Albanian in America
An essay by Aleksandėr Dardeli
Originally Published in the Potomac Review, Winter 1998-99
The first thing I learned in the United States is that almost no one
knows where Albania is: "Oh, Albania," reacted a redhead I met at a party in
Athens, Ohio, "isn't that in upstate New York?" "So how is the country doing
now that the Soviet Union collapsed?" asked one of my professors the first
time I consulted him. I have also come across oddities: "Has the country
been able to bridge the gap between the Ghegs and the Tosks?" was a question
from a librarian. Nice, but speaking of Ghegs and Tosks in Albania now is
like speaking of southern slave owners and northern abolitionists in the
United States. "I used to listen all the time to Radio Tirana with an old
short wave receiver. Is what's his name... Hoxha, yes, Hoxha... is he dead?"
asked a high school basketball coach. Yes, thank God. Hoxha is dead.
The flight from Tirana to Budapest to Frankfurt to Newark, my first
ever, set a difficult precedent to emulate: first class amenities, courtesy
of the Fulbright Scholarship Committee. At 23, in 1992, I was coming to
study comparative literature as a graduate student at Columbia University in
New York. I had spent my entire life in a country comparable in area to
Wales, learning English from books, movies on Yugoslav state TV and BBC
short wave broadcasts. I was coming to the bastion of democracy, the country
that appeared in all the contraband books I could lay my hands on as the
champion of change in Eastern Europe.
After a month long academic orientation program in Athens, Ohio --
practically a crash course in Midwestern reticence and mild manners -- the
Fulbright Committee dropped me in New York. Manhattan. Forty Second and
Eight, bustling with crack addicts, panhandlers and phone scam artists. I
was an Albanian coming from a city where drugs had not yet made their debut
and porn shops had been the communist propagandists' ultimate weapon to
demonstrate the depravity of capitalism. It was late August. The sidewalks
were hot. The bastion of democracy was suffocating. Its people didn't care.
I felt immobilized amid the uproar. I also noticed that New York had some
elegantly dressed women. Perhaps, I thought, it's not as bad as it seems.
Riverside Drive, with its gray buildings of not so distant splendor,
pet owners who roamed the sidewalks, crisp New Jersey vistas behind the
trees, resisted interpretation. Everything was new for me: living in a
suite, sharing the kitchen with students from Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Korea,
Spain and America, taking classes in the late afternoon, being able to go
for morning runs at noon, having to explain where Albania is, finding out
that the lavish stipend was, in fact, peanuts. After repeated attempts to
hide my accent and dodge questions about my origin to avoid long, tedious
explanations, I gave up. By default, I became an ambassador for my country
-- enacting, it seemed, my intermittent dream of a diplomatic career.
I started going to brown bag discussions on Balkan politics. The
re-discovered Eastern Europe served as background, its capitals being the
vogue of the moment. The raging war in Bosnia attracted all the attention
but here and there questions surfaced about the Albanians of Yugoslavia.
Conditioned to a two party system, the Americans liked to be spoon-fed a
bipolar version of history and events in my country. I had to skip
explaining that Albania had just shaken off communism, had no recorded
memory of genuine political pluralism, that she was still an overwhelmingly
rural patchwork of endemic concerns, with half of the nation living outside
her borders. Instead, I capsuled my answers in easily digestible two-color
pills of communist legacy and flickering democracy.
By the end of the first semester, I could divide questioners about my
country into five categories. First, mainly women, those who saw Albania as
an exotic land somewhere between the Far East and Gibraltar, unaware that
beneath the exoticism people were dying of malnutrition, the abortion rate
was skyrocketing to levels unimaginable to the knights of the
pro-life/pro-choice wars in the American media, and massive migration from
the rural areas to the capital, Tirana, was feeding an army of criminals
with no education, no jobs, no direction. I encountered the specimens of
this group at Upper East Side parties: spacious apartments, expensive
paintings on the walls, gin martinis with Spanish olives, and braless women.
