Peace cannot be brought by anyone

(Thoughts abort the book with publicistic writings “Personalities – Missionaries of Peace” of the author Paulin Rranzi)

A society, a political class or expressed more specifically, people of any layer, a nation, if they live in their country in peace, make them more noble, more human, more solidary and visionary, and above all, happier. Thus, a distinguished personality, Benedict Spinoza, said: “Peace is not the absence of war, but it is virtue, a certain mental condition, a tendency for good will, confidence, and justice.” In this sense I think that such publicist books like “Personalities – Missionaries of Peace” of Paulin Rranzi, not only are very important for the health and renewal of Albanian society and politics and should be published more, because they unfold the meaningful message that peace in a country can’t be brought by anyone, but are personalities that came out by people of this country that with their name and valuable contribution in certain fields of life create wide spaces for peace, tolerance and understanding. Thanks to a dedicated work in the summary with writings in portrait form, the author has illuminated different sides of the character of 10 Albanian personalities, who are distinguished for their valuable contribution in certain fields of social and political life in Albania and beyond. All the writings are traversed by another interesting message: ardent love for Chameria and Kosovo, which won its independence, but with war against the Serbs, in which as it is known, NATO gave an extraordinary help, because the Serbs exerted an unprecedented genocide against the Albanian population. While the missionaries of peace want the independence of Chameria to come true thanks to dialogue, understanding and tolerance, so, in a word, thanks to peace between parties. The author of the book to structure his work and to gather an abundant material has used, as to say, “up to the core” as main source the outstanding impressions of the tireless writer and journalist of Cham origin, Shefki Hysa, who has known all the personalities of the book and had friendship with them. Thanks to this material, that relates to the overall and diverse life and activity of personalities missionaries of peace, which he has drawn its portraits with mastery and publicistic pathos, the author from this material has managed to gather many situations, expressive details and tenuity. These artistic tools on one hand arouse the interest and curiosity of the reader and on the other hand deepen and make more prominent the lines of the portraits of missionaries of peace. In the writing “Man in love with peace”, dedicated to the former president of Kosovo, deceased Ibrahim Rugova, the reader will be known not only with an intriguing situation, with endless efforts, wisdom, agility of the journalist Shefki Hysa to interview the Gandhi of the Balkans in the summer of 1991, but also with their warm political conversation, from which are revealed the viewpoints of Rugova for Kosovo’s independence, his noble and peace-loving spirit, simplicity, modesty as he reached to make friend the Cham journalist and then introduce him with a rare diplomat of that time, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Even in the writing “The dissident that commiserated the political opponents”, dedicated to the deceased Pjetër Arbnori, or as he was called by all, Mandela of the Balkans, is noticed that the vital material that the author used to give form to the figure of this remarkable personality is the result of impressions and memories of the known writer and journalist from Chameria, Shefki Hysa. When the deceased Arbnori became Chairman of Assembly he had close relations with Shefki, who at that time worked at the administration of the assembly. They became friends and collaborated at the field of edition. Thanks to this collaboration, Pjetër Arbnori published some books, which were welcomed by the readers. Meanwhile with his help were brought in homeland the bones of the great Cham writer, Bilal Xhaferri.
In the book, the figure of Arbnori is drawn with love as the figure of a man, artist, with rich spiritual love, noble, approachable and communicative with simple people, debonair, funny and benevolent. But let us leave the word to the author by detaching a short passage from the book that the reader to understand better who was Peter Arbnori: “The writer Pjetër Arbnori felt delighted as a naïve child in front of the book. Burnished it with hands and fell in tears. It was his first edition and he was not very young, but 57 years old. Understandably, he would feel excited by all those things he had passed in his life. He was as human in that behavior, as with that longing ignored even his position as a senior politician. He could have been serious with a bureaucratic mask in his face, but not. He was man. He was a great man.”
After these two very impressive articles in the book follows two other stories that portray two deputies of the Albanian Parliament of Cham origin. The first writing speaks about the deputy Shpëtim Idriz, who just to lobby about the Cham issue is secedes from the group of socialist deputies, that’s why the author entitles this writing “Leader of Chameria- dream and reality”. The figure of this politician is given with the most substantially qualities and virtues as a man that does a lot for his homeland, visionary for its future, persistent and dedicated to the solution of this big issue till in the highest international instances. In the second writing, in the center of the publicistic optics of the author is the other deputy of the assembly, Sir Tahir Muhedini. His motto is transformed in the title of this writing “Our Will – Chameria”. Even the figure of this deputy is given in the book with the characteristic features of patriot, of good and peaceful man, that upon the interests of the homeland doesn’t put anything else. The author doesn’t forget to mention that deputy Muhedini comes from a Cham family massacred by Greek bandits, tells about the tumultuous life of this family when she settles in Albania, so for the sake of Chameria will, both deputies merge both of their parties in a single one, to lobby and try together that the issue of their native country to be resolved as soon as possible.
In the writing “Literature and Man” the author of the book draws the artistic portrait of a personality of Albanian letters, Hysen Sinani, describes trips to Greece in immigration of this man with rich and peaceful spiritual world, although suffered and autodidact, then he submitted the creativity of sir Sinani a quick literary analysis starting from his first novel “George”, that saw the light of publication before the arrival of democracy and pointed out some ideological problems for that time until to numerous translations of this author from different languages, which, however, have in the center the message of peace. With special respect is written in the book for an interesting figure of Cham origin, for Ibrahim Daut Hoxha, for his patriotism related with Chameria and for the unique contribution of this personality in many areas for his hometown. We can say that the writing is a complete biography of this man less known to the reader of today, but with many deeds to his beloved Chameria, starting from the exaltation of brightest figures of Chameria, making poetry for it, until to historic works related with this Albanian territory and the collection of the rich folklore of this territory. He has written a number of works for these issues, which with no doubt will remain in the archives of various works dedicated to Chameria.
Another side of the life of Ibrahim Daut Hoxha is given by the author with historical truth, understandably helped by his close friend, writer and journalist Shefki Hysa, related with numerous difficulties and barriers that Ibrahim was forced to overcome and that the class struggle revealed in front of him. But, that rigid fighter was brave, courageous, enough smart and visionary, therefore he knew to face and threw them away.
At the writing “The art of symbolism of peace” speaks about the life and activity of a Cham known sculptor, Idriz Balani, who lives and continues to create in Durres. The uniqueness of this sculptor and the art that he elicit from his hands is that his works always transmit messages of peace, kindness and tolerance. As we are talking about this, even I that am writing these lines am a friend of Idriz and together we have been on a visit to Kosovo. It’s true what the book tells that Idriz doesn’t detach the love for Chameria from the love for Kosovo. I have seen this with my own eyes and moreover this is proved by many sculptural works that he has created in Kosovo along the works for Chameria, the portrait of her famous son, Bilal Xhaferri etc. Thus, “an intellectual like Idriz Balani knows not only to create, but also to well manage his art, as a unique value in the service of civilization. He knows well that the symbolic of art is expression of peaceful world of the artist and to know to administer an artistic world, means to be, personality – missionary of peace.”
While reading the writing summarized in the book “Poet sacrificed for Chameria”, dedicated to a real artist, to the poet Namik Mane, you don’t have how to not feel emotions interweave with a deep pain for this simple man, this patriot of the highest scale, heart of compassion and with a rare spiritual world, who, as an progeny of a very well known family in Chameria, his heart couldn’t have been pit from where to stemmed love and pain for the evil fate of what the poet calls: “Chameria, Chameria/Pergola with my tear.” The verses of Namik Mane derive precisely from this heart-shaft, because he can’t understand himself without his homeland, for which, the poet says: My chest burns of so many years/From a longing that has no dimensions/And may the oceans be dried/Don’t fit my longing/Only you can keep it inside/In thy chest, Chameria!”
The author of the book unfolds with sever and harsh colors the tableau of life of this man with noble and peaceful spirit, the sufferings and hardships that his family and he suffered from the communist persecution. It is needless to add that his life if we speak of a figurative parallelism closely resembles the fate of his homeland. Being close friend of the legend of Chameria, to the poet Bilal Xhaferri, Namik Mane in the most difficult moments recalls his unforgettable friend, as he recalls his other friends, who stayed close and always helped him. After Bilal, he is the poet who has sacrificed more for homeland and his beloved hometown Chameria, so its contribution will remain unforgettable. In the book is also included a writing entitled “Message of light and peace”, which talks about the creativity and the messages it radiates, of the writer and researcher Sazan Goliku, nickname of the famous Albanian author Pandeli Koçi. Through a detailed and serious analysis by professional side, the author highlights the characteristic features of the poetry of this creator, which is distinguished for its conciseness, diverse thematic it conveys, for the curve of the verse and above all for human and noble ideas that are brought forth in it. A special place in the writing is dedicated to the hard work of Sazan Goliku for the study of literature that publishes in Kosovo, whether for adult or children. Furthermore, Sazan Goliku in this direction remains the initiator of the study of this literature with an abundant, diverse and enviable production. The book is closed with the writing “Writer and origin” where is unfolded the panorama of life and wide and manifold activity of one of the most prominent missionaries of peace, well-known writer and publicist of Cham origin Shefki Hysa. This writing compressed with facts and arguments leaves a scar for the hard and dedicated work that this personality has completed with devotion and dedication for the benefit of Cham issue. After is described the troubled life of Shefki and his family, class persecution and continued efforts of this young man with strong character to be formed each day as an intellectual and personality, the writing later passed on some features of his abundant creativity and in many areas until to numerous translations and edits. Thanks to acquaintances and numerous friends, Shefki thanks to his perseverance accomplishes some very important activities for the Cham issue as bringing the bones of the great poet Bilal Xhaferri in homeland, continuation of the publication of the magazine “Eagle’s wing”, the direction of the Cultural association “Bilal Xhaferri” etc. An innovation was the creation of the international organization “Diplomatic Mission Peace And Prosperity”, conceived as a mission of peace, which lobbies for peace and prosperity in the Balkans and worldwide, according to the best model that offers American democracy for countries in development. Look what is further said in the book for this personality: “It was this new venture, which would focus more the writer Shefki Hysa in the work of tirelessly missionary for Peace and Prosperity. As a missionary of peace, he began to create many new connections with the intellectual world, inside and outside Albania. Thanks to the continuous and full of successes work, his name and biography are included in many prestigious encyclopedia of the world”.
This book of the author Paulin Rranzi that contains enough interesting information and not very familiar for the Albanian reader will surely be browsed with curiosity, because it is in the benefit of the peace and echoes the human and understandable messages, tolerance, cooperation etc., for which nowadays all the layers of Albanian society need more than never.

Sokol Jakova
Writer

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A book for peace is a book for God

(Notes about the book “Personalities – Missionaries of Peace” of the publicist Paulin Rranzi)

While reading the book of the publicist Paulin Rranzi, Personalities – Missionaries of Peace, I reminded the word of the president John Kennedy: “If humanity does not vanish war, war will vanish humanity”. This prophetic warning of this great missionary of peace make us read with honor and curiosity every book, article or literary work that is dedicated to peace secular aspiration of men in every place of the world. The author of this book had clear the idea that the existence and human development can not be understand without the understanding and agreement between the members of a family, of a social group and especially between nations and states. The idea of peace is inseparable by the ontological concept of freedom. The author has come to the conclusion that there can be no real peace between the right and injustice, between the oppressed and oppressor, between the hungry people and affluent. Thus, in the presentation of life and missionary activity of personalities that are presented in this book, the author emphasizes their real values as human who at the core of activity and creativity have the ideal of peace and freedom, prosperity and social harmony. It is true that the term “war for peace” can be called contradictory but means and ways in which is fought have determined the degree of humanism and rationality with which is intended the realization of peace ideal.
The book is opened with the writing “Men in love with peace (Gandhi of the Balkans – Ibrahim Rugova)” that breaks down the features and outlook of Kosovo leader through the meeting and interview with the writer and journalist Shefki Hysa. Ibrahim Rugova, till in the first steps of his political activity tried to solve in peaceful way the big problem of the existence of his people. Even though in front of a politic of a chauvinist – communist – fascist state, he stayed with consistency, without being swayed by the visible and invisible whirlpool of the policy and diplomacy traditionally rooted with anti Albanian direction. He has been a follower of the paradigm of the great ancient philosopher, Sokrati: Peace with others comes only from inner peace, so, from the lack of violent impulse and aggressive tendencies of the individual or a nation.” From another point of view is analyzed the political and literary personality of Pjeter Arbnori, who although suffered almost 30 years the calvary through the jails of dictatorship, kept the kindness and love for democratic and human peace and spirit even when he was elected and worked on top of Albanian state. The figure of the writer Bilal Xhaferri, that traverses as a golden thread the pages of this book, is that of man who held on his back since birth, strikes of destiny and our history. He made no error, no fault, only if it is called so being an untired worker, free thinker, brilliant creator of higher levels of Albanian literature, militant to death for the overthrow of stalinist – enverist dictatorship in Albania and for liberation of Kosovo from Serbian bloody hooves. Peaceful spirit and soul of freedom were merged into a single, to be deposited as hot magma into the solid structures of the verses and stories in his books.
Chameria, Albanian province cruelly martyred and without nation, is on the focus of this book through confessions for some personalities that are subject of the writings. But we don’t encounter any spirit of revenge and hatred for the perpetrators of genocide toward cham population. It is required only justice on the basis of acts and documents universally approved and especially by the united Europe, where we tend to be part of it formally. So, there can be no peace, emphasizes the author Paulin Rranzi, without being put into place the justice; can not be maintained the normality and dignity of a nation, where killers are honored and are raised memorials and their sons still make open calls for war and carnage. The writer Hysen Sinani notes in the preface of the book that “there are represented all the regions, from south to central Albania and till to Kosovo”. This geographical range gives the book Albanian size and expresses the great truth of the peaceful character of the Albanians even in the most severe existential conditions and circumstances.
When finished reading the book of Paulin Rranzi, you are convinced that only a democracy lively and rooted in the soul of the people can allow an essential and quiet cleaning, therefore the achievement of a peace, where true freedom flourishes.

Lekë Mandreja
Writer

Characters – the first Albanian Missionaries of Peace

(Impressions from the book “Personalities – Missionaries of Peace” of the author Paulin Rranzi)

