By Aleksandër Beçiri
A dear friend of mine, ‘A monk in prison who lives like an ascetic and thinks like a king’ (excerpt from his poem), once told me: ‘Father died a few years ago, and Mother died before him; now, he said, I feel orphaned even officially, since I no longer have a Homeland or a Motherland.
Although I have brothers and sisters, I have not yet found any word or definition in Albanian or in any other language of the world, such as, Motërdheu or Vlladheu.’
When he whispered this sentence to me, it seemed as if his endless problems with himself had begun, but the more time passed, the more that expression took on, for me, an increasingly prophetic dimension.
The conflict between self and self
A few weeks ago, in order to convince him and even more myself that he was not right, I set off for Albania. Several questions, sometimes rhetorical and sometimes not, nag at my head every time I wait for the departure ticket. I have never managed to explain a certain tension, misunderstanding, or strange and incomprehensible non-understanding between Albanians who live in Albania and those who live outside the homeland, between Albanians of Albania and those of Kosovo, between left-wing and right-wing militants, in fact a certain passive-aggressive antagonistic conflict that is really a conflict between self and self.
What is a home and what is the Homeland/Motherland?
What is a home and what is the Homeland/Motherland? Do the word home imply walls, roof, windows, yard, apartment, villa, etc.… and is the Motherland a vague, hazy memory of the ‘land where my head fell’ (Andon Zako Çajupi)?
Without wishing to offend anyone, for me the Home and the Homeland are the people, their souls and their energy, not in the form of static furniture, barren land or immovable property, but in their form, content, substance and dynamic, dialectical morphology.
The day of departure knocked on the door, and as soon as I was on the plane, the Albanian ‘rebellion’ inside me raised its head. After a few announcements and warnings from the stewardesses, even though the aircraft began moving toward the runway, it seemed the passengers had no intention of obeying the orders of those young women, who in fact were doing nothing more or less than their job. Finally, after many drops of sweat and verbal clashes, we reached a cruising altitude of 10,000 meters.
Two hours and thirty minutes later the plane landed at Rinas airport. The screeching of the tyres as they touched the runway and the slowing down were accompanied by applause and cheering, because once again my fellow travellers had arrived alive in the homeland. The most frightened were the loud-mouthed rebels, since from their seats came a somewhat more euphoric enthusiasm. ‘What heroes,’ I said to myself.
The surprise meeting with the digital ‘thieves’
Before going to see Tirana after three years, I had just heard someone say that Albania had become a world champion in digitalization and that you could now pay anywhere with a bank card or credit card. Somewhat excited by this development, for the first time I also used my phone to pay, both at the airport and in other places within the capital. A day later, when I glanced at my bank account, I noticed that what I had actually paid was not the prices shown on the electronic terminals but an amount about 15% higher. Something like that had not happened to me in Montenegro, because there 100 euros was 100 euros and not 115 as in Tirana (where 15 euros were ‘hidden’ as bank transaction costs). Anyway, irritated, I decided to address Diella, our state minister for artificial intelligence, but I managed to restrain myself, since after all I come from abroad after three years, and how shameful it would be to grumble about an extra percentage as a contribution to the homeland. People like me are considered in Albania as ‘people with money’ (thirty years of work abroad to become a fish-of-the-sea to be fished). Hang on, I have no money, I have never had any, but I have never lacked anything since I was born. How can you miss something you never had? This paradox is explained by the fact that…
Did people go to sleep so early?
I walked through Tirana and dozens upon dozens of cranes announced construction and development. Although the completed tall towers gave an impression of modernization and progress (at least if we consider the concrete and the glass facades), they still rose like lonely fence posts, without any architectural aesthetics and not integrated into any coordinated and harmonious urban system, either with nature, with the other buildings around them, or with the corresponding infrastructure. After the darkness of night fell, it seemed to me that the towers faded, and apart from an occasional light here and there, the other apartments in them had turned into ghosts. Did people go to sleep so early, I thought to myself?
I, the wretch, fled
I approached the center and the atmosphere changed its style. Groups of young people were protesting. I could not resist the temptation, and also for nostalgic reasons linked to the student protests of the nineties, I joined the crowd. I was a veteran of protests, already gray-haired among those young students. The intervention of the police forces was so disproportionate that to manage a group of adolescents (apart from me) they needed water cannons, tear gas and even rubber bullets. “I, the wretch, fled,” I said, “because my body is no longer what it was around thirty-five or thirty-six years ago, my eyes are watering and my lungs can no longer withstand any chemical substance.” I wished them success without telling them that I too had been a child of a revolution, of a revolution that had raised its own children, as most revolutions in fact do – because revolutions really do work that way. But I kept this to myself.