Riding the contained intoxication, I played the colorful stranger who
answered questions about the prevalence of men with aquiline noses and blue
eyes in Albania. I smote the women with stories of beachlets on the Ionian
Sea and mountain lakes, but the ensuing relationships never lasted more than
two or three weeks.
Second were the paranoid New Yorkers, who read the Post or the Newsday
and remembered the story about the Albanian teenagers in the Bronx who had
tied a black teen to a post and painted her white. They would scrutinize my
conversations for signs of racism and could recite the dates and details of
robberies committed by Albanian gangs in the tri-state area. Life as an
ambassador was a curse in the presence of these people. The fact that Mother
Teresa was Albanian only temporarily quelled their conviction that the
Albanians in the New York area slid almost genetically into crime.
Third came the nerds one watches on Jeopardy!, who could name the major
cities of Albania, list the fish that grow in its rivers, explain the
symbolism behind the double-headed eagle on the flag, and spice their
presentation by mentioning a self-styled Albanian king in exile waiting to
return someday in pomp to the country of his father. I met these people when
least expected: in a bar, on the ferry to Staten Island, at Shea Stadium,
inside an elevator at Macy's. Capable of gleaning information from books
only, they would not hear that some of their data had turned moldy.
The fourth group, as small as the third one, yielded friends who really
wanted to know what was going on in Albania. Attentively they followed my
explanations on why the country had been practically insulated from the rest
of the world for almost half a century. One woman kept reiterating what a
great feat it was to come from Albania and study English at Columbia without
ever having been in an English-speaking country before. An ex-triathlete
shared my passion for running. Though he could swim and bike faster than I
ever could, he couldn't keep up with my running. I shared a love for wines
with a young woman from a rich family in northern Spain. She had deep black
eyes and long neurotic fingers; while I divined and sipped almost
mystically, she downed wine with a thirst too big for her slender figure.
With yet another woman, love overarched curiosity about Albania.
The fifth and last group preoccupied me the most. They would grimace on
hearing I was from Albania and go back to the comfort of conversing in
English about muffins, Dave Letterman, the New York Giants or the breasts of
their last girlfriend. They felt uncomfortable when I talked in Albanian to
friends and I felt equally awkward in their presence. They would mimic
Puerto Ricans who could not rid themselves of their accent despite decades
in New York -- yet took classes in comparative literature and bemoaned the
violence of mainstream trends against the margins.
Somehow this group attached importance in a direct proportion to size
or numbers. I could not get them interested in Albanian literature but the
drunken soliloquies of a Russian student on the mystical poets drew their
attention. In despair, I invited them to read Ismail Kadare's novels,
Albania's writer most compatible with Western tastes. To no avail. Some of
Kadare's books are really good. It had to be the meager numerical dimensions
of Albanian. Compared to the Russian speaking masses, Albanian belonged to a
handful of people scattered on the rugged mountains of the Western Balkans.
I hated the fifth group, and became obsessed with the conspicuous
absence of Albanian culture in the United States. I searched big campus and
city bookstores but found nothing on Albania except for a novel by Kadare.
This absence was painful. True, Albania produced far fewer books than the
United States, Britain or France but certainly more than Costa Rica or
Guatemala. Yet their literature was always present in the bookstores.
Part II
Nightmare 1
I think in Albanian, compose verses in Albanian, but they all come out in
English. I call my sister back home, have her send me classics in Albanian,
read them more intently than ever before. I take a break, go out for a beer
at the West End, get together with a shy girl interested in books. I start
telling her what I have just read. She begins to laugh. Loudly. I forget
everything I have read.
The more comfortable I felt with English, the world's language, the
more I harbored a grudge against its colonial mind-set and entrepreneurial
spirit. It was the language of the United Nations, the language one
defaulted to when his native tongue wasn't the lingua franca; it was the
language of Microsoft. I could feel the strength of its numbers, the power
of Joe Schmoes in the American hinterland turning away from foreign
languages, of Aussies teaching their kids English only, of Englishmen with
an essential layer of their national identity -- language -- stretching far
beyond their nation's borders.