The book “Personalities – Missionaries of Peace of the author Paulin Rranzi surprised me very much. It was really amazing the way that how this young author compare characters from different fields of life and make them speak the same international language: Language of Peace.
Once finished reading the book you could not stay without saying: Yes, these are the Albanian model of warriors of peace! These are the first Albanian missionaries for peace, the author Paulin Rranzi himself, who resemble the best models of warriors of peace worldwide. These are also the first characters of Albanian contemporary literature dedicated to the world peace.
This reasoning gives the right to come to the conclusion that finally even in Albanian modern literature blew the wind of Peace messages sender. The epoch of Skanderbeg, our national hero, who the old and new west literature reflect in many works as a great warrior, savior of European civilization, savior of human Peace, is being regenerated. Who are these lucky personalities that were transformed into first Albanian characters dedicated to Peace? I will not exaggerate if I say that, if not all, the majority of them are my acquaintance or friends. Let me start with the president Ibrahim Rugova. Once he was one of the best writers of Kosovo, my contemporary and colleague. He leaded The League of Writers and Artists of Kosovo and meanwhile I was chairman of The League of Writers and Artists of Albania.
Rugova was a prominent activist in the politics of Kosovo. Even I didn’t remain back in Albanian politics. But more than politics, what united me and Rugova was the literary creativity, ideals to serve humanity as warriors of pen. Be understood that Rugova worked a lot as a politician till he transformed in the symbol of Peace for Kosovo and the Balkans, the same as Gandhi for India. It is a great honor for the young author Paulin Rranzi, who has treated the figure of Rugova under the viewpoint of the missionary of peace.
Pjetër Arbnori, Mandela of the Balkans, as the author qualifies him, was one of the most prominent men that Albanian nation has brought out in XX century. In the early ‘90th he was deputy of Democratic Party, whereas I was deputy of Social Party. He was dissident writer that came from the prison of former communist dictatorship, whereas I was a writer that seemed to have served communism. As to say, we were political opponents; however we became friends, especially during the years 92-96, when he was chairman of the Assembly of Albania. In that period a part of democrats behaved roughly with former communists, the same as the communists of the years 45 behaved with former rich people, representatives of the reversed former classes.
On the contrary, Pjetër Arbnori behaved friendly with me, treated me as an opponent of political beliefs not as an enemy, as some others tried to act. An example: I remember that the publisher Shefki Hysa, our mutual friend, asked me to do a foreword for the book of new talent and I did it. The book was published with my foreword and was welcomed by the readers. It was also reflected in media and television. Then, TVSH worked as the only television in Albania. A young journalist in one of TV shows treated the values of the book, adhering my evaluations for the author in the foreword that accompanied the edition. For this action the journalist was fired from work with the motivation as a propagandistic of a figure that belonged former communist regime.
Poor journalist complained to the publisher Shefki Hysa and he, indignant rightly, discussed the problem with his friend Pjetër Arbnori, chairman of Assembly, institution from which depended RTSH. Pjetër Arbnori, after listening to his friend Shefki Hysa, said that Dritëro Agolli with his values as a writer, despite left beliefs as human, was a national wealth that didn’t deserve to be infringed, on the contrary should be protected and evaluated. He immediately called the director of TVSH and ordered to bring back to work the journalist, and even to do a special emission for the figure of the writer Dritëro Agolli. And so happened.
This was Pjetër Arbnori, a figure that with his work fed social peace, didn’t undermine it as did some fanatics representatives of Democratic Party that urged class hatred.
It is known that I belonged to communism, however I wasn’t a blind fanatic of communist regime, I was part of its utopia, part of that beautiful dream, of those ideals that communists had to transform the world in a social paradise where would predominate peace and human equality that was never realized in practice. Communist ideals were misused by the communist dictators and in the name of those ideals was raped intelligence and political opponents, was exerted genocide against a part of humanity. I was a writer, I didn’t belong repressive clans of former dictatorship. My creativity is censored from the communist censorship, maybe a little bit, but is censored the same as the dissident literature of Pjetër Arbnori, Bilal Xhaferri and many other writers, although I was also chairman of the League of Writers and Artists of Albania. I was Dritëro Agolli, I was myself, I was part of the world of creators that in soul and in actions are opponents of all powers. Based on my ideals as a writer, despite the directives of the former communist regime, I have helped and encouraged talents like the writer Namik Mane, former political persecuted, the writer Shefki Hysa (without mentioning some others), who are two of the most characteristic characters of the book “Personalities – Missionaries of Peace” of the author Paulin Rranzi.
The figure of my friend Shefki Hysa unites all the characters in this book. He is the founder of all this Odysseus that Paulin describes, is not only missionary, but head missionary of this mission shaped in the form of a publication in the service of Peace. I really estimate his figure, as he estimates me. Dritëro Agolli has served Peace with his pen. And if one day the author decided to publish a second volume of this publication, I have the belief that my personality would be included in the book as a message sender of Peace. Ask my precious storyteller Shefki Hysa for this and I am sure he will prove my hypothesis. He will prove it that as a talented writer belong to divine race of creators and like all divine knows very well the character of his friends. I am one of his declared friends. I am Dritëro Agolli. I am myself. I could have been part of Democratic Party, as many former communists. I didn’t. I accepted to remain socialist, part of better people that tend from left beliefs. The same as progressive leftists of the entire world who aspire social peace. I never betrayed my beliefs and ideals, I never went after a power for any personal benefit, on the contrary I put in the service of my nation, as the best Albanian democrats that turned the sight toward European civilization.
So am I, Dritëro Agolli, missionary of peace, that’s why I attentively read the book “Personalities – Missionaries of Peace”, that’s why I enthusiastically wrote these rows for its rare values. I am Dritëro Agolli, a missionary of peace still undeclared. Do not forget. Respect the warriors of peace for their sacrifices in the service of worldwide future paradise.

Dritëro Agolli
Writer

Lekë Mandreja, Albanian Writer

Ambassador Lekë Mandreja, Albanian Writer and Journalist

Three brothers, the inception of a legend

(Marin, Paulin and Ernest Rrazi – a world of challenges)

One day, my friend, Aleksandër Zefi or the Elder of Shkodra as his acquaintances used to call him, told me:
– Chief, when will be the case I want to introduce you with some good friends, very rare friends, as you like them to have. They are three brothers, businessmen from Kaç village of Shkodra.
– No objection, if you like we can meet even today, – I replied.
– Ehe, where to find them today because the live in Italy, – replied the Elder as embarrassed.
– Well, when they will be in Italy then, – I said without discussing any longer.
A couple of weeks had gone when suddenly the Elder came at my office with another person, a boy about thirty years old, apparently with a medium body and with black beard. Me and the Elder hugged each other without giving too much importance to the companion.
– This is Nesti, Ernest Rranzi for whom I have told you, – opened the discussion the Elder presenting me the boy.
I remained for an instance with the shoulder mounted.
– He is my friend, one of the three brothers who live in Italy. Do you remember, I have told you something about them…
– Aha, yes! – I reminded and shook the hand to the newcomer.
– I am an intellectual as well despite my beard, I like to have this beard, – said Nesti as he wanted to justify his look which did not gave you a good impression immediately, while he was shaking my hand.
– Even the scientist do like having beard, it is a normal thing, – I laughed and kept on shaking his hand as I wanted to show some affection, as we were old friends.
I invited them to sit down and started to discuss slowly. Nesti told me that he was the younger of the three brothers. He was born in Kaç of Shkodra on 3 October 1981 in a family with political problems as the majority of Shkodra’s families which were opponents of the communist regime. In the middle of the years ’90, with the idea for a better life, he had gone in the tracks of his brothers emigrating in Italy. They were get together and worked hard in migration. Was the will of God and they went ahead. They became rich. They made their families in Italy. There they constructed even their business. Later on they came in village, in Kaç, and constructed new homes. In 2005, in their zone, they created an Albanian firm with the given name “Tre vëllerizit shpk”. They invested and set up also a factory with the name “Marina” for the production of mineral water and soft drinks.
Now, their Italian and Albanian have more than 100 persons employed from the village, district, Albania and Italy. So, the three brothers helped also their co-villagers and their acquaintances. Nesti kept on talking and his life with such an interesting flow, imposed me respect. I thought that the Elder was not wrong in selecting his friends. So, the three brothers must be indeed good friends as it was spoken. Nesti told me that the older brother, Marin, leaded the business in Albania while Paulin, the second one, who was even the most versatile in relation with foreign partners and investors, leaded the businesses in Italy. They had their firm in the environment sector in the region of Lombardy and some common firms with Italian businessmen.
Nesti himself took after the environment sector. The collaboration diplomacies with banks, partners and investors were carried out by Paulin. He was born for this affairs. And he was successful. He was full of ideas and realizations.
I was listening the confession of Nesti and I imagined the hard work the three brothers used to make. United in a work force such harmonic, those three were certainly as a inexhaustible energy source, as a gigantic hydro power plant turbine put in movement by the river of their wisdom and the experience they had facing the life’s challenges in migration.
Nesti told me that by nature they were people with charity spirit and that they liked too much the idea to work for Peace, but they did not know how to do this. Albeit they had the opportunity they wanted to collaborate with the organization leaded by me. So, to be members of Diplomatic Mission Peace and Prosperity.
I replied that I felt honoured to have those successful boys as collaborators in my mission for peace. I told him that it was my desire to know also Marin and Paulin.
Ernest Rranzi, be understood, was too much pleased by my reception and conversation. They greeted each other as they were old friends, with the promise that they would collaborate for long in the noble mission to return back peace everywhere in the world.
It is known that good people find very easy the opportunity of collaboration. Without passing a month by the meeting with Ernest, came to know Albania the investor Jennifer Lim from South Korea accompanied by her two advisors. Among others I planned even a visit in Kaç village in the factory of the three brothers from Shkodra.
The Kaç village is situated somewhere after Bushat, in the lowland beside the Vau i Dejës hydro power plant. So, it is a part of the municipality of Vau i Dejës. The land where is situated the village, one of the most fertile area, was full of constructions, from the most beautiful. Somewhere between them was set up the buildings complex of “Marina” factory, distributed in one area of some hectares. Its first view is impressive. It was really an investion with values for the area.
In the factory entrance Marin was waiting for us, the older of the three brothers. After we greeted with each others, he accompanied us in the inner environments of the buildings complex. It was indeed a modern factory, with equipments and machinery of the last type which must be envied even by the best European investors. As it seem, the three brothers were boys with a bright future.
Marin Rranzi, with a sportsman body and with a debonair view, accompanied us from one department to the other and explained everything with his coarse and slow voice, although there was no room for explanations, the work used to talk itself.
The investor Jennifer Lim was marvelled by all those he she saw and she was felt as in her home. She said that she knew very well the process of the production of mineral water because even she had such a factory in Korea. So, there was the opportunity to collaborate together in the future. Even the lunch prepared for us, after the visit in the factory, was a surprise. We had lunch and discussed very long in a picturesque local somewhere in the green grove in the shore of the hydro power plant lake.
Marin talked time after time for their life and work. He talked about the roots of their family. He confessed that they had the origin from the Rranzaj’s mead of Bushat. So, they are local indigenous for more than 600 years. They had moved only for a period of time obligated by the persecution of Turkish invaders and were placed in Orosh of Mirdita, in Gjakova of Kosova and later on they turned back in Dedaj of Mirdita. About one hundred and fifty years before they turned back and were placed definitively in Kaç where they are situated even now. So, that land where their house and factory stood they had inherited grandfather after grandfather. Generation after generation they were an intellectual family that had combined the job of state official with the opportunities that the agriculture and livestock economy in the countryside provided. Their grandfather Gjergj Simon Rranzi was a real patriot, as well as their ancestors.
The father of three brothers, Jak Rranzi, of the birthday 14 May 1941, was electrician. He worked about 30 years in different areas of Shkodra distinct, whereas 5 last years, before he retired, he worked in the water company of Vau Dejes. He was eligible man and worked very much and couldn’t bear injustice. He often rebelled and talked a lot against bureaucratic actions of communist rule, although he was a member of the Labour Party. It hurt in his soul that wrong policies of the communist state were making the Albanians poorer and poorer. He said that even in Kosovo under Serbian rule, people were richer: every house had its own tractor. Apparently in 1973 he fed up with rebellious behaviour, therefore the communist leaders dismissed from the ranks of the party and for their family started the political persecution. Many times he was threatened to be arrested. However people appreciated very much his word and kept as one of the most honourable men of the area.
Jak Rranzi died in 26 June 2010. He left his wife and eight children, five girls and three boys who loved each-other very much. They escorted him from this world with the memorial epitaph: “In June our father died. In the hands of his sons he died and to Christ Jaku went. In glory and parris, may his name never be blotted!”…
Now five sisters and three brothers find consolation in their mother. She is called Gonxhe and is about 65 years old. The entire life she has worked in cooperative and after 1990, with the advent of democracy, she devoted to her children and home. Marin Rranzi spoke even for himself. He confessed that he was born in Kaç on 12 January 1972. After high school and army, as the communist system collapsed, he as many other Albanians, with the dream of a more beautiful life, took the path of exile. He worked in Italy. The three brothers raised their business in Italy and Albania. Marini says that the three brothers are truly successful in business, but their work has not been easy. They have made all sorts of jobs from the most tedious in emigration, until they were employed in the Italian company “Teknova Ambiente”, which is now their property. So, they have worked day and night very much until they came to light. Now Marin Rranzi is returned with his whole family in birthplace and is committed to managing the business, which they raised with savings of their work in emigration. Marin tells that the three brothers with their work also help the fellows. They also work for the welfare of the village. They have realized with their investments the lighting of the streets and environments; have also built the bridge that links the village with other areas. So, they are a great help for local government of Shkodra. No wonder the three brothers are well known with the speaker of Parliament, Mrs Jozefina Topalli and the President of the Republic, Mr Bamir Topi, who are grateful politicians that have appreciated very much the contribution of Rranzi family into Albanian life.
Paulin Rranzi, the second brother, came to the headquarter of the organization Diplomatic Mission Peace and Prosperity with the desire to cooperate as a Missionary of Peace. At first glance he is an impressive young man of athlete stature above average, with typical behaviour of the diplomat. During the conversation it is immediately understood that he is an erudite intellectual with comprehensive information on life and the world. We were met and known about 15 years ago, but the interest he was showing for the mission he is leading now, urged and deepened the formerly friendship in a new way toward common ideal: Personalities – Missionaries of Peace. He very quickly became part of the staff of our mission.
Here is how can be shortly portrayed the biography of this young man with dreams, desires and numerous ideals for a fighting life in the service of Human Peace: Paulin Rranzi was born in Kaç of Shkodra distinct on 12 March 1978. He is graduated for justice. Now he lives in Bargamo of Italy. He is one of the most successful Albanian businessmen. He is leader and shareholder in some companies that operate in different areas in Italy and Albania. He is member of the board of directors of the international organization Diplomatic Mission Peace and Prosperity. Paulin Rranzi, with his work as a Missionary of Peace and humanitarian, tries to help people in need. Thanks to the commitment for Peace, he has established friendships with many prominent personalities in the world, especially with those of Vatican. Paulin Rranzi, as journalist and writer, has published a series of writings on the progress of peace in the world and its missionaries. So, he is not only businessman, but even worthy member of the intellectual elites in Italy and in Albania, willing to sacrifice as all the best patriots for the Albanian national issue and World Peace. Paulin, as all missionaries’ personalities, is keen on family life and speaks for his children with that great compassion that characterizes the large-hearted fathers.
As a Peace Missionary and charitable personality, Paulin is decorated with the Cross of Merit by the international organization AMES, based in Italy. Three brothers, Marin, Paulin and Ernest Rranzi, with colours of their life more or less the same, in the eyes of the people interested to cooperate with them, with that world full of challenges and adventures tend toward the same ideal, towards the dreams to change and improve the lives of individuals that surround, recall the legend of the three former French musketeers. The three brothers, as three modern musketeers, fight together for justice, peace and development, for an earthly paradise in Albania, in the Balkans and in the world…

