchwork of three languages: the largest part of it is in Greek, interrupted by big paragraphs in Albanian and English.

    Every time I write something I don’t like I blame my English. When this happens, I regard my latest language as a scapegoat. I feel frustrated and I swear to give up writing in English, once and for all. But after an hour or so my frustration is replaced by stubbornness and a desire to make it work. Then I sit down again in front of the blank page, filling it with English phrases and words. How does it feel? Fascinating like discovering a new continent, and at the same time insecure like running barefoot on a minefield.  

    Ultimately, what does it mean to write in the language of the Other?  It means many things at once, I guess. It makes you travel through sounds and words that you would never have had the chance to discover otherwise. The most precious gift that the new language gives you is the fact that you never take it for granted. You will never consider it your own in the same manner that natives do. That’s why your relationship with the foreign words will never become unequivocally familiar. That’s why it will also never become routine. I often feel like a debutant in face of foreign words. Then, when I begin writing, I forget what language I’m in. Because, the most important thing when writing, is what you say and not the language in which you say it.

     

    About the Author

    Gazmend Kapllani teaches History and Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston. He has published two poetry collection in Albanian and three novels in Greek. His first book – A Short Border Handbook – has been published by Portobello in the UK and has been translated also into French, Polish and Danish. His second book – My name is Europe – has been published recently in French and will be published in English in the fall.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • History and hysteria: The private libraries of dictators

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece from Gazmend Kapllani, we hear about the books that were damned and banned during the communist regime in Albania, only to resurface in some unlikely places…

    There are houses without libraries. There are houses with poor or small libraries and others with big and wonderful ones. There are also houses with burned and destroyed libraries – like those of the Jews of Thessaloniki during the Nazi occupation of the city. The private libraries of 20th
    century can tell a lot about its political history and hysteria, about its big dreams and big crimes.

    The “Age of Extremes” (as Eric Hobsbawm called the 20th
    Century) “found” me in Albania.  I grew up in a house with a tiny library; most of which I used to hate.  My fearful parents, persecuted by the regime in the past, made a huge effort to create a sort of “window-library” which would show their obedience to the regime, hoping this way to prevent more possible ordeals. As one knows, the library is the first thing a visitor  notices on entering the house.

    The shelves of this “window-library” were full of books written mostly by “Party leaders” and “leading minds” of Marxism – Leninism. Enver Hoxha, all by himself, used to occupy three shelves of the library with his eighty books, which were multiplying every year, till he died in 1985. The other shelves were reserved for “Party leaders” of “minor levels” – none of them would dare to write more books than Enver Hoxha, of course. There were also some foreign books, considered as “useful” or “harmless” by the regime. Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and next to it, his Magnum Opus, Das Kapital. One with a red cover and the other one with a black one. Some other books written by Stalin and Lenin, all of them in grey covers. One day, two books by Mao Tse Tung were added to the rest, but they disappeared relatively early, as soon as Enver Hoxha called Mao “a traitor to  real socialism”. The most interesting books of the library for me were those of foreign literature, like Gorky’s Mother and Cervantes’ Don Quixote (the only one that I really adored!).

    Close to my adolescence I made an impressive discovery concerning the existence of other books in my house. Apart from the “window-library”, my parents also used to keep “damned books”. They kept them secretly in their bedroom, enclosed carefully in two small black commodes. The “damned books” never crossed the door of their bedroom and were never found scattered by chance in different parts of the house, on the sofa or the table, like the other “normal” books. They were like terrible secrets and their existence was exclusively linked with darkness. Before allowing me to read some of them I had to swear to my parents that I would talk to no one. A promise that, unfortunately, I never kept.