I despised the Albanians who had lived in New York for decades without
making a memorable mark on its cultural landscape or even keeping up their
language. I went to their restaurants and spoke in Albanian -- only to be
given a blank stare and a well-rehearsed shrug. They often pretended to be
Italian and even Greek. Lying across from Italy, on the other side of the
Adriatic, Albania has a special relation with contemporary Italian culture:
she commands a good knowledge of their soap operas and music. Many Albanian
émigrés in New York spent time in Italian refugee camps, were taught basic
Italian and even made girlfriends of the unemployed young women who loiter
in the crumbling towns of Southern Italy, a romantic paradise nonetheless to
the socialist realism of Albanian towns. After persistent attempts by me,
some émigrés finally began to talk in Albanian. But alas! Their botched up
Italian was far better. The Albanian they spoke lacked the cadences of
Tirana University auditoriums, it was ungrammatical to the point of causing
physical pain. I could slice their accents with a pizza cutter into all the
fiefdoms of Northern Albania.
Amid the fast paced English of New York, I had visions of my mother
tongue withering away, rusting like a sunken Titanic in the depths of
forgetfulness. I could feel her pulse but I could not find her heart. Yet
she heaved in sight like an oasis in a desert of alien airwaves and
undecipherable body language. The sheer bulk of other languages violated her
aspirations and pushed her to the margins. Columbia's shelves stacked with
literary criticism denouncing the violence of the mainstream against the
margins seemed fribble: there is no bigger rape than the silencing of an
entire language by other, more powerful languages.
Dream
The world begins to really care for independent thinking, for nonconformist
writing in languages like Albanian. The use of Albanian for one year in all
sessions of the United Nations and its related agencies is authorized. U.S.
television broadcasts subtitled Albanian movies, dispersing the notion that
a genetic deficiency renders the mass of Americans incapable of watching
subtitled movies.
Longing for my homeland, I wrote my thesis on the inherent dialogism of
Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I sensed Tirana in the Bronx, the "Martyrs
of the Nation" boulevard in Brooklyn, the Albanian Archeology and
Ethnography Museum fused with the Cloisters -- and at times the people
looked just the same. Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, I read the Cities in a
different light. Bakhtin says that nothing is uttered in isolation. Every
sentence, every phrase, every word is meant to spur some response, is
released with the subconscious awareness that it will produce a given
reaction, and mutates accordingly, halfway to the mouth, while being
released, to better adapt to the situation that will result from the
reaction. I missed my country dialogically, hoping that Albania, my friends
and relatives would miss me.
Just then, penniless, and sharing an apartment with two friends from
Northern Albania, I got a job at the Voice of America in Washington, D.C. I
was so used to New York, its bars and cafes, its high strung women and talk
junkies, that Washington seemed like a nature-filled theme park, designed to
reintroduce nature into my life. The trees did not hide between gray
buildings; there were big parks, vast lawns and open spaces; the taxi
drivers had shabbier cars but did not switch directions immediately when
summoned to the other side of the street. I had to start greeting strangers
in the elevators. People smiled, something I had forgotten since leaving
Athens, Ohio. The metro cars were carpeted and so clean that it felt like a
joke. But nobody removed the carpets, and the cars remained clean.
The free museums seemed a godsend as I waited for my first paycheck.
They lacked the opulence of the Met, and the sleek, in-your-face
architecture of the Guggenheim, but they offered time and quiet to think
over the exhibits. And then there was the multi-buildinged Library of
Congress beginning with the exquisite hall of the Thomas Jefferson building.
I preferred slouching in the armchairs of the Madison building to any
discussion with my new colleagues. I was working with a team of Albanian
émigrés, finally able to communicate regularly in my native tongue, but they
were out of touch with Albania and so entrenched in paranoia. They had been
away from Albania for decades, missing the extension of universal education
(communist as it was) to the remote mountains, the creation of a unified
literary Albanian, and the years Albania spent learning most of the words
needed to come out of the Middle Ages and into embryonic modernity. They did
not know the Albanian equivalent of "cool," had lost their native humor
sensors in anger and malice. To them I was an arrogant, cocky young man who
told them that the way they spoke was a vanishing curiosity in Albania.