Shefki Hysa
Writer

The dissident that commiserate the political opponents

Mandela of the Balkans- Pjeter Arbnori

When discussing for the Albanian intellectual elite, my friend, the writer Shefki Hysa, unequivocally stated that one of our most prominent intellectuals was and remains Pjeter Arbnori, although he has already died. He never mention the word death, because, in his opinion, Pjeter Arbnori, this versatile erudite, has left behind a work as large and enduring, as due to it he has passed the threshold of immortality. So, for the writer Shefki Hysa, the life and work of the personality Pjeter Arbnori are immortal values in the precious treasure of the Albanian national culture.
Although the current policy is silent on this figure, trying to cover with a sinister veil of forgetfulness, my friend the writer Shefki Hysa smiles with a sort of enigmatic irony that is not known to whom it is addressed and, as always visionary, argues that personalities like Pjeter Arbnori emulate even with their physical absence. It is known that his soul is already part of the Divine Universe and is present in our world in the form of an angel, often justifies the writer Shefki Hysa. The little-soul politicians, part of the evil world, for sure that the presence of angelic deeds throttle them. And obviously the mischief of these souls set in motion that ancient mechanism that keeps alive the duality between good and evil. Only in this way can be explained the silence of the figure of the writer and dissident politician, Pjeter Arbnori – Mandela of the Balkans. Yes, yes, Mandela of the Balkans, is the famous Albanian Pjeter Arbnori, as is the former president of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova – Gandhi of the Balkans! – My friend Shefki Hysa says without hesitation. Don’t you believe?! The intellectuals Arbnori and Rugova are two personalities missionaries model of Peace in the Balkans, just as the Indian Gandhi and the African Mandela worldwide. Tell me about one another intellectual who resembles a little bit with their work in Albania, Kosovo and the Balkans, the writer Shefki Hysa insists. And indeed that nobody comes to mind to challenge him and my friend Shefki Hysa, this word’s magician hypnotic with the magic of his speech. Enough to put him in sensibility and Shefki Hysa brings a thousand arguments to defend his thesis: Arbnori – Albanian Mandela of the Balkans.
In January 1992, when it was newly established Publishing House “Bilal Xhaferri” dissident poet Namik Mane urged his friend Shefki Hysa to be interested in creating any acquaintance with the former political prisoner Pjeter Arbnori. It was rumored that he was a special writer, for the nature of his creativity (it was said that he had written some anti-communist works in prison), althought he had not published anything yet. He had made about 30 years political imprisonment, just as the South African leader Mandela, and now he was one of the main regional leaders of the opposition, Democratic Party. He represented the opposition of Shkodra, but in the intellectual circles was claimed that for the ideas, ideals and skills Pjeter Arbnori could become one of the main leaders of this political force, which may soon come to power.
Shefki Hysa didn’t made the word two his colleague, Namik Mane. He found the opportunity during a cultural activity that the leaders of the Association of the former politically persecuted organized and he became acquainted with Pjeter Arbnori. He listened attentively with his debonair appearance and entirely came alive when he recognized that it was created a publishing house with the name of the dissident writer Bilal Xhaferri, which would exalted not only the values of his work, but all the best values of the Albanian dissident writers. He shortly told that he was recognized with the creative activity and the anti-communist ideas of Bilal Xhaferri in prison and he felt amazed by that extraordinary talent, his bad luck, exile and death abroad. Then he said that he had also written a little in prison, secretly, with codes. He was even re-sentenced with ten years when they seized the manuscript of a novel with anti-communist ideas. Now he was dealing with a novel he had written in prison. It was still with handwriting and during the evenings he tried to oppress with an old machine of the brand “Olivetti” borrowed to a friend. As soon as he finished it they would sit to discuss.
They agreed to meet soon.
Two months later, on March 31, 1992 Democratic Party won parliamentary elections and took the power. Pjetër Arbnori, deputy of Shkodra, was elected chairman of the Albanian Parliament. Many intellectuals labeled this choice as a good omen for the Albanian culture.
The poet Namik Mane exalted to the colleagues for his foresight. Especially to the writer Shefki Hysa, who didn’t stay without humorously tamper him: “All the people already know, Namik Mane, that you are the most intuitive type that the world of letters has ever known”!
The poet Namik Mane jumped upwards badly inducing.
“You say it in jest, but I’m really foresayer. Look Pjetri, your friend, became someone in Albanian policy. If you remember, even for our poet Dritero Agolli I had once said that he was a great poet and person, with a great heart, but you didn’t believe, till you became friend and closely knew him. At the beginning you praised only Ismail Kadare! Am I or not a visionary?!” And to not defrauded to the poet Namik Mane was a really intuitive man. Sometime, in the mid-60s’s, he was interned together with the dissident Bilal Xhaferri in Hamalle of Durres, after the escape of Bilal he didn’t burn his poems, although he risked of being imprison, but hid them with the idea that there would come a day that will be overturned the communist dictatorship and they would serve as evidence of dissent and as rare value for future generations. And so it happened. Behold, he was now a respected personality even for the fact that he had preserved some of the best creations of Bilal Xhaferri, not only his own.
Not even two weeks had passed from the day when Pjeter Arbnori was elected president of the Assembly of Albania when he announced the publisher Shefki Hysa that he wanted to have a coffee together. Preferably to meet in Durres, in the beach neighborhood, where he was temporarily housed in one of the apartments of a government residence.
Naturally, former political prisoner was still homeless, without a home of his own in Tirana. The publisher Shefki Hysa decided to deepen the friendship with the writer Arbnori. He discussed even with the poet Namik Mane and left that initially he went to meet him, since he was from Durres and the evening was the most appropriate time for friendly conversation face to face. Namik went two consecutive nights, but didn’t find him. He was said that he came back later. Shefki Hysa then decided to go and to meet him a Sunday, noon. And so he did.
Finally they met. The writer Shefki Hysa shortly told him about his origin as cham, then he explained the mission of the Publishing House “Bilal Xhaferri” in the service of Albanian and worldwide cultural values. Pjeter Arbnori talked about his life. He told that he was born in Durres on 18 January 1935. He had passed an ordinary childhood. He finished the high school in Shkodra, brilliantly, in 1953. Perhaps for this reason he was allowed to work as a teacher, in Shkodra and Dukagjin, but was soon dismissed from work for political reasons. He finished the military duty and then worked as a laborer in Xhafzotaj and in SMT of Shijak. He entered the University with false documents and for two and a half years he gave the exams of five years taking the diploma with the motivation excellent in 1960. Since the age of 14 he began taking part in illegal groups against dictatorship. With a group of friends he distributed tracts with anti-communist content. He created a social democratic organization with an anti-communist program, but, in 1961, he was discovered and arrested. It was spring of 1961 when he was condemned to death for activities against the communist state, for agitation and propaganda. Later the death penalty was turned in 25 years imprisonment. Having done 18 years imprisonment he was also sentenced with other 10 years as anti-communist agitator and for the writing of the novel ” The house left half” (Shtëpia e mbetur për gjysmë) and other creations that were discovered by the guards.
After leaving the prison, in 1989, a year before the collapse of communist dictatorship and democracy arrival, a period in which was softened somewhat the oppressive ferocity of dictatorship because of economic problems that the country experienced, was forced to enter as a pupil to become a carpenter.
Once the democratic movement began, he took an active part in all demonstrations of Shkodra. With his initiative and of other anti-communist people in Shkodra knocked the bust of Stalini. He attended the first anti-communist movement in Tirana. On December 12, in the tribune of the founder rally of the Democratic Party, in Tirana, he handed Azem Hajdari and Sali Berisha a message from democratic and anti-communist Shkodra. On December 13, 1990 he was one of the main organizers of the anti-communist demonstration in Shkodra, where was thrown the bust of the dictator Enver Hoxha. For his continuing anti-communist activity he was elected chairman of PD for Shkodra. Later he was also elected as a MP. Without passing the year, there were new elections and he was re-elected MP.
PD won the most seats and it is known that it took the right of the government of the country, for the first time as an anti-communist democratic force, on March 31, 1992. Finally he was believed the task of the Chairman of the Assembly of Albania and the former political prisoner, entered as a leader in the office of former dictator Enver Hoxha, the former leader of the Communist Party. So, the headquarter of former central committee of the APL was already turned in headquarter of the Albanian Assembly. And the headquarter was directed by him, a former political prisoner.
Behold, the power of God had brought that he teaches good works in the service of Peace intellectual people, peace missionaries, emphasized Pjeter Arbnori in a moment with an appearance somewhat of a winner. Maybe it was the first time that he was opened so in good faith, as the creator in the eyes of the creator, because instantly he took the look somewhat tired with that voice with delaying tone. Then Pjeter Arbnori, like all creators, with emotion about the fate of his work, spoke for a novel that liked a lot. Its events took place somewhere in Nazi Germany, during the period of Reich the third. They were events more or less the same with those that had experienced Albanians during the rule of the dictatorial communist regime. So, he treated Nazism and Communism as two parallel world with the same content, regardless the particularities. In essence, were the same dictatorship that ruthlessly suppress any divine and human worth. They were a modern day savagery, the same as the barbarity of ancient barbarians, so not in vain he had titled it “When the Vikings flock” (Kur dynden Vikingët)…
Pjeter Arbnori, after a little thought, said he had deliberately shifted events in Germany, with the thought that even if this work was discovered in prison, the censors didn’t take it and didn’t punish him again. It was enough that he was sentenced for 10 years more for the novel “The house left half” (Shtëpia e mbetur për gjysmë). It is known that censors of the communist dictatorship appeared as anti-nasist and when they read a material with anti-nasist spirit, they would rub their hands from pleasure, instead of censored it. But destiny wanted not to let that work be discovered, which like many others he had written across the white sides of the newspaper’s pages “Voice of people” (Zëri i Popullit), organ of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania.
He handed the novel written with a typewriter in a paper of official format. There were about forty pages, adjusting here and there with blue ink pen. His hand easily trembled of emotions just as he suffered from parkinson.
The publisher took the printed sheets and glanced the two-three first pages. It was understood since the first lines that it was a work written by a master. It began with a saying of the indian Nehru: “Fascism and communism are brothers”. The publisher Shefki Hysa felt excited as an archaeologist who suddenly discovers a rare fact that affects the course of human history. Instantly he reminded the phrases of some pseudo politicians who had begun to advertise that in Albania there were no genuine dissent. And those who made such statements should be the neo-communist of the post-communist with the desire to reduce and diminish the values of the former politically persecuted as true catalysts that accelerated and brought the collapse of the Albanian communist regime.
On the contrary neo-communists claimed that they set in motion with their wisdom the mechanism of the decomposition of dictatorial system. So, they claimed that they collapsed communism not the dissent… They were the thought and the movement of the Albanian dissidence.
However the publisher Shefki Hysa, while carrying on his hands the manuscript of Pjeter Arbnori work and while watching with the eyes of the mind how his youth was vanished in prisons, turning into this old gray beard and fallen hair man that was in front of him, thought otherwise. Here was the vivid model of the Albanian Dissident, Pjeter Arbnori.
So, it had existed, was rooted at the tired intellectuals in the province, at the individuals rebelled in the spirit through towns and outlying villages, to the internees, prisoners and all the non-satisfied, that the regime had denied the possibility of self-expression. He was at Bilal Xhaferri and Vilson Blloshmet, poets who paid fiercely their rebellion against the dictatorship…
Exactly, with the publication of their works, works as the one he had in hand, Shefki Hysa publisher would give a blow to the pseudo- politicians trends that together with the Albanian national wealth unjustly wanted to take also her dissidence.
The book “When the Vikings flock” (Kur dynden Vikingët) of the writer Pjeter Arbnori was published in August of 1992. The writer Shefki Hysa was in the role of editor, publisher, also wrote the foreword for the novel. Pjeter, graciously acknowledged all the comments and suggestions, he also made the processing of the material as the editor required and the novel was really a surprise for Albanian readers. The only thing that the author adamantly asked was the presentation on the cover of the book of the black broken cross of the Nazi grafted with the five-pointed red star of communism, which was realized according to his imagination and the appearance was really impressive. The book was published with a circulation of fifteen thousand copies and was welcomed by many readers. The writer Pjeter Arbnori felt delighted as a naive child in front of the book. He touched it and shed tears. It was his first publication and he was not young, but 57 years old. Of course he would feel excited with all those he had passed in life. He was so human with that behavior that with that longing he ignored his own position as a senior politician. He could have been hold heavy shade with a cold mask of bureaucrat in his face, but not. He was man, great Man.
Seeing the very friendly relations with that complex personality the publisher Shefki Hysa, as never before felt proud for the commitment toward the work of this man. Deep himself seemed to have performed a sacrifice in one of the holy temples of God, in church or in mosque, a sacrifice for which he believed would not go awry. Sublime sacrifice.
He was proud that he had also written a preface with the whole soul, felt as if it was one of his creations. He wrote:
Once you read the title of the book “When the Vikings flock” (Kur dynden Vikingët) of the writer Pjeter Arbnori, the mind goes immediately to the barbarian invasions since the ancient times. Not without pain he imagines all the extinct civilizations, people dismantled, races and languages assimilated. Vandals keen on zulm, have swallowed the soul, not only the matter, unable to be human, to resemble somehow those who tried to subdue.
But the author what flock is talking about? Maybe for the communist plague? The note “Written in Burrel prison” since on top as a significant subtitle, promotes the thought that, in this book, the object of the rebel writer and worthy political opponent of the former dictatorship, should be exactly that hell climate that possessed all the communist east and in particular Albania. But in the first sentence of this novel you face with Reich the third of the former Nazi Germany. So, it comes to Hitler’s dictatorship, one of the most perfect models of the inhuman oppressive machine of the Stalinist type. The movement of the events through the labyrinths of Nazi Germany, is nothing more but the author’s message, sent from the prison of Burrel for the similarity of Nazi and communist crimes in family, social and political life. Moreover, the curiosity to discover the relationship between symbolism and reality that itself carries the sentence “Vikings flock” rises. Why not “Vikings flocked”? Where is the secret and priority the use of the present tense of the verb flock, in comparison with the past tense that might fit the period of the events’ developments.
Vikings still flock? To what extent and what are the consequences of flock?
Such questions harass awhile, but are quickly forgotten in a very emotional reading in front of that strange space that unfolds alive among the eyes, as the tempting and inviting shores of the Odyssey’s sirens or as the magic islands of Circe whereupon experiences only anxiety, pain, revolt and horror for that human ugliness that occupies the path. So, this piece extract from the preface shows that the writer Shefki Hysa has seen into with a sense of artist in the magical world of the work of the creator Pjeter Arbnori – Albanian Mandela of the Balkans, as he often called him in the conversations with his friends. The politician Pjeter Arbnori appeared simple and ready in the eyes of the friends, ready to respond with sacrifices to the sacrifices that they made for him. He honored and respected very much the writer Shefki Hysa. He suspended or hastened the end of each official meeting when the secretary announced that in the office lobby was the writer Shefki Hysa. He went himself to the lobby and took him as an old friend, although he was almost twice older. He expected him the first than any MP or staff official of the Assembly. They talked long and advised each other particularly for the development of literature and for the Albanian and world culture problems.
In 1994 the publisher Shefki Hysa prepared for publication another book of the creator Arbnori. It was the novel “Beauty with the shade” (Bukuroshja me hijen). This was also a work written in the prison of Burrel. It was an idyllic creativity, a flight of imagination of the author beyond the prison walls and the slavery where had pent-up physically and spiritually former communist dictatorship. The new publication was really liked. It was something unexpected and unthinkable for the Albanian reader, something that he could not expect from the world of a former prisoner. There could not be perceived that an ex-convict elderly to write with such feeling, passion and lyricism for human love. This novel was a surprise even for the writer Shefki Hysa. Here’s how he wrote in notes accompanying that publication:
You have to be a man with a very sensitive heart, being a writer truly gifted to have both patience and fantasy to neatly braided with the pen tip the idyllic and glittered veil of a summer beach, pent-up inside the cells of a tremendous prison like that of Burrel. It is uunbelievable, but true. Former political prisoner Pjetër Arbnori, in terms of wild terror, through the darkness of the illuminated cell only with the light of the eyes and fire of memories of early youth that fails to besmirch the psychological or physical violence, which hunger doesn’t quenches, striving not only to survive, but also to sharpen the thought and feeling so then to clot in a special art. This is the romance “Beauty with the shade” (Bukuroshja me hijen). Her fate is a part of the author’s fate, of those people that recently came to light, from the fence of barbed wire, with soul still intact, thanks to the explosion of the dormant energies.
You read this romance and can’t stay without shuddering not only from the lyrical hectic state and the messages it conveys, but for the fact how it is created within the recesses of the edifice of the fear of the notorious prison of Burrel. We don’t exaggerate at all, if we express figuratively, that this artistic values is conceived and grown like the pearls within the mussels shell of deep submarine. The pearl’s hunters know what they do to find and extract by submarine depths and to put in the service of man such treasures. So, this romance that has nothing to do with the horrors of prison, rather it is a successful try of the author, as desire and whim, to sing the immemorial human feelings as man himself, love. Although in an area where have entered and failed many writers, Pjeter Arbnori, in his own way, with the hue of his emotional world, finally, manages to weave a new hymn to the love, this time with the most Albanian features. Those who will read this romance, will be convinced that after the publication of the novel “When the Vikings flock” (Kur dynden Vikingët), the Publishing House “Bilal Xhaferri” displays another artistic proof for the undeniable talent of this author, already not young in age, but in soul. “Beauty with the shade” (Bukuroshja me hijen) is a challenge for skeptics, nihilists, mediocre. Even in the darkness of prison, he kept in his soul and work the purity of light, when many other writers, though they lived in the light, the darkness of dictatorship took place in their lives. Pjeter Arbnori will have his place in our literature. He as a tireless hunter will surely continue the search of such pearls in the painful seas of creativity for the pleasure of those who know the value of miracles. And the future will reward him, engraving his name in the memory of time. Those were what Shefki Hysa wrote for the work of his friend. Notice how he characterizes, the myth Pjeter Arbnori, with a magical ability to recreate the freedom even there where its presence may not be perceived, in a notorious prison like the prison of Burrel, spawned of the unique ferocity of the former Albanian communist dictatorship.
The journalist Shefki Hysa, as head of the Chameria Cultural Community, asked the politician Pjeter Arbnori to go for a visit in the town of Konispol, neglected by the government of former communist dictatorship and he immediately accepted. It is known that Konispol is the northen province of Chameria remained within the Albanian border, the only area that symbolizes the Cham culture and traditions in Albania. And the back was deliberately turned to the economic development of this region. Konispol City was deliberately left in limbo, without funds of investments for roads and public works. It was treated as a backward commune, instead of being a developed municipality, as it had even the earlier traditions. The Mayor and the residents of Konispol welcomed the writer Pjeter Arbnori as a king. The general high school “Bido Sejko” organized the discussion of his creativity and turned that day into a holiday with music and dance. It was tabled a rare lunch with Cham traditional dishes and the politician Pjeter Arbnori was delighted by that reception. He didn’t know how to thank the organizers and especially the writer Shefki Hysa. In 1993 the journalist Shefki Hysa, together with a group of intellectuals, friends of Cham ideal, created the Community Cultural of Chameria (Cultural Association “Bilal Xhaferri”). One of the main objectives of this organization was the return of the bones of the dissident writer Bilal Xhaferri in Albania, who had died in the USA. To accomplish this mission successfully without bureaucratic hurdles of the Albanian state, Shefki Hysa thought to seek help from the politician Pjeter Arbnori. And so he did. After he discussed and got the word of the politician, he put the mind at work. He came up with the idea to quickly raise a commission. As committee chairman he proposed the writer Pjeter Arbnori, president of the Presidium of the National Assembly. After this action he drew up a financial project for submission to the Ministry of Culture. Pjeter Arbnori, as chairman of the committee for the ceremonial of the return at home of the bones of the dissident writer Bilal Xhaferri, naturally signed the project. Ministry of Culture agreed to fund. The main newspapers published the news under the title “will return home the bones of Bilal Xhaferri” and with the content: “The President of the Republic, Mr. Sali Berisha, at the request of Publishing House” Bilal Xhaferri “and the Cultural Community of Chameria, has decided that the Albanian state will return home the bones of the prominent dissident writer Bilal Xhaferri, exiled and died in the USA, a refugee from the former dictatorship. Following consultations between institutions charged by the President and with the relevant personalities, was approved the Organizing Committee for the ceremonial of the return home of the bones, decoration and re-burials of the anti communist writer Bilal Xhaferri. The journalist Shefki Hysa, once funding was secured, he went in the USA, to arrange in Chicago the ceremonial of the exhumation, to return in Albania and rebury the bones, with all the honors, as it belonged to the outstanding figure of Bilal Xhaferri. This was truly an unprecedented victory for Chams. Finally they were making one of their missions a reality. On May 3, 1995, President of the Republic, Sali Berisha, decreed the decoration of Bilal Xhaferri with the medal “Martyr of Democracy” (Martir i Demokracisë)… Three days later, on May 6, 1995, after many vicissitudes that passed in Chicago, the USA, the journalist Shefki Hysa, president of the Cultural Community of Chameria, brought in Albania the bones of Bilal Xhaferri. In Tirana a splendid ceremony was organized which was attended, under the direction of Pjeter Arbnori, all the highest state authorities, politicians, writers, artists, journalists, leaders of nongovernmental organizations, friends and colleagues and relatives. The ceremonial was organized in the International Center of Culture. Tirana, the capital, the place from where the dissident writer had been expelled from the former dictatorship, had now sat the black and red flag at half. Finally, the tomorrow on May 7, 1995, the bones of the deceased Bilal Xhaferri were buried in Saranda. The echo of this activity, largely reflected by the Albanian Radio Television, the Albanian and foreign press, went throughout all the areas where the Albanian fellow were, in Kosovo, Macedonia and all over the world and once showed again the Cham’s children knew to keep up their ideal. The writer Pjeter Arbnori appreciated very much the tireless work of his friend, the journalist Shefki Hysa, not only in conversations with intellectual elites, but also in formal settings and in the press. After the end of the ceremonial, in the closing meeting with members of Cultural Community of Chameria: artists, journalists, writers and intellectuals of other fields, Pjeter Arbnori addressed the auditor:
“Dear friends of the deceased Bilal Xhaferri!”I express not as Chairman of the Presidency of the Assembly, but as your friend, as contemporary and inmate of great people as Bilal Xhaferri, the poet, prose writer and prominent dissident publicist, as Mr. Shefki Hysa qualifies him, so dedicated to the mission he has set himself for the exaltation of this brilliant figure that communist dictatorship tried to undo and threw away in the oblivion bin, as it did with many other patriots, as it did with Pjetër Arbnori. I express as honorary member of the Cultural Association “Bilal Xhaferri” and as chairman of the Committee for the Organizing of Ceremonial of the returning home the bones of the deceased Bilal. You charged me this task and I think I have done it well. From my experience I say that is not easy to deal with such complex figures as Bilal Xhaferri. It is one of the most difficult missions that a man who understands can take. Mr. Shefki Hysa had the courage to charge himself this mission and managed to wake the memory of the Albanians for the extraordinary talent Bilal Xhaferri, managed to bring back home and he is resting in peace at birthplace, in Saranda. I think that with this human act, Mr. Shefki Hysa, Publishing House “Bilal Xhaferri” and Cultural association “Bilal Xhaferri” have fulfilled their mission for the Cham issue, have served Chameria as nobody else, of course with our help and yours. However, in my opinion, the mission “Bilal Xhaferri” can be called fulfilled in its core, regardless the additions and decorations that time will bring and other patriots that will follow Mr. Shefki Hysa”.
So, finally, thanks to the commitment of intellectuals as Shefki Hysa, the voice of Chameria had begun to be felt and to echo even in the Albanian life. Goodness is rewarded with goodness; this is one of the mottos of the writer Shefki Hysa, who is guided by the principle that if you did a favor, he double bound. Perhaps this behavior is also one of the secrets of his success. After the completion of the “Mission – Bilal Xhaferri” the writer Shefki Hysa felt as proud and anxious. He didn’t know how to reward his friend, Pjetër Arbnori, the generous help he gave. The publication of another book seemed a little, very little, although Pjetër assured him that as every Albanian patriot, he had his own obligations for Chameria. However Shefki Hysa had as a pledge in the heart the inability to restore the honor. So was he… In 1996, Pjetër Arbnori had ready for publication the novel “Whirlpool” (Vorbulla). The publisher Shefki Hysa took it, edited, prepared for print and sent it to the printing press. It was one of the most voluminous works of the author, over four hundred pages, one of the most accomplished. The novel “Whirlpool” (Vorbulla) came from the press in January of 1997, with a circulation of ten thousand copies. It is known that 1997 was one of the most turbulent and vicious years for Albania, however “Whirlpool” (Vorbulla) was welcomed. This work was liked by the readers perhaps by the fact that it described the historical whirlpool that often interlock Albanian life, just as the political-economical whirlpool that had caught by the throat Albania in that year of mourning. Here’s how the pen of the writer Shefki Hysa characterized this work. “It is said that the world was born from chaos, that light was born from darkness. But it cannot be accepted that life arose from death. Life is the world full of light. Life is constantly risked by death, as well as the world by chaos, as light by darkness. However life is in the world from thousands of years ago. Life survives, especially, at man – the only reasonable creature and the most endangered of this world. To man is threatened everything. The threatened man coexists with risk, resist to risk. Everywhere risks and overall risk by its kind. In the whirlpool of history are appeared not only individuals, but also warrior people. Race threatened by other human race. People risked by other people. Among the risked, the Albanian people remain the most risked. Maybe they remained since the times of Prometeu. Albanian- is the model of the risked man. Even risked by themselves. Grandpa after grandpa swallowed in the drifts of death whirlpool. You can’t say that fire re-lit by its ash, but Albanian fervid through wars, from the barbarians’ invasions and the Empire of West and East, is reborn from his ashes. The Albanian hero is reborn so many times by the death that fell on his head. Israelis, biblical persecuted, through the waves of humanity history survived. They were again persecuted, almost up to extermination, by the Nazi. Mankind did homage to Israeli pain. Albanian pain, rather, is turned back. Albanians had to reappear as many times from the ruins of empires. He has rediscovered himself, as archaeologists discover ancient statues after the excavation extremely fatiguing. Empire after empires have collapsed on the head of the Albanian and he is revamped, giddily, with wounds, through empire dawn and could resist heroically, from one death to the other, from one circle of hell to another, while he reborn again back. Such heroes embody the novel “Whirlpool” (Vorbulla) of the writer Pjetër Arbnori. Heroes reborn from the whirlpool of human hell. After reading the “Whirlpool” (Vorbulla) everyone can say that Arbnori has artistically recreated a historical reality detached by the dawn whirlpool of the period after Prizreni League. However, despite the hue and the unique originality of the events and episodes that are confessed in the work, its heroes recall the resistance fighter of all Albanian millennia, even the hero reborn from the era of communist hell. So, “Whirlpool” (Vorbulla) is a cut of Albanian millennia history, regardless the time position it is experienced, is a synthesis of the turbulence of the past and future, imitation as well as artistic generalization. A work created in unusual circumstances, born like a swirl of light in the darkness of prisons, with unusual characters, which resemble, more or less their creator. Arbnori was reborn from hell, being miraculously escaped by the death’s shackles. The red hell devoured many victims, as the unfortunate characters of tales that, to get rich or to have the Beauty of Earth for wife, take that “way in which you go and never return”. On the contrary, Arbnori, through this way ended in “Hereafter” of communist prisons. He survived all the horrors of the circles of hell and finally found the path of return loaded with victory and with all those treasures – his literary work, among them the novel “Whirlpool” (Vorbulla), and the Beauty of Earth – the honor the writer deserves.
“He survived the plague epidemic,” is said in such cases. He survived, as the almost mythical characters of “Whirlpool” (Vorbulla). For the sake of art and the ability to reborn, he will be engraved in the memory of generations”…
Believe it or not, but for me, as I said earlier, as many other creators say, the writer Shefki Hysa is a word wizard, a magician that let you mindless with the ability to hypnotized with the power of words. You can understand this after you have read the texts of his pen. It is the opportunity, dear readers, to judge how the writer Shefki Hysa artistically reflects the rebirth of the phoenix Pjetër Arbnori from the whirlpool of the Albanian communist hell.