We will be left without a story to tell
When I returned to the hotel, a journalist friend of mine, in her show ‘Rrefimi i Darkës’, was appealing to the protesters (including me, to some extent) as a mother, as a sister, as a citizen, not to damage the city or the sidewalks, not to burn the trash bins, not to break shop windows, and to behave like good and decent people. There was so much emotion in her words and sentences; from her eyes, tone and gestures, she radiated honesty and sincerity, she meant every word and was not playing theatre. In fact, she is a very intelligent woman and a journalist with a heart in the right place, but in those moments she seemed to me very naïve.
I wanted to invite her to exchange a few words, since two civilized people can debate and agree to disagree, but I hesitated because she is a virtual friend on screen and I only follow her programmes, interviews or broadcasts regularly. The truth is I was also tired and did not have the clarity, the energy or the calm needed to exchange a few valuable words.
I wanted to ask whether the student protesters were the cause or a symptom of a system, of a sick status quo in which gerontocracy has concentrated everything in its own hands: political and financial power at the expense of the next generation. I wanted to tell her that we, the gerontocrats (around 60+ years old), have accumulated wealth and power either by inheritance or by stealing, and perhaps a minority of us through honest work and effort, but we completely forget that someone will take it from us just as we took it; they will either inherit it or steal from us, and in the end we will be left with our fingers in our mouths and without a story to tell.
Blessed is the one who has a story to tell’!
Blessed is the one who has a story to tell’!! (adapted from a saying of William Shakespeare). What, then, is our story? Although this reflection of mine may contain deep notes of naivety, let us become two naive people together and whisper. After all, in a world where everyone claims to own intelligence, not only natural but also artificial, is being naive perhaps a self-protective privilege? Anyway, next time I will summon the courage to meet my journalist friend, for whom I have only respect and admiration.
Time passed faster than I wished and I had to go to the bathroom, but the following signage confused me. I took a photo (see below)
‘Hello – I thought, – as a man I follow the arrow and go right, but where should the women go? Straight left, crashing into the blind wall? Bravo, from this ‘modern’ airport that has been passed by the tens of millions of tourists, we have not been able to fix a functional signage? A point that doesn’t fit us!
With a Prayer Room and not a single bookshop
I left and after passport control I encountered another revealing sign; Prayer Room, a sign I had never encountered before in dozens and dozens of flights from Rinas over the last thirty years. For the first time I understood why Albania in the West is often defined as the gateway to Arabia.
This carries no negative connotation since Albania consists of a Muslim majority, but the Prayer Room sign brought me back again to the early nineties, when places of worship such as churches, mosques, synagogues and others sprouted everywhere like mushrooms after the rain, following the fall of communism. Personally, I see an essential difference between religion and faith, but that is another topic. Even though Albania is a secular state with Western tendencies, at least in principle, if my mother were alive and read this piece, she would comfort me with the words: Don’t worry son, God will make it right!
And finally, I cannot leave without mentioning a new phenomenon of this airport’s modernity. There, inside the “new and modern” airport, I didn’t see a single bookshop. (That old airport, the “unreborn” one, from about 15 years ago, had not one but two bookshops. Now it seems we no longer need books either, since the Sun reads them to us.
How much is Albania Albania and how much is the Homeland Homeland?
When the flight time approached, the words of my friend came back to my mind. I felt like a barren soul. …Without Homeland, without Motherland.
… and damn it, I remembered that famous saying of the well-known American writer and satirist, Mark Twain. – “The emigrant is born in one country, lives in another, and when he retires he is a foreigner in both countries”.
I once told my friend, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this piece and who lives “like a monk in prison”, this saying of Mark Twain, and he calmly answered me with a saying of Seneca:
“Only time is ours – everything else is foreign”.
…I have not yet retired, so I have no business with that wretched American Mark Twain, so I told myself – trust Seneca – live your time, since only it is yours. Everything else is foreign.
The gate for the Amsterdam flight opened. And I, like an official orphan, without Homeland and without Motherland, got my passport ready as a foreigner, for a journey of less than three hours from one country, which seemed foreign to me, towards another country that is also foreign.
God, have mercy on me!
Aleksander Beçiri, is a civil engineer dedicated to modular and recyclable construction, and to environmental protection. Alongside his engineering work, he is an author and translator. With knowledge of Albanian, Italian, Dutch, English, Greek, French and, most recently, Spanish, he has been active in various multilingual translation projects. A notable achievement of this translation series is ‘Aan de Rand van de Wereld: Michel Houellebecq’ (‘On the Edge of the World: Michel Houellebecq’), translated from Dutch into Albanian in 2015. The poetry volume ‘Faje Njeriu’ (published under the name Sander Gjoni) was published by Skanderbeg Books in 2008.
In 2021, the Irish publishing house Galway Academic Press published and presented his book ‘Pasardhësit e Fermës’ (published under the title ‘The Bastard’). Several short-story pieces from this book have been embraced and have found their place in the Irish literary magazine The Galway Review. His various multilingual contributions have served to build cultural bridges and enrich the literary space.