But it was hard to find Albania outside of the office. I was shocked
when a middle aged woman walking down the stairs of the Madison building
stopped and smiled at me and then said in a soft voice: "You must be
Albanian...from Kosova." The walls of the Madison building closed in on me
on hearing not only my mother tongue being spoken but also the Albanian name
(KohSOHvah) of the hotly contested land lying within Yugoslavia. Did my
nation have some special mark, a unique feature (a deformity?!) that I
embodied in the eyes of a stranger on the other side of the Atlantic? "I am
an anthropologist," she explained, assuaging my fears. "I spent a good chunk
of time in Kosova." Her Albanian was music but she had to leave town the
following day.
Two more months passed before I ran into a non-Albanian who was able to
identify Albania on the map. I was headed home to Federal Center Southwest
when the cabbie, neither an Arab nor your typical African, asked where I was
from. He was from Ethiopia, where a party called "the Albanian Communists,"
because they were trained in Albania, held power for a while after Haile
Selassie fell. Son of a bitch, I thought; Enver Hoxha, that is. The country
could not feed its own and he wasted money on spreading the cause. As the
cabbie spoke on, images of Ethiopia's deserts, Ryszard Kapucinski's tale of
Selassie's fall and Hoxha's training camps wove in my head with graphs in
Amharic and communist military marches.
In touring the city, I shied away from visiting the FBI museum because
of still fresh memories of the pervasive presence of the secret police in
Albania. A drive by the Pentagon sparked off memories of Hoxha's drooling,
vitriolic rants about the U.S. military center he depicted as the end of the
ninth circle in Hell, where Dante himself feared to tread. In Albania,
mentioning the name of the Pentagon created as if by default a tangible
ideological line. On one side, we rooted for the U.S. armed forces,
applauded the air strike against Libya, delighted at the invasion of
Grenada. We could hardly hide our glee when Saddam's mother battle aborted.
The second group, kids whose fathers had made it up the ladder of the
communist apparatus, owed their status to what the Soviet Union stood for,
even though Albania had long severed all ties with Moscow. We all went to
the same colleges, but while the pro-Soviet argument was simply not kosher,
ours was malignant heresy to the regime.
I was fascinated by the unimpeded access to the White House and the
Congress. Standing smack in the center of the Capitol dome, in awe of the
belief that the founders of America had in its future, it seemed
unfathomable to my East European mind that they would want such an open
Congress. On more cynical visits, the free access to the Capitol building
seemed to indicate that the senators and the congressmen, silk scarves
puffed up in their suit breast pockets, were supreme buffoons. People could
walk freely into the U.S. Congress because there was nothing to keep from
them in the building, no real power, no real game being played. Yet coming
from a former communist country, I still feared my humor would not escape
political scrutiny.
Washington, a more impersonal universe than New York, seemed to lack
depth. In New York, I was an Albanian thrown into a world of academics,
cafes, books and bagels. In Washington, I was an Albanian placed in concrete
buildings, going through regular cycles of first being punished to spend my
hours with raving bureaucrats and then forgiven to collect myself in empty
parks. In New York, I was part of a mass of non-Americans, if amorphous, a
conundrum to be solved by the Americans I met. In Washington, I was a ghost
who missed the New York diners and couldn't find a decent place to have Eggs
Florentine for breakfast. The coffee was lousy. The restaurants were
expensive and spread apart. What looked from outside as genuine family run
restaurants were in fact franchises. I could not say I hated Washington but
love, if any, seemed far away.