Paulin Rranzi
Writer

A message of special type

Notes about the book “Personalities – Missionaries of Peace” of the writer Paulin Rranzi

The book “Personalities – Missionaries of Peace” (Personalitete – Misionarë të Paqes) is a compilation of writings on specific figures of politics, art and Albanian literature. This collection looks like a monographs rather odd in the way it is conceived at the beginning and how it is composed later. So, in the form it differs from all summaries of different literary, artistic or scientific biography, it even differs with a monography on a particular topic that actually has this book and serves as a liaison yarn among various figures, as is the idea of the mission or missionary of peace. However, when you have read the entire book and have experienced for a little time the taste that reading has left you, you smile and it looks that you have in front of you a beautiful work carried out with collage techniques. It seem so, as to say, from the literary and vital material that the author Paulin Rranzi has used, by mixing within an idea, that of the mission of peace, three or four different areas of practice and human creation. Perhaps, this has made this summary more diversified and more attractive.
It is acted simply and carefully for the choice and the composition of the object of the book: the author has a close friend the writer Shefki Hysa and by the empathy he has for him, he looks round him events and personalities that can better serve his idea to join in a monographic narrative missions and Albanian missionaries that consciously have served this high and human eternal purpose: peace. Watching the book from this perspective, it doesn’t seem redundant the frequent quotation of the source of inspiration of the author, because it serves more as an element of truth in the stories that follow. Furthermore, I would say, in the confession about the meeting with Rugova, this “inspiration” of the author is exciting. And, in fact, the head “Rugova” is among the most beautiful and among the most significant of the book, along with that of Pjeter Arbnori and especially that of Ibrahim Daut Hoxha, which contains in itself a whole history for a life of sacrifices.
In the professional selection of the missionaries is noticed an equal ratio of selection between the literary and politicians, although some of them happened to be literary-politicians, who are really distinguished for their peaceful disposition in politics, as it comes to Ibrahim Rugova and Pjeter Arbnori, who also give the predominant hue to this book. An outstanding value this book gains by diversity of forms that, in my opinion, reminds the collage. For those personalities where takes place more their life through memories or episodes experienced by the author, the form is that of emotional narration. For others, where the idea of the peaceful message is extracted by their work, the form is somewhat cold, of academic style. Such, indeed, written as rarely before in our political journalism, are the descriptions for the politicians Shpetim Idrizi and Tahir Muhedini, where their political ideas are presented in a manner sufficiently clear and attractive to read. But there are also mixed forms of narration, like that of Namik Mane, where the quoted verses bring the breeze of a touching peace. A very special thing impresses very much in this book. There is not a special chapter for Bilal Xhaferri, but he is present throughout the book with his peaceful spirit and soul, adding it to the work, as without being felt, the missionary and inspiring force. The summary of Paulin Rranzi has, or seems to have, even a geographical distribution thought in the selection of personalities. Perhaps this is totally random, but in fact there are all the territories represented, from the south, in central Albania to Kosovo. Of course, the many are Cham, but this is justified, when it is known that more than all Albanians, the message of wisdom, patience and peaceful politics comes from Cham. Therefore, even those in this small book for Albanian missionaries of peace, stay enough good and as in their own house.
The book “Personalities – Missionaries of Peace” (Personalitete – Misionarë të Paqes), of the writer Paulin Rranzi, in his inside is crossed by a message of particular type, as it is the message of peace that carries in itself each of the characters as visionaries and peaceful at every step of their activity.

Hysen Sinani
Writer

Even the stars die

(Fragment)

Valiu was shocked. It was not a dancing. It was a storm, flame and fire, was a call and a clarion for war. It was the scream for the life and contempt for the death. Arnaut blew in the face his contempt. The shameless! The heart began to beat strongly and in the chest he felt a vinegary constraint. Arnauti was kidding with him, he became brave and despised death. With that dance he reminded him the dikes and soldiers who were killed and cut in the woods and gorges. What about that bridge? He wanted to confess that if they infringed even on their bodies, they would continue to fight from generation to generation. With this dance he had said what he couldn’t say with words. He had spoken with his body. Since there are no guns and other opportunities, as it seems he wants to kill me with this dance, thought Vali that the constraint of the heart was becoming heavy.
-What do you think about this dance, Myderiz Efendi?
-The jinn have entered in the body of Arnaut, Vali Pasha. He thinks the rope is a baby’s toy.
Vali also asked his grace Dhespot. But Dhespoti raised his shoulders not knowing what to say and did the cross. “The christian feels good that they humiliate me”, – he thought.
In the garret, Gjylyzari, was fused and was made one with the dancer. The music entered in the soul and her whole being danced and became happy as in a divine ecstasy. In a moment of unconsciousness, he wanted to be there, with him out of that cruel cage. Not willingly he cried and pushed the cage with all the force he had, which was ripped off with grind. He wanted to be there at the square dance. Hava Hanemi managed to catch him and hold him not to plunge from the second floor of tower garret. People who were standing by turned there and released an “Oh!” Valide Hanemi almost fainted. She arose and went with haste in tower. Valiu shook his fists so much, as the nails entered in the skin. Gjylyzari left the garret and entered in. The dance had finished. He sat on the sofa. She was shocked and murdered soul, the body was numb, asthma was taking his breath, shed of tears made his sight foggy. She put her arms on the knees, bowed his head and started to hardly breath and cry. Hava Hanemi, even she’s shocked, tried to calm her daughter.
-No, – she said, – he shouldn’t die. He is so young and, oh God, forgive me! So handsome, so young, handsome Osman Taka. Osman very handsome! A peerless dancer who is not afraid of death but banter and deride it.
Crying so much, she pereated the same things, then she cried and a bad hiccup caught her. Hava sent the servant to call the madam. She said the same things to her mother and begged to seek her father to save the life of the handsome Osman.
While in tower were happening these things, the dance had finished. The violinists left. They didn’t want to see death after that triumph of life. The preparations for hanging the condemned were being made. The executioner, a black arap tied his hands behind the back, rode him over the wooden platform of the hanging square and put in his neck the rope chain that smell wax.
-I didn’t know that death smelled wax, – he said to the executioner. Then he folded in two a head scarf and wanted to tie his eyes.
-No, – said Osman quietly. – i want to see death in its eye!
A servant of the house approached to Vali, did cringe and mumble something in the ear. The vali flame red in the face rose and gave orders not to act without his orders. Everything froze.
In the great chamber broke disorders. He daughter ran towards him, hugged his knees and kissed his feet.
-Oh father, have mercy and forgive the life of Osman Taka! He is so young, so brave, so handsome…
Vali rose her daughter and sat her on the sofa.
-So much do you like him, you want to marry him?
-Gjylyzari assembled himself, a sudden grace fell in his face and the smile lightened his face, decline the eyes and answered her father as to talk to emptiness:
-Ah, if I had that destiny?!
The gall of his daughter raged Vali, he wanted to say severe words, to call her sluttish, bitch, perky, insolent, but he bite the tongue and didn’t let the words to get out the fence of the teeth. Hava Hanemi was there and the words would spread. All the people would mock with them.
-What about Valide Hanemi, what does she advice? – he addressed his wife.
-We have a single daughter; she is the light of our eyes and hope of our lives. Hope God will make you listen to this desire!
-Hanemi of mylazimi has anything to tell us?
Hava Hanemi herself was shocked and confused by how she had seen. Beauty and grace of that man was removed neither from the mind nor from the eyes.
-I am honored Vali Pasha that you ask even an advice by me. Make glad your single daughter and Valide Hanemi! You are their shelter and God. The empire doesn’t break because is forgiven the life to a heroic outlawer. The empire is not great, it has had and will always have trouble. The death of an Arnaut will not extinguish them.
-Highest and honorable ladies. You are three and beat me. A knowledgeable said that it is easier to command battalion with soldiers than the women of your house. But that rebel, unfaithful has dared to rise against Padishahu. They want to make Albania. But our Sultan, may God add the long-lived has a severe shade, in every corner of the empire. His punishment is God’s mercy.
He thought, put his cunning mind at work, called for help the oriental cunning and then he said to the ladies:
-May your will be done! I will forgive his life, but I will let death behind him.
The executioner, soldiers and people standing by were waiting. Osman Taka who was waiting for his life to end, with the rope chain in his neck, saw the sky birds that flew westward.
Vali approached the gallows. Executioner was about to kick the wooden bench. Vali raised his hand:
-Put off the rope! The hanging is postponed until a second order!
Lock the prisoner in the castle cornet.
It was a relief for everyone.
It was enough only the first part of the show, the human one and not the cruel. The sentence of Osman Taka was forgiven. The news spread everywhere. From Konispol came the horsemen that brought the white horse and he after had triumphed over death with the force of life and had given his name to a dance, flew to his hometown.

Resmi Osmani
Writer

I myself sent her to death

By: Aqif Hysa

I myself sent her to death. Step by step.
She held on my arm tight. She feared falling.
We’d laugh until the end and beyond. We’d remain silent.
We’d go beyond word as though playing with toys.
We would phone the wind. Was last autumn’s wind.
The leaves would answer us. The leaves fallen on the road.
We’d play with the leaves. The leaves would play with us.
As though they were announcements. As though they were dolls.
We stood in front of the building. We pushed the door open. She entered inside.
She surrendered to white uniformity, to fragility.
She never came back. Whiteness had devoured her forever.