    I should say that during that period of oppression and systematic paranoia in Albania we had a lot of free time to read books. But we couldn’t have the books we really wanted to read. Today, I can read whatever I like, but I have no time anymore. That’s why there are moments when I feel nostalgic about that terrible period, when reading of the “damned books” was akin to a ritual and my relationship with books was similar to the forbidden love…

    In 2009 I found myself again in Albania, doing some research on the lifestyle of the “Party leaders” during the communist regime. I was surprised to discover, among other things, that books and private libraries played an important role in Hoxha’s court. I was astonished by the fact that some of these guys, who systematically destroyed libraries and book collections, were also great readers and book collectors themselves. They even used to compete with each other, comparing the size of their private libraries. Enver Hoxha himself possessed an astonishing private library with almost 30,000 titles, mainly in French, as he had studied in France in the thirties. Some of these books were, literally, stolen from the private libraries of his enemies, who were killed or deported under his orders.

    The private library of Enver Hoxha doesn’t exist anymore. Many of the books of the old tyrant were stolen by those who came to power after his death and after the collapse of the communist regime. Some of the book thieves were former exponents of the old regime and from this perspective they were starting their post-communist career by stealing the books of their old master. The tyrant’s library was “dismantled” into thousands of pieces and totally disappeared.

    In the framework of my research I interviewed Ramiz Alia*, the successor of Enver Hoxha and one of his most obedient attendants. We met at his beautiful big flat, constructed by the Russians in the fifties, some hundred meters only from his previous villa. He used to live alone as his children had emigrated. We had a nice talk together. As we reached the end of our interview he insisted on showing me a particular beloved corner of the house: his private library.

    As I was looking, full of curiosity, at the books on the shelves, examining almost like a microbiologist their multilingual titles, he told me that many of the books he possessed once were stolen “in that period”: it meant the period when the regime collapsed and  Hoxha lost power. Ramiz Alia began telling me the titles of the books which were stolen. I remember him mentioning books by Nabokov, Baudelaire, Camus, Kafka… I interrupted him gently and asked: “Sorry, do you know that during your regime, if someone was caught with a book like the one you mentioned, they could go to jail for many years?”. He pretended not to hear my question and continued to talk with a nostalgic enthusiasm about his beloved writers and books. His approach only increased my insistence. I interrupted him again, not so gently this time: “Why were the books you are talking about on the list of the “damned books?”. He looked at me and smiled cynically. “Because the minds of the people were not ready for these books. It’s the same when a father wants to protect his child from evil” he answered. Twenty years since his fall from power he was still justifying his methods.

    We said goodbye and while I was going down the stairs of the Soviet style building I thought that tyrants never regret for their deeds. Were they to come to power again they would do exactly the same…

     *Ramiz Alia, died in 2011

    About the Author

    Gazmend Kapllani was born in 1967 in Lushnj, Albania. In January 1991 he crossed the border into Greece on foot to escape persecution by the communist secret services. In Greece he worked as a builder, a cook and a kiosk attendant, while also studying at Athens Universityand completing a doctorate on the image of Albanians in the Greek press and of Greeks in the Albanian press. He is now a successful writer, playwright, broadcaster and journalist.His best-selling first novel, A Short Border Handbook has been translated into four languages (English, Polish, Danish and French). A Short Border Handbook was published and by Portobello Books in 2009, and was translated by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife.

     

  • Writing In A City That’s Collapsing

    English PEN Launches the PEN Atlas with this piece by Athens based writer Gazmend Kapllani.

    What does an author do in a city that is collapsing? Like all the other non-authors, he tries not to collapse. He hopes that the worst is over, and yet he fears that perhaps the worst is yet to come. He observes the falling snow and for a moment he thinks about the homeless who have filled the streets of Athens. To them, snow means death. Perhaps this makes a certain book come to mind – 

    A Sun for the Dying by Jean-Claude Izzo.

    If he uses the metro often, he’ll observe that since the economic crisis began, the number of people reading books on the train has increased. Unfortunately the number of beggars who move from one train to another with their hand outstretched, has increased even more. In any case, the metro is the only place in Athens where the crisis, with all of its hazardous force, has not yet been entirely felt. Every time I descend into the station, it’s as if I am in a shelter which protects me from the prevailing feeling of melancholy which persists above ground. The people waiting on the clean platforms have more relaxed expressions on their faces. It’s as if they’ve put on a temporary mask. Once you ascend to the surface, the mask falls.