Law school was not as difficult as I thought it would be: it was far
more difficult. Maybe blissful ignorance was a precondition. I had gone over
the contradictions between law and literature innumerable times, tickled by
the idea of a lightning foray into politics. Law would provide the boot camp
to build logic in a mind long exposed to the magic of literature. I loved
literature and writing, and believed that's where my genius resided. What
tipped the scales toward law school was the growing awareness that I was a
foreigner without access to any safety nets, and I needed something certain
to live on before I could pursue literature in a foreign country.
And so it was that I elbowed my Albanian idiolect into that fortress of
tradition and conservatism called Anglo-Saxon law. The co-existence was not
easy, though. I itched to holler justice where the professors would tell me
the letter of the law.
Nightmare 2
I approach a gray building with ornate brass doors. There are knights
mounted on neighing horses in the courtyard. One of them bursts into an
echoing gallop towards me. I try in vain to tell him that there is no reason
for the charge: I am only a scribe. But then the horse stops and raises its
front legs in the air a few yards before me. I turn to find my guide telling
the knight to leave us alone; he obeys. The guide comes nearer. She's the
director of admissions. We chat as we approach the gate. She points to the
inscriptions above: "Rid yourselves of all hearts, ye who enter. Make room
for the letter of the law." I begin having violent contortions, it's my
Mediterranean temperament reacting to the inscriptions, but how do I tell
the admissions director?
Participating in discussions with a broadcaster's voice and less than
Socratic attitude, I succeeded in intriguing classmates with my accent. Yet
I watched in horror as they became mute or meek when I told them I am from
Albania. Did they fall prey to the tyranny of numbers or was my country so
unknown that it borders on the threatening? I tried again, this time with
students who had gone to Poland through the International Law Institute.
They would understand where I come from. But no. Blank. Awkwardness. The
subject jerked back to generic Eastern European topics: the nouveaux riches,
the stiff-lip friendliness of common people, the less than Anglo-Saxon
working habits.
Then came the crisis. Albania was rocked by the collapse of giant,
government-blessed pyramid schemes. The first democratically elected
post-communist government in Albania fell precipitously into dysfunction and
unraveled with amazing speed. People in the South who had invested larger
amounts in the schemes took to the streets, then took to the police
stations, secret police hide-outs and army depots. The only action the army
took was retreat. Protesters, innocent and devious alike, broke into the
military depots. In a week, the country was awash in AK-47s, mortars,
Soviet-made hand guns, Chinese rifles and local hand grenades. It was
Albania's turn to grab headlines, from the Observer of London to Italy's Il
Corriere Della Sera, Le Monde and the Washington Post.
Buried in a Daily Telegraph article was a sentence about "the
Kathmandu-like main street of Tirana." The writer saw Tirana as "the least
European of capitals." I sent the Daily Telegraph a long letter. What did
European denote? Who was entitled to tattoo himself "European" and flash his
shirt to show it off? Did the name attach if one's parents conceived him/her
in the residential areas of London, say, when Winston Churchill was playing
with the idea of the United States of Europe, or in the small flats of Paris
when Sartre gave birth to existentialism as intellectual defiance to World
War II humiliation, or in the vicinity of Buchenwald when ordinary Germans
were marched by allied troops to witness the inferno their compatriots had
constructed? Was it simply coordinates of conception west of Belarus,
Ukraine, Romania? Or north of Serbia, Croatia?
Albania has always been part of Europe, I wrote. It still is as much
part of Europe as Britain or Switzerland is. True, not in an economic sense.
Neither on an institutional level. But certainly on a moral/cultural level.
Poverty, economic straits, and institutional chaos cannot deprive Albanians
of being European. In fact, we remind Europe so much of its blunders and
outright injustices that we have become part of its repressed psyche. The
exclusionary Europe may want to ignore our existence, may try to diminish
our Europeanness, but we live inside her with our own lethargies and sparks
of genius as much as she lives inside us. The exclusionary Europe may try to
denigrate, demonize and poke fun at the Albanians and other Eastern
"tribes," but deep down she has to live with the threat of us sharing in its
wealth as much as we have to live in danger of being denied access to the
collective European treasure where our dues have gone for centuries.
