Ismaél Kadaré, the eternally indignant
Until his death on July 1, at the age of 88, the giant of Balkan literature, Ismaél Kadaré, spent his life writing about the totalitarian regime which isolated his country for forty years. The tormented atmosphere of the communist era resonates in most of his novels. Return to the footsteps of one of the greatest authors of all time.
I met him a few years ago, in his apartment in Tirana. I found a man weakened, but intellectually alert. He always had the words where he needed to put them, that is to say in the wound of this world and the ills of his country, Albania.
I went there to make a documentary about him. Not to present it (he no longer needs it from his height), but to see his mark on his country, this crossroads of civilizations and religions, long confined to isolation by the communist regime of Enver Hoxa, who ruled the country for more than 40 years – until his death in 1985.
It was Kadaré who brought his country out of silence. He spent his life writing about communism and its injustices. The tormented atmosphere of the communist era resonates in most of his works. A bountiful work. Around forty novels translated into more than 40 languages, including the one that brought him notoriety in 1963, “General of the Dead Army”.
These magnificent historical epics, contemporary tragedies, give flesh to the chaos of the dictatorship. Some will be written from France where he lived in exile – since the fall of the dictatorship at the end of the 1980s.
The Albanian George Orwel
Tirana, the Albanian capital, will be one of the recurring characters in the writings of Ismaél Kadaré . This is where he lived in the 1960s, where he trained as a journalist, and where he wrote his first books, before going into exile in France to flee the regime.
At the time, it was a bloodless city, delivered to a mad dictator. Today, the city has changed. The communist grayness has given way to colors, particularly on the beautiful stone of the Belloc district. An upscale neighborhood. Flowery facades, trendy bars…
A shadow in the scenery: the property of the former dictator, Enver Hoxa, bears witness to the time when this district was reserved for dignitaries of the regime and closed to citizens. Thumbing up to the red pashas: it is there, in Tirana, just two phalanxes from this house, that Ismaél Kadaré decided to set up his base.
Is it to get as close as possible to madness to tell it better? “ Tirana was a city full of unknowns and mysteries, but these mysteries suited me well,” Kadaré answers me . I found what I liked in this atmosphere, with its enigmas, its unexplained things, hidden things that we were not allowed to say.”
Kadaré will try to uncover the secrets of this climate of worry and terror in most of his works. A particular place will irrigate his imagination: the Presidential Palace. It is one of the most impenetrable alcoves of power, which will inspire a fantastic fable: “the palace of dreams”.
It features a secret administration responsible for interpreting citizens’ dreams. It’s the 1984 Albanian version of George Orwel, with its atmosphere of purge, its rumors, plots… a vitriolic portrait of the paranoia of those in power. Symbolic of the writings of the novelist, who found in “ literature an inexhaustible arsenal, to combat the most fixed and dogmatic situations. »
The kingdom of dreams
But if his first writings are tolerated by the regime, this “Palace of Dreams” will be censored and will earn the novelist a ban from writing. But Ismaél Kadaré will not give up responding to the call of his inspiration, he remains one of the sharpest critics of the dictatorship, carried by the fantasy of an eternal Albania rich in a multicultural history, which must challenge the communism. An identity which found its best preserved expression in the city in which he grew up.
“A hilltop town… where a drunk who slides down the side of a street is very likely to end up on a roof.” It’s Gjiorikaster. An immense mountainous “rock”, impassive under its metallic sky and on its cobblestones which cling in clusters along the slopes.
Ismaél Kadaré spent his childhood in this city, which inspired his most personal work: “Chronicle of the Stone City”, a lyrical novel which takes place in a context of war, told by an imaginative young boy, who encounters violence with touching naivety.
It’s impossible not to see young Kadaré and his childhood in this family house, typical of Ottoman architecture, which excited his imagination… He grew up there during the war, then under the dictatorship. It is a small castle from ancient times, with 8 or 10 rooms, some large, empty, boarded up. The home of ghosts.
In this den of magic, Kadaré often finds himself immersed in the world of adults: their code, their secrets, their worries, their loves or their fears… He was a mischievous kid, almost always where you wouldn’t suspect him. the least. “In the attic, he managed to spy on them,” describes Alicka. He would sneak into the reserved rooms at unexpected times. In the cellar, he was witch hunting …
This is how young Kadare experiences his first emotions, and trains himself to evade the codes of a stifling society.
The citadel, which dominates the city, will offer its stones and its walls to tell the story of this oppression. This 600 meter long fortress, built in the 13th century, was occupied for 400 years by the Ottoman Empire. Later, the “rainbow” flags of the conquerors followed one another on its roofs: the Italians, the Nazis and, finally, the communist police had made it a high place of detention.
The censors catch up…
From the window of his room or from the attic, the young Ismaél Kadaré watched every day the ballet of the inmates who arrived in this prison. The image of these chained prisoners tickled the child’s curiosity and inspired several novels. Including the “Drum of the Rains”, a book which conceals its intrigues in the Ottoman era, while making mischievous winks at the communist regime of the time. Thus, the prisoners become “drops of rain in a cistern” and the revolution, which he calls for, “the rain to deliver the besieged and drive out the besiegers”…
It’s not just a play on words. It is a subtle game of hide and seek with the dictatorship, to escape repression and censorship. But in 1967, the dictatorship caught up with him. It’s the cultural revolution. An official measure which prohibits any form of expression.
The regime keeps writers away from the capital. Kadaré is sent to Berat, another vestige of the Ottoman period, stuck in the heart of the Tomorri mountains.
Today, the city seems to come out of a fairy tale, with its white houses, thick walls and its castle with 2,500 years of history . Its historic center is, like that of its neighbor Gjirokastra, listed as a UNESCO world heritage site. It tells of the coexistence of different cultures and religions which succeeded one another in the city.
But at the end of the 1960s, Kadaré discovered a city disfigured by the forced atheization decreed by the regime. All places of worship were either destroyed or diverted from their function. The forbidden religion, dead God… All that remained of its churches and mosques was a vague memory of a thousand-year-old heritage. Even the Dormition Cathedral – an Orthodox splendor that houses icons by 16th-century Byzantine painting master Onufri – is reduced to a broken toy.
But while he was supposed to write propaganda reports for the government, the martyr of religions dictated to him his most committed works, such as “The Bridge with Three Arches”, which features a priest, while the Albanian Catholic priests In those years, they suffered the most serious persecution.
Then begins the second period of the writer’s life, who will write masterpieces. Until his death on July 1, 2024, the indignado continued to find, in his native land, the freedom to travel in words as well as in history.
This documentary by Djaffer Ait Aoudia
is broadcast on Arte in 2018