    You walk along the streets of Athens, “collecting” various images – broken storefronts, glum faces, burnt buildings and homeless people who are like sad witnesses standing across from burned-out buildings. The ruined buildings are some of the most beautiful in Athens. They are victims of violence at the hands of “neo-barbarians” who are “children” of an “eternal present” – with no recollection, without a past and without a vision for the future besides their only slogan: “a burning city is a blossoming flower.”

    One of the buildings destroyed by fire is the Attikon cinema, one of the city’s oldest. It was at this cinema, in February 1991, where I watched my first film in Athens – An Angel at my Table – a movie which tells the dramatic life story of New Zealand author Janet Paterson Frame. Back then I was a recent immigrant, in Athens for only two months, without residency papers and knowing very little Greek. I can still recall some scenes from that movie. Janet Frame was horribly stigmatized and suffered a great deal but in the end she made it. Standing in front of this burned cinema in Athens, I hope that Greece will follow the same fate of this famous writer, coming out of its scary present stronger.Putting my memories aside, I continue a little further down the street. Near the cinema I notice an open-air stall selling used books. Five euros per book. Used books, especially during these times of crisis, are sold for pennies in Monastiraki, an area below the Acropolis in the center of Athens. So how do these books end up for sale at the bookseller’s stall for five euros? If you follow their trail perhaps you will understand something about how Greece’s economy works. Since the crisis began, the number of readers in Greece has dramatically decreased. The price of books, however, used or new, has not decreased and in some cases, the prices have even gone up.

    How can one find the nerve to write in a city that is collapsing? In my conversations with authors, new authors and well-established authors alike tend to feel despondent. They say the market for books is collapsing as well. Rumors about publishing companies are circulating: some are not paying authors, others are in danger of closing their doors, while bookstores are closing down one after another. People have other things to worry about and reading was never their strong point. “Author” was always a risky and extravagant “profession.” In a city that’s collapsing, however, being an author is like jumping into a void.

    I take a look at the best-seller lists in the newspapers. In fiction, mostly romantic novels and crime fiction are popular. Best-selling essays are those trying to explain the economic crisis and criticize ruthless capitalism. I talk with owners of bookstores who have shops in wealthy Athenian neighborhoods. They have not shut down yet, like hundreds of other bookstores in poorer neighborhoods which have had to close. They tell me that the “quality readers” are those who have been hardest hit by the crisis. And that many readers ask for books that will make them forget and not think about what is happening around them.  

    In a city that is collapsing, what can an author write about? And in the final analysis, who will read what you write? But if you don’t write when everything around you is tottering and changing, then when will you write? I recall something that Dino Buzzati wrote in one of his books: “Please write. At least two lines, even if your soul is restless and your nerves are gone. Every day, write.” Writing is a shield and therapy; it is an escape, an analysis, a reminiscence and it is imagination. You write because you have the illusion that you can translate the incomprehensible into a story. To borrow a phrase from Sepulveda, to write means to endure. Especially, to withstand one’s own fear, one’s own misery and melancholy. Through writing, you discover how unforgiving time is. And how every so often, hope springs from despair….

    Athens, February 2012

    About the Author

    GazmendKapllani was born in 1967 in Lushnjë, Albania. In January 1991 he crossed the border into Greece on foot to escape persecution by the communist secret services. In Greece he worked as a builder, a cook and a kiosk attendant, while also studying at Athens University and completing a doctorate on the image of Albanians in the Greek press and of Greeks in the Albanian press. He is now a successful writer, playwright, broadcaster and journalist. His best-selling first novel, A Short Border Handbook has been translated into four languages (English, Polish, Danish and French). A Short Border Handbook was published and by Portobello Books in 2009, and was translated by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife.

    Additional Information

    Jean Claude Izzo (1945-2000) French writer – Sun for the Dying (1999) published by Europa Books, 2008. 

    Dino Buzzati-Traverso (1906 – 1972) was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel Il deserto dei Tartari, translated into English as The Tartar Steppe, 1939. Available in Canongate edition. 

    Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1489–1573) was a Spanish humanist, philosopher and theologian