TV weighed in across the board, too, though it was clear the American
media elites were baffled. Then the Pentagon evacuated the Americans who
lived in Albania, citing the potential for utter chaos and acts of violence
against foreigners. I sat in my apartment near the U.S. Marine base in
Arlington, Virginia, watching clips of U.S. ships in the Adriatic, heavy
helicopters landing on the U.S. diplomatic compound and marines with
automatic weapons guarding the evacuees. The evacuation was complete within
a few hours but Albania continued to be in the news, and the cause of the
dull headache I first attributed to sleeplessness.
For one thing, Albania was recast as the land of the Ghegs and Tosks. I
felt like screaming when I watched commentators parrot scripts lifted
unapologetically from dusty books conceived around the end of the last
century and perpetuated in guesswork published during the lunacy that was
Hoxha's Albania. My disappointment peaked when I saw an article in Newsweek
written by someone I had met at Columbia, dividing Albania into North and
South, two incompatible regions. The atavisms which popped up in the Western
press seemed misleading at best and intentional at worst but their
intellectual parents resisted criticism. A journalist in the New York Review
of Books who paraphrased Shakespeare (why is it that Shakespeare is
perceived to help an article assume high-brow status?), wrote that the
Albanians seemed to protest too much.
Helpless, I donned a T-shirt with the Albanian flag on it hoping that
it would attract attention and I would be given an opportunity to explain
what was going on. I drew sympathetic glances from a few women on the metro
and stirred hushed conversations in the corridors of the federal building I
worked in. A black computer engineer remarked that I must be a very strong
man to put on a shirt with the Albanian flag given what was going on in
Albania. He must have meant the Albanian thugs that one could see on CNN
wielding weapons at the foreign cameramen.
And then the crisis subsided. The country seemed to return to an uneasy
normalcy. An international force was invited to restore order. There were
elections, a change of government though the weapons remained on the loose.
The American press could not sustain interest and the small country
retreated into the fringes of American awareness.
This time the retreat did not go on for decades. In less than a year,
Kosova (Kosovo in Serbian) exploded. Divested of autonomy since 1989,
stripped further of essential rights, and painted as aliens in their own
land by the Yugoslav regime, the Albanians of Kosova, under the banner of
the Kosova Liberation Army, took up arms to seek independence.
With posters reading "Wider Autonomy," savants and bureaucrats huddle
again in front of cameras to make sense of the violent land that Serbs, a
ten percent fraction in Kosova, claim as the cradle of their nation and
Albanians, a 90 percent majority, claim as home to half their nation. Their
buzz words are Albanian Muslims, Serbian cradle, wider autonomy. It's easy
to talk about the silence of the West while the Albanians are slaughtered,
but how do I explain the underlying implications: a partially religious war?
the Albanians as usurpers of this mythical cradle? the Albanians as no more
than a minority? How do I make my friends see that half a nation cannot be a
minority? Would West Germany seek minority rights for, say, a Russian
controlled East Germany? How do I tell my friends that Islam means as little
in this war as the Masonic cabals did in the American Revolution? How do I
convey there is no cradle, only a myth perpetuated to make the Serbs feel
emotionally chained to a land where they are outnumbered nine to one?
I write to newspapers that the American foreign policy elites,
forgetful scions of forefathers who willed America into existence exercising
their right to self-determination in armed opposition to the British crown,
cannot preach Serb sovereignty to the Albanians. But Monica enters stage
(right) and the entire establishment unzips into Jerry Springer debates
about sex, lies and close-circuit testimony.
Albania is on her own, in her corner of the Western Balkans, no
different than the last two thousand years. And as she has done innumerable
times in the last two thousand years, she will rise like a phoenix blessed
with survival magic, cursed with bad timing and disadvantaged by the tyranny
of numbers. But in America, when Kosova settles down by carrot or stick,
Albania will recede to her normal corner. She will mutate again into a
remote, strange, unpredictable and unimportant country somewhere between the
Far East and Gibraltar.
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