English Translation by: Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj

The Doe

The asphalted public road, terribly straight, lay among a wooded forest, always green and disappeared somewhere in the horizon. If you observed carefully, the horizon would give the idea of a loss or more exactly of a mixture of colours in a unique heinous colour, without a clear name, extremely provoking, hateful, terribly hateful… The eternal blue of the sky, the green of the trees and the grey of the asphalt melted away and that nameless colour rose…Oh, what a hateful colour!… Hateful and horrible at the same time, maybe because it was an eyesore with that view of a monotonous veil, which could arouse an immensity of corrosive feelings, exactly contrary to that sensation that the white veil of the bride arouses to the groom in front of the altar. That nameless colour would remind you the veil of death and it seemed as if the public road threw you away to Hell… Did that street lead you somewhere or not?!…
Behind the back, somewhere tremendously far away, started the city, with a grey colour too, as though the death had clutched it to the throat, smothering slowly the colours of the nature…
Where could you go?!… Behind the death’s door, alongside, to the left, to the right an immense forest, stately and tremendous, in front a frightful immensity… Hell…
– Oh! – I screamed with a howling voice that came from the profoundness of my chest.
– Oh God, give me the force to understand this mystery of the crossroads!
Surprisingly, without being in a desert crossroad, I was experiencing some ghoulish feelings. A tempting voice was intonating in my ear:
– Everywhere you go, you go and you don’t come back, everywhere you go, you go and…, everywhere you go…
Maybe I was lost in the lands of fairy-tales and who knows what kind of sylphs, dragons, divas and ghosts were going to come out of the forest to engulf me?!… Who knows?!…
I revaluated my situation and I couldn’t understand if I was dreaming or not, if I was asleep or awake, in this or in that world… I couldn’t explain to my self how I had arrived in this situation… It seemed as though I was robbed at my own home and so bewitched, I was left far away the humanity, in an extremely straight way, among an immense forest, me-the complete ignorant man… And that way couldn’t lead you anywhere. It could only fling you in the death’s lap…
It seemed as if a coma had me in its power, from which I couldn’t extract a reaction to myself, neither the finest muscular movement, as if my reasoning was numb, my instincts too, and I had no desire to move in any direction…As if I were a dried tree with the legs amidst the asphalt… And what can you expect from such a tree in a crossroad, immense everywhere?!
Suddenly something moved… Absolutely… I began to spy on it…
– Prrr, prrr!
It was an empty sound, like that of a piece of leather crumbled from the trunk of a dried tree… Was it an extraterrestrial sound? Maybe I have not good ears!
– Prrr, prrr!
The sound was repeated with the tempos and the dimensions of the real…It was an illusory sound, wasn’t it?!…
Excited by the sound-waves, I was constrained to turn sideways. And a lively ball that had rolled off the nearest pine close to the public road, appeared in front of my eyes. What was it? Was it a squirrel or a weasel?
The little ball opened and an extraordinary little animal, with a small oval gray face, took shape. It jumped on the back legs and caressed the face with the forefeet. Its small eyes brightened like the just burnt cinders. It wheeled round itself, wagged and shook the tail, which was bigger than its body, as though it wanted to brag with its pride, that fleecy mass, which was standing upwards, arching like an umbrella over the little head.
– Prrr, prrr! Prrr, prrr! – The sound was heard again and it seemed as if the small creature or a voice that I had heard once talked to me.
I froze.
– You don’t know me?!… You act as if you have never seen me before?!… I think that you have forgotten me!…Hi, hi, hi – exploded that creature with a human voice, followed with a derisive laughter and I don’t know why I had the idea that a nymph, a jinn or the Beauty of the Earth itself was hidden behind that little creature…
That voice sounded known as well as unknown and when the waves were still sounding, the silhouette of a girl, whom I had met once, somewhere, suddenly greyed…
– Poppet, you are? – I screamed instinctively and I felt a wave of warmth and vitality permeating into my freezing body.
– No, I am the Doe! – laughed the creature in front of my naive astonishment.
– The Doe?! Which Doe, because you are driving me crazy! – I sprang in myself and I felt released of that numbness that had seized my whole being.
– You have to know that I revived you from that madness that had invaded you! I am the Doe, the daughter of the Squirrel… I am the queen of this forest, – replied that jezebel, insulted in its dignity from my ignorance.
– Aha, you are the Doe! The queen of the forest! But it seems as if the death has devastated this forest, where are its habitants Your Majesty?! – I continued not less astonished and bewitched by the discourse of that mysterious creature which I still couldn’t remember where I had met in the past times, before losing the vivacity in that endless way…
– I am that Poppet, coming from the high mountains of Muji’s Fairy, I am not the Doe! You forgot me very soon… Which Doe are you talking about, you good boy?!
– The Poppet?!… The Poppet or the Doe, my beloved, because you are driving me crazy, with forests’ kingdoms and legends’ high mountains?!…
– You should thank me because I cleared up your memory from the magic of madness, you sleeping beautiful boy?!… Neither that Poppet nor the Doe can you remember?!… You deserve to stay in this endless way, like the bride’s and groom’s relatives, frozen from the Fairy’s power in Muji’s high mountains! – Interrupted me, really disappointed, the Poppet-Doe and immediately made a quick about-face, disappearing among the woods of the deserted forest…
The word “disappearance” itself used to terrify me; moreover I was really lost in a magical way that couldn’t lead me anywhere… Endless way… The death’s way… Suddenly the symbol of vivacity had appeared in this way and weirdly it was leaving me alone, with the veil of death, because I didn’t know how to deal with life…
– Oh God! Give me life to follow the life! – I screamed with all my force and I rushed as fast as possible to the forest, trying to pursue the Doe-Poppet…
I was running blindfold from the exasperation when I felt my head bumping into the pine’s trunk.
– I am here, above the fir! – I felt the familiar facetious voice.
That voice made my whole being shudder and it filled me with life and vivacity.
As if God’s power rejuvenated me at once to triumph over the uniformity of death…
– Hold on, Doe! – I shouted elated and nebulously I hugged the fir.
– I am the Poppet, not the Doe, you unmindful boy! I am at the pine sideways…
– I am chasing after you, Poppet. I am almost catching you…!
– I am the Doe…! The queen of the deserted forest… The daughter of the Plumed-Tail Squirrel, – laughed and made fun of me that melodic voice and I was ready to explode from the anger, from the inability I had in those moments…
The Poppet-Doe or the Doe-Poppet reminded me an invention of my imagination that used to caper only in the desert of my ill fantasy. And I crashed in the abysses of desperation, so tired of that unlucky hunting. So it passed a long time of drowsiness and of fighting with the desert pines and firs and my hunt didn’t appear anywhere, except its voice that was echoing everywhere…
In an instant I decided to give up living my life and to be submerged in the death’s lap. It was exactly then when the Poppet-Doe appeared in front of me, more captivating… It looked like a sparkling lightning plume and it was sufficient to fire it and, with the speed of light, it would permeate into all the spaces between the eternal green woods…
Although I was haggard, practically lost in the doze’s arms, I gathered strength to view with love that fantastic creature…
– It’s me. I am of meat and blood, I have a soul and I am mortal like you, but I know how to survive…Here I am, touch me if you want! – said all of a sudden the Poppet-Doe, the Queen of the forest, with a soft voice, very fond, burdened with regret notes, but I had no energy to move the fingers…
I noticed curiously her lips, the white teeth, small and sharp like all the gnawers, its small oval face, a little pinched from the eternal gymnastics of its kind along the forest woods, the forehead hair, that starry view, that time after time used to disappear under the crest of pride, that showed a rare feature of that being: the savage freedom, and I thought how difficult its domestication was…
– You don’t love me anymore?! – It furrowed the face and meantime, rushed and grasped my neck like a fur with magic warmth, which I had dreamt for so long…
What warmth…! It seemed as if I was hugging in my chest the Beauty of the Earth…
– Why, have I ever loved you?! – I murmured surprised.
– Always…but we have missed each other for so long…!
– Then, come, come with me! – I said and jumped with the idea that, being accompanied with this fabulous creature would drive crazy all my friends, who had acted high and mighty with those living creatures that moved around them…
With the passing of days, weeks, months and years my love for the Doe was not ending… Neither her love for me… It seemed as if the world was breathing from our love…
But happiness doesn’t last forever, as being a matter of another world…
Then I figured out that my friends began to trick on me… Maybe jealous of that rare creature that God had brought near me, surprisingly, in stead of congratulating me, they tried to diminish its values, exalting their inventions, some lionesses, tigresses, puppies, cats, mouses, foxes, chickens and every kind of ostentatious creature, which were worse than lyrebirds, more talkative than parrots… Eh, the friendship…! It’s necessary to beware by it?!
– The Doe…! A small and capricious thing… Wild, wild and mysterious, maybe it will never be civilized…! You would better choose a lioness… A lady in the jungle and in the zoo… Look how happy we feel with their grandiosity! –the masters of the jungle’s queens didn’t leave me alone…
– My happiness is enough! – I responded to the envies.
– As you want, but the lionesses are the delicacy of this life! – They insisted.
– The Does too… Everybody has his own likings… Then the forest can’t be enjoyed only with the lionesses… The roes are necessary too, even the… each creature has its own beauty and this makes more varied the forest’s life, with its presence… Even the Does…! Even the Does…! Even the Does…! They are the rarest thing of the wildlife! – I teased the evil friends, as far as to make them turn their back and disappear immediately, appearing next day even more annoying…
What have they got with me?!… As if my happiness was troubling them?!… Did the Doe’s particularity make them furious?!… Did they want to see me like themselves, near ordinary creatures or lonely?!… I had different likings…The Doe made me happy…!
Eh, this life! Overstrained… Cruel life! The man gets tired of its vicissitudes one day… Even the superman gets tired of intrigues… Once I got tired too… I was tired of intriguers… Those whom I called friends and mates… All my companions … All my envious acquaintances… I was so tired of them…
With or without my desire, I decided to change, to deny myself again… Far away from intriguers and intrigues… I let the Doe go in the forest… I left it dolorously… I brought it back in the forest…. There, among the trees, among its species, the squirrels… And I turned the back to it, thinking to get separated from it forever, but I don’t know what used to keep me attached with the common past… A kind of unconfessed sorrow…
I used to get out sometimes close to the forest and hiss, keeping my ear to the ground and spying… I could feel how the forest gave the hissing back… The woods’ leaves would swish and the Doe, like a wind plume, trunk to trunk, appeared amidst the nearest wood’s branches…
– Prrr, prrr, prrr, prrr! – It used to greet me with its immemorial tongue.
Its eyes used to shine from the tears… It used to spring around and wander as if liking to remind me the past times and, while being faced with the glacier of my soul, slowly, so unhappy, it would turn back crestfallen in the squirrels’ kingdom…
Finally I felt that this adventure was torturing me… And I decided to follow the way of solitude, with an old longing in my soul, in the endless public road of desperation, among the forest, at the same time near and far away the Doe…
I was lonely… Who knows…?

Shefki Hysa
Writer

Aqif Hysa – Albanian Poet

A short biography of the poet Aqif Hysa
Aqif Hysa was born on 9 May 1960 in Shetel of Shijak from where he received the first raw material for the poetic citizenship.
Since earlier he has studied the poetry, the truth and itself.
The first volume of poetry “See you somewhere” (Shihemi diku) was published by the publishing house “Naim Frasheri”, Tirana 1999.
In 1996 he decided to overcome the sea, in search of the space, holding as a compass the horizon’s line. In 1996 he published in italian language the poetic volume “Erranti come gli dei” (Wanderer as Gods) (Endacak si zotat).
He continues to write poetry and his fate in the southern landscapes of the coast beyond, the italian one. The book “The escape poem” (Poema e ikjes) is his last publication.

Notes about the poetries of the poet Aqif Hysa
Professor Alberto Altmura writes about the poetries of the poet Aqif Hysa:
Aqif Hysa, if at one side complies with Europian literary tradition, on the other hand shows to have acquired the “citizenship” values expressed by his poetry: the authentic love for the peace and punishment for any kind of war, the aspiration for human brotherhood and the erection of barriers, not only physical, but economic and political, the rejection of hypocrisy and the empty formalisms.
In this framework extends his lyrical song, characterized by a kind of naive astonishment (and at the same time insidious) in front of the spectacle of life, nature and love. It is immediately felt that Aqif Hysa has the poetry in his blood, by the way he “cooks” his verses and spread in the ingredients of poetry a very special music and a powerful rhythm.

My eye draws a leaf

My eye
Draws a leaf
It shakes
It avoids stealthily
Shortly before it gets dark
in wind
an eyelash-leaf
shudders the space

Aqif Hysa
Albanian Poet

The literature – Artistic history of humanity

God, Adam and Eve were the first literary characters
In the beginning was God.
He created the Universe, the Land, he also created the Man, Adam.
And God told the angels:
– Man is my most perfect and wise creature. I gave him mind from my mind, I gave him light from my light.
And the angels humbled the greatness of God.
And God continued:
– I decided to appoint the man, as the wisest even from you angels, my vicegerent on Earth.
And the angels humbled the vision of God.
And God said:
– Humble even to him, the man, my vicegerent on Earth!
And angels bowed to human respectfully. Only the Satan didn’t accept and addressed to God:
– I am a creature of fire, of grace, I don’t humble to a creature of lay! –he blew up.
And God ordered him:
– Humble to man, because is a wiser creature than you!
– I don’t want to humble! –the Satan rejected.
– Obey my authority! Humble to man, otherwise you will be punished! –God said.
– I don’t humble even your authority! Let me be punished! –the Satan rebelled.
And God cried:
– Despised be thou forever, Satan! Even in Hell my punishment will follow you!
And the Lord threw over lightning (whereas designed and decided to create the Hell as punishment for the whole disobedient, as Satan).
And the Satan, the first rebel of the Universe, ran very fast to hide in Hell scalded and persecuted from the lightening of God’s wrath. Whereas, man, Adam, this privileged creature of God, felt as a gentleman in the Heaven that the Creator gave him. Adam enjoyed all the benefits of Heaven. It is said that he had also milk of swallow, but was soon jade from that prosperity.
He felt a kind of emptiness in the soul. The loneliness excessively bothered him.
He addressed to God:
– Be praised, Lord, for the blessings bestowed upon me! I am among the infinite gift, but even I don’t know why I feel so lonely. I don’t know what is missing here inside my soul.
And God laughed heartily by Adam’s naiveté.
And he put the man asleep, removed one of his ribs and created a human copy more or less the same with Adam. Then, he slightly waved and woke him up, sure that he would like the new gift.
As Adam woke up, he saw a creature that looked like him as two drops of water.
He could not believe his eyes as he watched amazingly his human copy that comfortably slept next to him.
– Adam, it’s Eve, your female parable, your wife, the mother of your future children, -God said.
– My Eve?! – Adam left a shout of joy and felt he was entirely amazed from that creature as similar and magical.
And the emptiness of his soul was immediately filled with a sweet sense as the whole Paradise. Adam humbled the power of God with thousand of praise for that miracle he had donated.

Adam and Eve, the first human love
God advised him:
– Adam, you have to love Eve! And you Eve have to love Adam! I created you for each-other, to be loved as you love the Paradise. The entire Paradise is yours. Now, you have the Paradise also in your souls. I have created it just for your love. Try every fruit of its. I prohibit you just one fruit of its: The Apple of Knowledge! Do not dare to harass the fruit of Apple of Knowledge! Promise me for this and you will live, will be loved and will be inherited indefinitely in the Peace of Paradise!
– As you order, God! Your word is never both! – Adam bowed and promised.
– I promise you with my whole soul, our God! –bowed the flattering Eve.
And God wished all love again and closed at its eternal beyond the bars of blue heaven.
Adam and Eve, madly in love, were grasped and went rolling over naked as a single body on the green grass of the meadows of Paradise, that harassed them even more the desire for each-other with all those fragrances of pleasant smell of roses, cloves, cinnamon and a variety of the most rare flower that has created the all mighty mind of God. They were loved, were wanted and were loved without measure, as it is never remembered, or as it is said for the characters of the tales, so that they had tired those tools. Only after they broke and were packed to love, though took a little shame by nakedness and ran and covered with a fig leaf each of them their bird…

The first victims of the first intrigue
Whereas Satan, the rebel, rebellious and the first revolutionary in the Universe, as will be expressed later apologists of the doctrine of the Communist Revolution, vowed to take revenge against Man, Adam, who threw over him the disaster of God, left the Hell and secretly flew toward Paradise. It immediately turned into a dotted and beautiful serpent and with its whistle tongue, as a seductive lullaby sleeping pill, urged Eve to bite the Forbidden Apple.
And the flattered Eve, like all its successors, naive female characters in the literary works of later centuries, wanted or not, bite the Apple of Knowledge. And she sinned. She became the first sinner in the Universe. And God that immediately felt the sin, thundered and flashed angry:
– You, sinful people, you broke the promise! You made a sin and can be punished for this!
And God took away the Heaven and Immortality of Adam and Eve, dumping in the overcharged hardships of the Arabic desert.
Adam and Eve, now mortal, with a shield of dried fig leaf, began to roam with terror after the images of the mirages of endless deserts, persecuted by the shocking screams of all sorts of wild beasts and frightening mockery and mock of Satan, that were after them by putting into play their human weaknesses, versus the treacherous world, which resembled more or less the Hell that expected them after death.

The good and evil eternally at war
Thus, besides Paradise, the Good, Virtue, so Human Values embodied in the Divine in the human spirit, in the Universe was born also the Evil, Rebellion, Sin, Habit, in a word, Human anti-values embodied in the Satanism of Satan and the souls enslaved by him, that God decided to punish harshly and without mercy as a component of Hell. So Adam and Eve, all their descendants, all humanity, human life itself, essentially would be characterized by the struggle between good and evil. Exactly, this bloody struggle with its infinite battles within the human race constitutes the human history. And it is known that this history was first reflected in an artistic way by art and literature.
Adam and Eve, all their descendants with their deeds and sufferings of their life are reflected step by step through naive creations of primitive periods as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the songs of Nibelungeve till in the modern literature of our time as the novel “The Da Vinci code”. Thus, these artistic evidences of human progress have become the raw material for Aed, the first troubadour of humanity and for all popular troubadours and the later creators like Homer and Shakespeare or for the modern creators, writers of our time. In a word, the entirety of the works of the literary creators, that creativity that took the name literature, that in its beginnings, using elements of the magical and the miraculous that set in motion the human imagination and fantasy, took over the mission to be an artistic chronicle of human development, so an artistic history of mankind. Human deeds are also reflected by the documentary history that would be created as a separate science long after and would be developed besides literature, a parallel type, as different and independent, although they are subject of the same object.

Literature and History two parallel subjects of the same object
Adam and Eve, so, Man as the reasonable being of the Universe, facing the difficult reality of Earth, where he suddenly found himself, through his spiritual world has developed the ability to dream and want that Paradise that God gave and took away in the early childhood, when it transformed in a sinful being. Dreams, imagination, fantasy encourage Man to not subject the sufferings and hardships of life but to try to change the territory where he lives. So, he tries very hard to protect himself and the values that creates by the evil and the anti-values that the Satan offers.
Adam and Eve were initially shocked by the challenges that the desert made to them, but the Lord had given wisdom to avoid the unexpected, and they began to set in motion not only biological instincts, but also the mind. So, they started to react in many ways to survive. And they survived by developing their biological and spiritual skills. They developed the thought and feelings, mental world, brain, and the sensory one, soul, conscious. God created firstly Adam, so he created the person, who having in itself talent of God’s wisdom asked not to live alone, so as to say, he sought the company of another individual. God accompanied with Eve and this association with an individual genetically similar, with the only difference that it was a copy of Adam-female, brought the creation of the family as the first cells of the future of human society.
Adam and Eve fell in love at first sight and later, in good and in bad, realized how necessary and indispensable they were for each other and wanted or not, became the first family in the world. She born many children and the family enlarged and enlarged and by its descendants were created other families, which were added in other household which were grouped in tribes. So, by some consanguineous families, that descended from Adam and Eve, were created the first tribes. They were placed in small pastoral and agricultural centers, in the first villages of whom were born later craft centers and the first city-states, who were led by leaders of the most powerful tribes. Kinship relations and kinship created families and new tribes. If blood ties were strong within the family and tribe, over time they began to decline among the tribes, that carried away from each other in the manner of living and by the new territories that conquer around the Earth. Relations and mutual connections of many tribes brought the creation of the provinces. Populations of several provinces, with the same blood and language features, brought nations, of whom were also born modern states that we inherit today. It is known that nations distinguished from each other by blood and language, but also of culture, traditions and customs that were created differently, through the centuries and centuries. And it is these individual and social characteristics that differed from one nation to another, that made someone inferior and someone superior in front of the environment and each other, even more exacerbated the struggle between good and evil. So the nations will be attacked one another for life or death as a barbarian horde to devour and assimilate any civilization worth. And this eternal struggle, which determined the birth and the ups and downs of class orders and social systems, became reflection subject by literature and by history, which are two subjects that often go and develop hand in hand, despite a meeting place and the mission more or less the same they have.

The literature-tool to regain Paradise
It is this constant clash of interpersonal that has served as raw material for the written texts of documentary history, and for the fables of artistic literature.
Literary works unlike historical documentary texts, have reflected emotionally the history of human survival, therefore are an artistic chronicle of human development, impregnated chronicle with spiritual and feeling elements, fed by the imagination and fantasy, are not just recap of facts, reasoning and deduction of the chronicler’s opinion. So the historian chronicler deals simply with the description of the human deeds and sufferings, lists, counts and documents chronologically facts, data and arguments, while the artist chronicler refines the raw material, passing through the filters of feelings and through mirrors, prisms, telescopes and binoculars of imagination and fantasy, reflects it by enriching, creates and re-creates everything he sees and hears. In this way the artistic chronicle differ from the documentary chronicle of human life, although they are referred to and reflect the same object. History is an archive, warehouse, inventory documentary, which has only one mission: to inform and recognize us with our past. In contrast to the history, literature is multifaceted missionary, not only recognizes us how the events are developing from one time to another, from antiquity to modernity, but it also affects, gives us aesthetic pleasure and makes us wiser, seduces and calls us, encourages and inspires, sees and pushes forward to change the world around us. And man has aimed this at the moment that lost paradise, to change the status quo, to improve the world where they live under the parable of the lost paradise, to improve themselves to regain the right to be the pet of God, the Creator, and to merit his gift, Paradise.
In this viewpoint, I would say: literature has even another role, it serves as a tool, as a kind of weapon in the arduous path to regain the lost Paradise.

Shefki Hysa
Albanian Writer

Chameria

Fragmet of story

The car was slipping without being felt among the blocks of olives, oranges, mandarins and lemons that were lying like a green sea across the wide field around the main city, Gumenica, of the new Chameria or Thesprotia (this was the name held by this land in antiquity), as the Greeks of today intentionally called it to cancel the name “Chameria”. The pent-up blue sea lay farther on the right, in the Corfu Channel. There was a mountain range standing on the left, which used to divide Gumenica from Janina of Ali Pasha and to protect it by the cold North winds, converting it into a very likeable climate for olives and citruses. In some parts of it, the eyes caught even blocks with vineyards and with characteristic trees of the Mediterranean coastal areas lovingly well-maintained… A scholar’s sharp eye, like Fatos Mero Rrapaj’s, who carefully observes everything, could immediately understand that the area was fed due to agriculture, more exactly arboriculture, maybe tourism too, but industry not at all… Thus, environments were virgin and submerged in that lustrous sun, and despite the end of autumn, you couldn’t think to find any piece of polluted nature. And this was a privilege for the habitants…
Fatos was not satiated by enjoying the rare beauties of that nature where the mountain, the hill, the field and the sea were prodigiously harmonized… What more could a man want to live the earthy “paradise”?!… You might be crazy to launch wars in that region…
Eh… The Greeks!… If you dug the ground where the roots of that greenness lay, you would come across bones and skeletons of grave less murdered people… The Cham grave less people… And this was Greeks’ work, those who used to get out of the graves at night, like elves and bogey-men because neither soil could accept them…. Yes!… These were the Greeks… And their descendants pretended to bring peace and justice in the United Europe… No, God shouldn’t hush anymore!…
Kostandin at the wheel was talking and talking about the elims, about their castles in Kuç, Mazrek, Paramythia, about the wells in Mount Kladhi, about the cave in Arpica, about the three stones in Paramythia, about the stone in Luarat, which the elim women utilized as troughs to wash their clothes… But Fatos was more quarreling with his thoughts than listening to him… Do you know Fatos, Kostandin said, that the elims have worked at the Saddle of the Wall, near Margelleç, to build up a high-high wall which would link Mount Krane with the Peak of the Priest and they hoped they could reach the sky and see the whole world when they climb in there… But the wall they built up during the day would fall to pieces at night and they never could stop working… Wasn’t their willpower to be envied?… If people nowadays had that power, that willpower…, – whispered Kostandin, who seemed to madly admire and be almost blinded by the elim world’s grandiosity and his desire to talk to the others about the elims was already converted into a mania… At the end of every story he wouldn’t forget to work out the conclusion that not only Chams but whole Albanians are elims’ successors, that’s why they are able to survive in the most unusual circumstances.

Extracted by the story “Elims”, summarized in the volume with stories “Chameria Flavor”

Shefki Hysa
Writer

The Chams

Don’t hurt me!…
At least you, friends and acquaintances of mine, do not hurt me!…
Others, those who don’t love me and the enemies, let them do as they want…
Their behavior doesn’t bother me…
What hurts me more are your prejudice and judgments for Chams and Chameria…
Don’t hurt me!…
Don’t force me to talk about Chams, because I am a Cham myself, I am from Chameria.
I am not used to praise myself, but your suspicions pushes me to become an apologist of myself and advocate of my Cham’s brothers, although I find it difficult to say words when deeds, works and values of Cham’s boys light as gold in front of the inventions of the enemies and those who don’t want their good…
Look them better!…
Whole mountains with gold treasures blossom in front of you and I am surprised how you don’t want to see them!
Couldn’t you see the glow of Cham’s values or perhaps you are blinded by their lightning that you don’t want to accept the Cham’s existence as a tangible reality that has occupied your path?!
Don’t hurt me!…
You can’t overcome such ranges and not feel tired… Fatigue shines in your faces… Even your fatigue shines in our path towards Chameria…
Please, don’t hurt me!…
Enough have hurt me those who have gone back on us…
Enough have denied our spiritual treasures the treacherous and the ingrate…
Chams, were firstly betrayed trust by Albanian state and some so-called politicians, like their patrons shovene-hellenic (I respectfully salute the Greek civilization), labeled and sold them as treacherous…
You, friends, don’t hurt me!…
Let me at least comfortably in my field battles with our enemies!…
Chams are like bees that tirelessly collect nectar flower to flower and produce honey for themselves and for others… Can bees be treacherous?!… Those that just work, build and produce with the rare art the most wonderful food, the honey!…
Don’t hurt me!…
Cham’s boys are like pigeons that go around and sing their own doves (not the crows of the world; they fear the sufferings of the fables of magpie with dove leather). Can the pigeons of peace be treacherous?!… Those who do, want and convey to the others with love the message of peace?!…
Don’t hurt me!…
Chams are like lions that avoid the donkeys with lion’s skin… And it is known that lions are lions, brave and battle warriors and not treacherous or actors in wickedly role…
Don’t hurt me!…
Cham’s boys are Osman Taka and Albanian whistles that dance even before death…
Don’t hurt me!…
Chameria’s boys are like Bilal Xhaferri who melted like the candle of Naim for Albania…
Don’t hurt me!…
Don’t misinterpret me, I don’t want to be like Beluli, this modern buffo that praise himself in the style of Mark Anthony, who immediately bankrupted the greatness of Bruti, the murderer of the Tiran Caesar…
Don’t hurt me!…
Cham girls are like Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, that forced the Caesars to put their head in her lap and to worship her graces as she was goddess…
Don’t hurt me!…
Cham’s girls are like the bride that accepted to sacrifice on the foundation of the bridge of Arta, that it would be built to bring the unity and the civilization of human coastlines…
Cham’s girls are like suliots that disposed of in the abyss from the rocks of the mountains of Suli to not remain slaves of the invaders cruelty…
Cham’s girls are like Vasiliqia that with a look descended from the horse the cruel Pasha, Ali Tepelena, threw away his sword and taught him the civilization…
Don’t hurt me!…
Chams are like Enkeleda Alushi singer, bride in Kosovo that sings to Chameria with longing…
Don’t hurt me!…
Chams are like me that bow my head only in the lap of Chameria!…
Don’t hurt me!…

Shefki Hysa
Writer

Cham warriors’ portrait

Shefki Hysa – Albanian Writer

Shefki Hysa, Albanian Writer, Secretary of Albanian League of Writers and Artists

The Dictator

Dictate you used,
As no better deceived,
You ate with a golden spoon,
People moisten bread with salt!…
Inaugurations, non-value ribbons
You signed, donated decorations,
Just for show,
People of hard works,
Behind the best’ back
Poked out without mercy!
Hearts tried to grab us
With your words and tricks
And never thought
How one day you would end up?!…
Heaven’s thunders you threw everywhere
Let us in necessity, in poverty,
Our curse fell in you
As a reward for the black gall!…

Liri Hidërshaj
Albanian Poet

Literary creativity of Hysen Sinani

(Novels)
Hysen Sinani writer’s creativity begins early, at a very young age, but he published for the first time literary stories and reportages in 1974. Later, when he was literary editor of the “Light” (“Drita”) newspaper, he published his first novel (1980) with the simple title “George”, (Gjergji) the name of the hero of the novel. Although this story has a history from working people’s life and passion, it doesn’t pass without severe criticism in the press of time, like those of ideological character that damaged more Albanian authors. The main criticism, notably in the Plenum of the League that year, more or less was this: “the employee had gone away from his social destination, giving a very bad example in our society” etc, as the novel’s hero, George, from worker becomes a literary translator realizing his passion, as for example “Martin Eden” who becomes a writer, but nobody criticizes him why he abandoned his longshoreman fellow… Another novel even more criticized than the first one, is his second novel titled “I didn’t forget that day” (“Nuk e harroja ate dite”) (1989). This creation is prohibited for three or four years in the editorial board of the only publishing house for “disparagement of Albanian reality”. Finally, after it was read and discussed in responsible instances, it is given permission to the publication, but it almost passed in silence, with the exception of an article which he criticizes in “Voice of the people” (“Zeri i popullit”) newspaper who calls the novel unrealistic and inconsistent with the Party line for the relations between the individual and the collective worker to whom he belongs. This work has at its center the life of a worker who fights against the power of corrupt leaders of a socialist enterprise. A year later, but by the only publishing house, the third novel with the same working theme, that would complete the cycle of corruption of the socialist society as the later months showed would be published. But the novel “A man like this” (“Nje burre si ky”) was only published in early 1992 when the socialist system was being collapsed. In this novel appeared the hopeless situation of Albanian simple man. More specifically, the lives of two hostile couples who were forced to coexisted under the same roof, because of housing shortage and how to somehow mitigate this housing shortage. In democracy, the author Hysen Sinani says that he had been willing to handle the topic of social protest, of whatever kind and whatever time it was. After several years for nothing in emigration, he returned to Albania and, within two years (1999-2000), he published two novels: “52 men for a woman” (“52 burra per nje grua”) and “Bad soil legend” (“Legjenda e dheut te keq”). The last one is a rare test of Albanian autobiographical novel, one that even today after eleven years since its publication; none of the Albanian authors has ever dared to repeat it. The novel, like a creation between memories and descriptions from the author’s own life, leads the reader in three European countries (Greece, Italy, France) where the main character goes to work or to meet his friends, telling the reader those part of Albanian character that are neither worse nor better than those of other peoples, which means: people vary a little between each other, their management policies vary widely. The press received well this special work, but did not spread enough its model. The other novel, “52 men for a woman,” handles the story of a young woman, a victim of the customs in the past of Albania. With bold dramatic and poetic tones, the whole novel is a unique description of Tirana village life in the last centuries.
Two years later, in 2002, another novel comes from this author, unlike any other previously published in Albania. This novel has also a very strange title: “Triseta, theorem of love” (“Triseta, teoreme per dashurine”). It is the first Albanian book with such a noted eroticism in a science-fiction atmosphere. Those who have read it think it is a premature book not for the reader but for Albanian writers race, who if they haven’t written themselves an innovative work, never accept that others have done it. “Triseta” of Hysen Sinani shows in a joyous way “the planting” of human semen in four centers of our globe, one of which is this “small place” where we live today. Then, from this macro-world touch down to Albanian today’s micro-world life, where in strong contrast with a great love, the narrow-minded society is dragged and especially that of the Albanian politics. For this novel, I have the impression that the Albanian criticism has only uttered a few words. There is a possibility that they haven’t understood it.
The last of Hysen Sinani’s published novels is that with the ironic title “The Sadist”. Another successful test of the author: an action-novel between the cruel revenge and human biblical destination, a simple story about ordinary people and an association of opinions about that who likes to contemplate. Technically it has a prominent structure: a statement issued from the holy books, the Bible or the Koran, which precedes the act of revenge of “The Sadist”. Some brigands have raped his fiancée, so he decides to kill them one after another. What did the press say about this book? Some quick thanksgivings and nothing more.
Throughout this ten year period, Hysen Sinani has made many other literary works like works’ translation of distinguished French and Italian writers, or even genuine lexicographic creations as two Greek language dictionaries, one of them medium and the other large.
He is currently working on a new novel unlike others, a “novel-contemplation” the author would call.

Paulin Rranzi
Writer

Paulin Rranzi, Albanian Writer

Paulin Rranzi, Albanian Writer, Advisor of Diplomatic Mission Peace And Prosperity and Journalist

Chameria, the voice of the divine reason

(About the storybook “Chameria Flavour”
of the writer Shefki Hysa)

Shefki Hysa is one of the most interesting writers of a generation of creators who came in Albanian letters, after their release from extra-literary limitations and taboos by a period of prohibitions and walls, giving us a new vision about the daily life, the time and the contemporaries. Son of a Cham family, who has experienced a double Calvary, the Greek-Zervist and communist, Shefki Hysa has set up in an aesthetic system the fate and the fatality of Chameria, a magical world full of messages deeply historical and mythological, in search of the faded Cham identity. In a vicious era, among the sadder Albanian national crossroads, an innocent population, in the noble ancestors’ lands, was chased and tortured from barbarians.
Shefki Hysa, in his stories brings back artistically Chameria, this piece of epic land mutilated by the harshness of ages. He confesses about a world where the dreams and the hopes of free people abound that someday they will be back to the denied Eden. Shefki Hysa is the writer of the fine psychological surveillance, of the vivid narration where are intertwined the description, dialogue, monologue, and where the real and the obsession goes together and merge with each other, the possible and the transcendent, the dream and the aware action, a world which by the protagonists who acts in that, appeals for more freedom, peace and humanism. But, what makes him a writer with an aesthetic profile all of him, is the rise in cult of the Cham’s world, that metaphorical search in the myth’s annals and in the history of a detained population, which in this new globalization era is still pledge of nationalist and chauvinist psychosis of our neighbors.
With a series of creations like stories, Romanesque, publicistic-literary books, where abound the light-shadows of a stuck time in one of the most complicated labyrinths of the Albanian time, Shefki Hysa builds a poetic narrative saga of all the times, where move the Cham’s dream and reality.
Three-dimensional time, where Hysa puts his events and stories includes in an esthetic manner those bridges of Albania, Balkans, European and World memory, where after every artistic whim is a historic fact for Chameria, the timid truths, announced or implied, which feed the tree of pain, of resistance and love of detained population.
Cham exodus from their ancestral lands, persecuted by descendants of those who had given the world the vision of the best peace and cohabitation through the narrations of Homer and sagas of Aristotle, Plato and Sophocles, those knights of the justice, is akin to the Biblical journey of Moisiu and Israelis, persecuted by the Pharaoh of Egypt. With a difference because Israelis were inclined in seeking the Promised Land while Chams were expelled from their lands and were wildly murdered and persecuted. The massacre against Chams is akin to the Nazi holocaust applied by a onster system, like the one who poured the over Jewish the lava of a pathological detestation, exerted the genocide until the extermination of human protein. Jewish were arose over the pain sea, over the demolition and wounds and went to their promised land to built up Israel and to find the lost self in a crazy time-space. Chams have the Promised Land, those areas where “leaky sun and honey” as a poet used to say, but in it live the foreigners, the Greeks, who have expelled them from their lands and properties, depriving them from grandparents graves, from the history of their noble ancestors, from the myths and legends of a population with a great poetic spirit.
Dr. Haim Raitan, diplomat, distinguished personality originated from Israel, after he has been acquainted with the Cham dossier, already expressed in one of his public attitudes: “Even I am Cham, I am from Chameria. Just like my ancestors survived to the holocaust, fought and saw with their eyes the establishment of the Israel state, I also would call it a great honor to try something about Cham issue”.
Internationalism of the single dossier in Europe and wider, the Cham dossier which is still hostage by the complexes of a false greatness that has gone together with crazy empires, everyday more evidences the necessity to depart from this Gordian junk, that keeps to maintain alive the war’s law between two places, Greece and Albania. Two places which are more united than divided with each other by the history are hostage of a syndromic, chauvinist complex. In the middle is Chameria, the temporarily lost land. It is the centre of Albanian world gravity as well as of democratic world which does not work with the old hour of several Athens’ districts.
This staring world by the charm of historical survival and the search to find new ways to rise up over the museum forgotten complexes, gives a boost to the writer Shefki Hysa to build up a range of themes where the protagonists make their next war for the triumph of Cham issue.
The author is aware that Greeks came more barbaric than Vikings. If Vikings after all were merged with Anglo-Saxons population, by learning from them the alpha and omega, Greeks not only displaced Chams, not only didn’t learn from their nobility until altruism, but certain segments of the Helene state and society still today continue to be more Viking than Vikings by feeding the psychoses of genetic detestation against Chams.
In this viewpoint, the book with short prose “Chameria flavor” of the Cham writer Shefki Hysa, is free hand narrative-poetic drawing of virgin world of ancestors where the characters seeks their fates and the fates of a land remained without people, of an escaped population, hostage of a misunderstood and digressive history up to nonsense. It is not only the topic of Chams space with its particulates, with the light-shadows, the mystery, with the transcendent world of myths and Cham legends, with the unknown or very little known in our letters, which make this book to be read by a spirit. Over all, is the magical of the narration, the suggestion of environments and situations, the agility of types and drawn characters, the foreshadow of that staring world by emotional flow of the upper level, that passes the fate of Chameria in the esthetic optic of the writer Shefki Hysa.
The author, this passionate searcher of Cham psychology and soul, in the framework of Bilal Xhaferri and other apostles of Albanian cards, in that forgotten corner of Iliriada where the Goddess Dodona firstly spoke in Albanian language and, the descendants of Pyrrhus were departed in the biblical journey towards an unknown fate, not once in his writings and books is directed to the collective consciousness of an immolate population which on top of Golgotha of a sad season were crucified by cruisers who don’t have even the pseudo-alibi of Pilat.
In the stories of this book mill about the Chams fate, the Calvary road, the existential anguish of a population that, despite has cohabitated in pre-history with Zeus and mythological Gods and has inherited the noble gen of Epirus, it has been denied the threshold of the house, the stone of the foundation and the stone of the grave.
In the narration “Elims”, the author, by using the heroes of Cham epos, the Elims, their mystical and magical world, those elements such special and suggestive, that gives in his hand a virgin folk and mythology, builds an wonderful narration where through the main personage, Fatos Mero Rrapaj, a real figure of Albanian world, a courageous historian who has carried the Cham issue as an existential hostage, escort the anguish, the disillusionment, the dream and the hope of Cham population in its secular war to find the self and the denied land. Actually, the fantastic world that gives charm and vivid colors to the narration in some short prose of this summery, like in the short story “Didini” where the magical elements serve for the narrative structuring and for the strengthen of vital substances, “The turtledove and the evil” that has in the centre of narration an ancient Cham legend, etc., “Elims” where the fantastically with the potential are emerged, reminds the kutelian images, that world of hobgoblins, night shades and ghosts which the distinguished narrator put in service of his esthetic messages for the fate and human fatality. But, different from Kuteli, Hysa uses an original superstitious archive not as a purpose in him, but to strengthen vital elements, to give them more charm and motivation in their archetypal journey towards dimensions of the great Cham dream.
Before it can be fulfilled in the magical prose of Shefki Hysa, we can say that the magical realism has existed since in the distant pre-history in myths, fairytales and legends of Cham population; in that poetic dimension of the deepest collective unconsciousness that has created by itself the Gods in the magnificent temple of Pelasgian Dodona.
Marquez spirit that traverses the Hysa’s prose, especially the narrations, deals with the vertical incision of narration lines where rules esthetic fixation and pre-destination. But, different from Marquez in whose prose are noticed the human relations and in this context also the Latin-American customary law that inhabits his prose in a pure dependence from the myth and mythology, Shefki Hysa put the myth and mythology in serving to the strengthening of history and to the evidencing of symbolic and metaphor of reality. In this sense, the fantastic serves to Hysa to make the real more touchable, to give the narration another understanding. So, for example, Didini, the hero of the narration with the same title, who appears and acts not like a concrete human but like a troubled soul of the nationalist boy, massacred by communists during World War II, in magical circumstances where he acts traverses very good the tragic of a bad time, where a part of Albanians murdered and massacred the other part due to borrowed ideology from Moscow steppes that entered as a killer nightmare among them. The events in the narration happen in perspective by wrapping all the vital material the soul-personage, who as an invisible breeze goes and comes in the homeland areas passing the events in an ice time that entered as a misery among Albanians. The fact the Didini is Cham makes his drama more tragic, neatly confessed by the soul of the young boy, which wanders away-that way, in searching for self start, remained in a bloody and painfully twilight.
The narration “World Neck” is a tragical dense and surprising saga with symbolic codes which are represented in the deadly clone (entourage nuisance with accompanying thorns of a murderous voltage of electrical energy), that separated two worlds, the propaganda world hence the Albanian border which vomited fire over them who dare to cross the thorny wires border toward the dream of freely world, where other wind blow, where Chameria is situated, this wonderful bride of Balkans, slave of Greeks. The protagonist’s journey of this prose from the iced clone where wanders the Stalinist-Albanian shade, toward Chameria is a tragic adventure where are interweaved the crime, paradox, delirium, the search of those psychic, esthetic, moral and philosophical truths which bear the prohibited Cham’s time and space. The writer Shefki Hysa has changed the Cham dossier in a searching universal metaphor of the lost identity where the individual and collective fate of a barbaric driven population from the ancestors’ lands, is combined in the metaphysics of freely time-space.
The book with short stories, “Chameria flavor”, in the sense of esthetic truths that unfurl and of the messages that passes, as our distinguished writer Ismail Kadare says, “is necessary, is indispensable, virtuous, like every mellow edition of this nature, as there are many reasons that Chams don’t forget Chameria and, this is guessed, it is not only their right, but it is the right of all Albanians”.
Essentially, this is the right of all progressives and idealists all over the world.
The compressed and concise style but worm and full of colors and life where are merged in one the pure confession, monologue and dialogue, poetry and lyrics, irony, grotesque and paradox, placement of fiction in a right context of the psycho-aesthetic-linguistic, figurative language full of brakes and surprises, slim phrases full of linguistic charm, etc., make the short prose of Shefki Hysa to be read with a spirit.
The Cham writer Shefki Hysa, believes in the divine reason of his ancestors homeland, believes in Chameria voice and in the voice of this transcendent reason and has crushed in dozens protagonists’ voices of his wonderful narrations presented in this book, which believe that one day will be back in their land, where love fruits and cohabitations fruit mature, in this trobled corner of Balkans.

Dukagjin Hata
Writer

Left devils, right demons

Definitely someone follows me
And indeed, don’t know where to go;
Left come forward hastily devils,
From the right wait the demons.

From the hutch I took a melon,
Part-part I began to chop:
Half of melon with demons,
Other half with devils.

I sharpen a pencil and opened a letter,
By the letter don’t remove my eyes:
Devils lie over the letter,
Demons stay over the pencil.

Where to enter, cannot find place,
Where to laugh and where to cry?
Left come forward hastily devils,
From the right wait the demons…

Dritëro Agolli
Poet

The Cham World, a spirited historical – publicistic narration

The writer Shefki Hysa, one of the most passionate searchers of the Cham’s spirit and psychology, following in the footsteps of Bilal Xhaferri and the other apostles of the Albanian letters, in that forgotten corner of Iliriada, where the goddess Dodona spoke for the first time the Albanian language, not once, in his writings and books has addressed the collective consciousness of a muhaajir population, the Cham one, in the veins of which flows the pure blood of the old Epirotes, that wrote the history of the proud and refractory tribes against the foreigners, in the bark of the giant tree of our national memory.
Shefki Hysa has converted the Cham’s subject of destiny into a universal metaphor of the discrete identity search where the individual and collective destiny interweaves in the metaphysics of the time-space of freedom.
After a lot of marvelous narrations, such as tales, novels and sagas, where the Cham world moves in the dark-light of time, Shefki Hysa turn to a straightforward story, “a history spirited from the poetic ego”, as Umberto Eco might say, for the Cham forbidden history. This time is given in its three-dimensionality, with regard to those bridges of the Albanian, Balkan, European and worldwide memory, where historical facts, timid truths and those proclaimed in a sensational way passes toward the tree of pain and the love of a prohibited population.
In this track, his new book “The diplomacy of self-denial” is a fiction review with articles, essays, interviews, memories, impressions, portraits, adjustments, redactions, comeback, reportages, narrations, sketches, whose focus is the discovery of the Albanian world of Chameria, in that historical and actual vector that is called the Cham issue and makes up the Gordian point of the modern Albanian history.
With a tight and concise style, but at the same time warm and colorful, where narration and investigation, the portraiture and the analysis, literary hue and the journalistic principle, the personal and the communitarian attitude are mixed together, and onward the national attitude for this capital issue of the Albanian world, with a lithesome and elegant language, where the integral search of the journalist is combined with the aesthetic principle of the writer, Shefki Hysa brings us with this book more than a concern for the historical destiny of a outgoing population, sacrificed in the road of a double Calvary, the Greek-zervist one and the communist-enverist one.
He is the author of some artistic books such as narrations and novels, and also editor of the prestigious magazine “Eagle’s wing” (“Krahu i shqiponjës”) where frequently he has given us narrative spaces and occurrences of the Cham world, (Even Ismail Kadare speaks with admiration for his last book that treats the destiny and the fatality of the Cham world) Hysa in this book brings us a philosophical and historical-literary estimation about a wound of the Albanian world, the Cham wound. The author, with facts and with his intellectual attitude of Gandhi type, claims that this wound, which continues to cause pain to all the Albanian people, must be soon operated, before it turns into gangrene and without damaging the frame of the Albanian national issue.
The author underlines with the force of argument, that in the dark tunnel of the tragic past, which still seems that holds the memory of the living people and the dead ones, after so many times in silence of prejudice and disinformation, finally a ray of light is seen. The author invites us to run after this light, to see beyond it, that street where the vision and the future strategy for that land and the sacrificed population is disclosed.
This voluminous book speaks about historical characters and VIPs, ordinary people and individuals that have carried the Cham burden along the streets of the Albanian Stalinist Gogoltha, these are Bilal Xhaferri, Ismail Kadare, Namik Mane, Sabri Godo, Bedri Myftari, Ibrahim Hoxha, Pandeli Koçi, Pjetër Arbnori, Sali Berisha, the shortsighted political vision that doesn’t generates nothing except moment conjunctures for the sake of x party or y politician survival, but even that vision which is molded in the anvil of the real nationalism ( not the folkloric nationalism) and generates ideas for the future of the Cham land and population.
But even international personalities such as Hillary Clinton, the British researcher and diplomat Miranda Wickers, who in the gloomy monastery of the Cham issue has fired up the candle of hope, aren’t excluded from the ample, investigative, comparative and polemical view.
The universe of the author point of view is the same multiple and broken universe of the Cham issue, which constitutes a dimension still unexplored of the Albanian national issue.
As a matter of fact the book is an experience that the author and his collaborators have lived, with victories and losses, with seen, rationalized, argued, prejudged achievements and judged from the viewpoints of those people, who in their dream and ideal vision, have had and still have Chameria in the head place.
The author estimates the diplomatic world and its reactions, which though insubstantial, have done again their best to make conscious this joyless space of the collective memory of the Albanian world, emphasizing the fact that the achievements of the foreign diplomacies are bigger than those of the wars.
Disciple of the Gandhi’s spirit and of those streets that bring water in the effective national choices from the intelligent grinder, Hysa appeals to the Albanian society elite to do what is necessary for the Chameria, to contribute for the Cham vision, so it won’t be a hostage of the gloomy past.
The author emphasizes with pain the silence, almost apostolic of the Albanian state in front of this historical and actual drama, the Cham drama, meanwhile the foreign diplomacy, benevolent versus the Albanians reminds the politicians of the eagle country that Chameria is a historical hostage that needs to get rid of the misunderstanding and the injustice, getting off this issue from the moldy buildings of the archives into the political agenda of the day.
The author describes the labyrinths of a misunderstood and startling dossier from the perception rate of the Albanian political conscience. The action that our indolent and expectant politics has never done and it won’t take the courage to do, will be effectuated from the responsible foreigners, our country friends with their eyes toward the west. Thus in the summer of 2001 with the intercession of Hillary Clinton, the Cham issue was introduced before the American Senate. In an auditory session the senators were informed about the Greek-Albanian relations, the developments, the irritations and the appeasements, from the summer of 1944, when genocide was plied over the Albanian Muslim population of Chameria, called otherwise Thesprotia, massacring and deporting them from the birthplace and the dwellings, from their ethnic land. The author describes the reaction of the Greek lobby in America and the official policy of Athena, the cards of justification of this policy, the closure in an isolated cairn of this problem, the manifestation of the mock fact that in Albania doesn’t exist a organism to represent the Chams, that the Albanian state moots this issue only as a counterweight in the irritation moments of the bilateral relations between Tirana and Athena, that this problem doesn’t exist and when something doesn’t exist it doesn’t need a choice.
The British searcher and diplomat Miranda Wickers, as sublimating a new political reality, which was now contoured in the American senate for Chameria, referred another challenge to the Greek policy, when she, as a representative of the British Foreign Department published a detailed study with incontrovertible historical data and facts about the tragedy of the Cham population and its beginners. This gave a strong buffet to the political circuits of Athena, set in motion some deputies of the European Parliament, like the radical Italian deputy Marko Panela and other personalities such as Dr, Haim Reitan etc, who were a protest voice, which was coming in the right time and from the right direction against the silence, till oblivion, of one of the most cardinal problems of the Albanian history.
An important part of the book has the academic and intellectual personality of Bilal Xhaferri, the elite writer of Chameria, the dissident that paid up the freedom of creation with his young life, the most industrious and passionate amplifiers of the Cham world, whom he boosted in the seventh sky of a brilliant aesthetics.
Shefki Hysa, with his intellectual obligation, with the foundation of the Publishing House “Bilal Xhaferri” and of the Cultural Association “Bilal Xhaferri” (Shoqata Kulturore “Bilal Xhaferri”), influenced that the figure of Bilal Xhaferri could get out from the fifty years of misunderstanding and adulteration flour and could take the deserved place in the forgotten pantheon of the dissidents letters.
The journey of Shefki Hysa in the annals of the Cham world is a virtual journey where the historical fact and detail is interweaved with the impressions of the author, the international geopolitics with the narration of the apostolic silence, till political naivety, of the official Tirana institutions, the investigations for the truths covered from the oblivion flour with the deduction for the intellectual Gandhism, as a tool for the identification and the profit of the Cham paradise.
As our remarkable writer Ismail Kadare says: “This book is necessary, imperative, virtuous, like every ripe publication of this kind, as are numerous the reasons that the Chams don’t forget Chameria, and it can be intended that this is not only their right but the right of all the Albanians.
Furthermore, it is a moral obligation because one can never forget a suffering wound of thousand people. A displacement can never be forgotten. The birthplace can never be forgotten, where the house is… Chameria can never be forgotten”.

Dukagjin Hata
Writer

The Sadist’s revenge

(Passage from the novel “The sadist”- 2003)
The first sunbeam fell on the eye when taking a turn at the foot of a hill, no further than 10 kilometers from Ionnina, the last Greek city near the border of his native land. He didn’t drop the speed of the car because at that hour there was no movement and soon the road would take a sharper bend towards the north. It was not a game of obstinacy neither with him nor with sunbeam. That entire trip at night made him sad at the beginning, when he was departed from Elefsina accompanied by a Greek song that just cried for a getaway, for an abandonment of no return. Was surprised by the sudden release when he thought of the reason for that sadness, but just gave himself the right saying that, ultimately, he had just a division with those people, especially with Nikon, with whom had gone well. Then he had felt a strong and coercive anxiety, as strong as he stopped the car in a corner of the highway and lit a cigarette. The cigarette smoke caused him sharp pain in the lungs. He was coughing and was soon got in the car. He didn’t depart immediately, for a moment he thought to call Luli, his fiancée. But he had shut the phone, shaking his head with regret to the whims of his loneliness. Greek clock at that moment had been 5 am, which meant 4 to Tirana. The fragile lady would be shocked by that call, when just last night they talked about half an hour for their longing and his return at the most convenient moment. She was having a more difficult life with her sick mother and her father that had started to drink more than ever. Only he missed Luli and there was no sense that he continued there, far away from her.
Now the sun is hooked up on the hills of east and the UK Tirana is coming near Kakavija customs. He can’t wait till going there to call his fiancée and again stops the car at a roadside. Greek clock marks 7 and 5 min and his Luljeta may wake up a bit earlier in a marked day like that. The ring fails to fall twice when Luli answers: “Sweat-heart, what telepathy”! I have 2 hours waiting for this call. I got up at 4 am from a very bad dream… Oh, such a bad dream!… I will tell you when you come. Where are you now? Are you coming?…” He does not respond immediately because a car goes with bang with him. Then, after the car noise is removed through the gorges of the rugged terrain, he says: “I am coming sweat-heart”. I am in Kakavija and I think I will be there by lunch. Wait me in my house cause I have brought some things I want you to see as soon as I come… Kisses!”
He shut down the phone and sighs.
When he arrives to Kakavija’s customs, he sees that the string of barges and small cars is about a kilometer long. He descends from his car and takes the road to the offices to see if the movement has begun. “At 8 will pass the first car”, they say. “8 am here is 7 to us, brother. We have plenty of time to wait till 11 pm when their custom closes…” However, the man who had spoken was left in a hurry towards the end of the cars, as if he feared that the custom clearance began and he was not there. Uku had followed visually, without really knowing what to do with all that time waiting. The service in the military had taught that the best thing to do in such cases was to wait thinking that, however endure, finally the hours passed and the long waiting could be soon forgotten. Customs cafe where he could have a coffee thinking of the anguish of a few hours ago was open. Albanians returning from Greece to their country, rarely entered there, while those who did the opposite trip, nor turned their eyes from that small cafe, rushed to flee as soon southward, toward the calling of their dreams to the promised lands…
He has passed Gjirokastra, Tepelena and then Ballshi bends and the joy of the trip toward the loving person left the place to the attendance not to fall down in the narrow exchange with the cars of his compatriots unrestrained by the freedom of democracy. Somewhere, outskirts of Fier, he feels that he needs a coffee and a cold glass of water. He stops the car in a bar along the way and sits outside. Seeing how the cars are exchanged and how paraded without any rule, the idea of movement psychopath becomes even stronger. Who knows how many accidents a day could happen here, he thinks and asks the native boy who brought the coffee and the sparkling water.
– Uh, – he replied, – only in this way, no day passes without 2 or 3 cars collided. But they don’t die every day; they rarely die, just 2 in a week.
They are poorly selected; Uku thinks and pays the waiter taking the water. In a moment, inside the car, he wants to call Luli again to let her know that he passed Fieri, but he changed his mind because didn’t want to ruin her waiting time. Exactly in these moments when Uku thinks to call her, Luljeta Voraka is with the two hands full of bags with fruits and vegetables bought in the VIP market of Tirana. It is not a good market to have such a pompous name but it is the best for the capital of Albanians wanted for western levels, however it can’t be compared even with a small market of Paris’ outskirt. Luli has stopped in the pavement, waiting for the cars to rarefy to pass in the other side where she can take a taxi. Finally, finds the opportunity and somewhat strained by the weight of the arms, her bottoms under the dress jump with an upsetting power for those who see. There are six boys, from 20 to 30 years old with the appearance of those born in 1997. They have been around her all the time during the shopping and she has noticed none. She doesn’t see anything. She hears inside of her the sounds of a sleeping symphony from thousand dreams repeated as a miracle for her. And even miracles occur, as it was happening for that lady that youth had come with the fear from savagery… She saw nothing. Even for the fruits she asked: “The best! Choose for me the most expensive!” And continued further: “Yes, I would like peppers and tomatoes, among the best and the most expensive!” She hadn’t seen her spy. Six spies for a single lady…
When she was approaching a taxi in line, a black Mercedes car had stopped in front of her legs baring the way.
– Luli, don’t you recognize me?
But Luli couldn’t remember immediately. At first she smiles without understanding who he was, then something resembled from that round face like a young woman.
– Luli, – the boy repeats opening more his blue eyes, – don’t you remember your “Ismail Qemali” high school friend?
– Surely, – she says quickly in shame. I am sorry but I was distracted because I was in a hurry to catch a taxi.
– Here it is! – He says getting out of the car and courteously opened the rear door of the car.
Luli hesitates for a moment but not enough to decide not to enter the car. The sudden appearance of that man has brought an immediate discontent. She had forgotten the short story with this school boy as all short and unpleasant experiences are forgotten when don’t leave deep traces in the long human life. Now that he suddenly came forward, she couldn’t recall even his name. Or she didn’t want to recall, as an unconscious reaction to the suspension of the harmony with her memories that he had just done. Even that road from “Avni Rustemi” square to Xhamlliku seemed as a betrayal to Uku, who, however, she would tell and explain the circumstances in which it happened…
She hadn’t heard anything clear of what that boy had said until they reached Xhamlliku, exactly at the building over the bar, which had given the name to the small square. She didn’t want him to accompany to the apartment where she would go, even though the bags were heavy. She had objected by saying that even the taxi would have left her there. But, Armando Ramboja, so called the high school friend, hadn’t accepted in any way to be rude with “a star at all” that she had forgotten even the name although he was her first friend of life…
***
What happened next would require several hours to return clear at Luli’s memory.
***
When Uku saw the door of the apartment torn and half opened, thought nothing. He couldn’t even think the simple reason of that breaking door. The view, in that moment, caused him a blackout of vision and he could only go inside and sat on the kitchen couch with his head between both hands. He stayed long with his head between hands, till the noise at first then the pain had died leaving the place to an unparalleled tranquility and clarity. The fruits and vegetables spread through the kitchen, made his thoughts clearer on what could have happened. Even the couch where he was sitting, opened and carelessly dragged by the wall, showed an all-rape of human and the housing. “It would happen,” says to himself. “I knew that something bad would happen in my return and still couldn’t stop it. It would happen. It would just happen to me because I had believed that nobody would dare to touch even a hair. While those have torn my scalp…”
He was sure that it was “these” not “this”, sure by that presentiment that had notified to hasten and he failed to arrive on time. But the evil was already done and he needed to think about what had remained to be fixed…

Hysen Sinani
Writer

A mother speaks to her poet son

Your infantile face opened up
with the blossoming of peach trees…
Whom you resembled. But I wanted you
more handsome still.
Within my eyes I hid you
so your evolution from blossom
to fruit
might be ever so brief.

Your growth left no footprints on my apron.
Even as a toddler you yearned to catch the rainbow
with your hand;
but each time the rainbow drifted away
with the hoary locks of the sky.

You came back crying.

Now you neither cry nor run
after it.
Because you have your own rainbow – of words.
Is this not a rare thing of beauty?

Once I measured your growth by the palms of my hands.
While now others measure it
by the lines of poetry you write.

You are a poet
and the poets reach extends beyond the boundaries of space.

Gjekë Marinaj
Poet

The writer that breaks the armature of dictated values

With a difficult childhood, blooded-knees, mucky hoofs, full of yellowish flowers thorny, with finger pommels torn from blackberries, with bloodshot eyes from the cold river basins “Pavel” from whose caves he occupied trout and codfish, with seasoned limbs in sharply rocks where he tracks the partridge nests, Shefki Hysa exceeded the threshold of puberty and entered a problematic juvenility with a political convicted uncle, with his father dead in a young age, with a family victim of the class war, a flock of children like a flock of sparrows were left in the compassion of destiny, were fed with seeds of plants like birds in the slabs of stones, always at risk by trap, with their hand skin blackened from wild liquid blackberries and shoreriver nuts to extinguish hunger always present, with a harsh drapery cheesecloth, with the books and the copybooks of a scholar, they mature and grow up.And came the day that the petile young boy, with a wan face, like a man face went to Konispoli’s high school. He was skillful like a sable where he should point out, he sensed and he could clasps the good mark, but he was never estimated as he should, not because he didn’t deserve but because in his class were some beautiful faces of guys pampered from the political climate who necessarily must be the first of the class and even the studentship, the chosen draperies and the white necked maiden must be only for them. Contained up to coolness, worried face, seasoned on the atmosphere of a social nonchalance, without having the possibility to live his juvenility, deprived from the right to attend university, he was obliged to enter in the reclamation venture to be a Bulldozer. Familiarized with the petrol and grease smell, fattened with a driver dictionary, but very near to the nature virginity he began to sharpen the journalist’s and confessor’s pen to outline a new profile of self-esteem. He was caught with nails and teeth after the possibility to go to university at every cost, as a student of Tirana’s Philological University, thanks to Dritero Agolli’s goodwill for the new creators, in war with tarnishing biographies that were never separated from him. Thus, with hardship and efforts, thanks to his ambitions to go onward, but also born educated like a contradictory reaction toward a vicious reality, he broke the armature of the dictatorship values system, to display his communicative ability and secure talent. He is the author of works in prose such as: “Turtledove and the devil” (Narration), “Slave of Peace” (Novel), “The Cursed Heaven” (Novel), “Confessions of a Thief” (Novel) and also publisher, chief editor and also redactor of “Eagle’s wing” magazine (which was established from the poet, writer and the publicist: Bilal Xhaferri in USA), Shefki could attract the Albanians reader attention with his prominent individuality. The admission of diversities and the observance of the real values of the writers and artists, despite of their economical, political and social position, is a necessity that will condition the progress of Albanian society. As one of the most talented and productive proser writer, Shefki Hysa enters in literature with an abundance of motifs and themes that derive from the directly recognition of life after having drunk water from its sources, in chatchment and constructional brigades, in the school classes where he has taught, in Saranda’s and Bulqiza’s precincts but also in down towns and capital where he worked as a journalist. Shefki’s prose has a deep realistic breath because his individual evocations entwist with our communal biographical elements. A scalene reference in the place names where narrating and Romanesque actions happen, or a chart of the protagonists would assure us that we have to do with an irreplaceable afflatus and a possibility for a detailed and persuasive presentation of the environments and characters: Foinike, Dodona, Konispol, Saranda, Pandalejmon, Qafëbota, Qafëbualli, Bulqiza, Tirana, Chicago, Mileja, Mëllezi, the Holy Mountain, the Jinn Outfall, The Cross Crown, Epyr, Kosovo, Chameria etc. This argument is aggrandizes also by the usage of well known historical and contemporary names as: Pirro of Epyr, Hasan Tahsini, Enver Hoxha, Nikita Khrushchev, Dritëro Agolli, Ismail Kadare, Bilal Xhaferri or shortened and alienated forms of them, Xhek Hyz (Shefki Hysa), Xheki Vilëza (the same). Ben Lleiz (Arben Iliazi), Ali Arkeologu ( Halil Shabani), Cifja (Josif Papagjoni), designer Gim (Agim Mato), etc. Another stratification represent the symbolic names that rely on events and real characters like: Docent Ramushi, Nondë Kaçoli, Bill Burreci, Kapo Erosi, Kurrizo Hefesti, Ramush Kaleci, chief editor Kopani or designations used as sobriquets created on epithets basis, vices etc. like Dad, the Reeve Maliq, Dullë Baxhaja (taken from the H dossier), Xan Hunchback, Çalamani, Capori Gungo, Satan, Poison, Esmeralda, Lina, Lirika, Rozafa, Zemëria, Demona, Bardha, Eli, Turtledove, Diella, Kumrija, Afërdita,Black Widow, Princess Marsjana, Marsida, Kullumbria etc. These words of names is striking and significant and would serve as a tutorial target. The rich language full of idioms, dialects, jargons, which are functionalized especially in the character’s chamber, utters the realistic characteristics of Hysa’s prose. Beyond the realistic inclinations of Shefki Hysa’s prose, in it we notice also elements but even concepts of a real prose which relying on folk creativity and also contemporary literary techniques, it appears to us as complex as rich in its apparently simple structures, but also excessively expressive. It must be stressed out that this wont has its basement in the dramatics of vital material dredged and collected by the writer. The narration “Didini” that has as a protagonist the so named character, a discrete nationalist disengaged in faith, betrayed and shot, who cannot find rest in his tomb and wonders like a squab in the old house’s ruins, is an artistic model of the usage of the magic elements which are an utterance of the magic realism in our literature. In the same way the scene of the conversation between I.Kadare and Pirro of Epyr, the vivid dreams of the same protagonists etc, support the idea that magic realism in our literature is not imported from Italy or Latin America, by Dino Buxati, Garcia Marquez or Isabel Aliende but is a litter of Albanian Folklore’s influence, a product of fantastic fairytales that populate it, so it is a lawsuit artistically natural and wrongful. The folklore’s influence seems obvious in the other magic narration “The Turtledove and the Devil”, where is operated with the same artistic means, in the transformation of the girl into a turtledove and the boy into a whisper. The umbra’s role, like umbra characters or umbra images in Hysa’s books for example the soul or the umbra of Didini speaks in benefit to the existence of magic realism in Albanian literature: “The soul stopped in abeyance the breeze on the rooftop of the old house” (“Confessions of a thief” pg.51). In this sense art’s essence is not a naturalist reflection but an esthetic transformation of reality on basis the main esthetic categories, where the beautiful becomes more beautiful (Rozafa, Afërdita, Esmeralda, Diella) and the uglier (Reeve, Dad, Dudumi): The reddish face of Dad, big and rounded, in a net of deep wrinkles as impaled with knife… looked on you through hollows life like two fresh wounds where two pupil eyes blanched like two extinct cinder, stuck in reddish seams nets (The Cursed Heaven pg.122). Divinities and monsters are built on this principle, the grandiose and the grotesque. The Reeve, the Capo Eros, the humpback Hefesti; Dad and Dudumi; jackass president and the shit under the fez are just artistic embodiments where the reality is changed and transformed through the hyperbolic features, behaviors and attitudes, creating in this way the grotesque image which has a more sensitive esthetic effect as an archetype of the hideous and the ridiculous. Embodiments of the evil with faces like red skinned indigenous, with the utterance sometimes of idiot innocence and sometimes of beast’s savagery which cracks the teeth, sometimes cynic and supercilious, sometimes rambling as caricatures, are symbols of Power and Violence or blind enforcer of this embodiment. Thus the author manages that through entwisting of naturalist and expressionist elements to fulfill in details the perverseness, the disdain that the characters awake, when they eat carrion like vulture animals, when they snore like pigs in slush and urinate under the table. Even their criminal actions, carried out with placidly and premeditated, are neatly motivated. The murders of Dardan, Albano, Rozafa and Jack witness this ghoulish attitude. If there are great artistic figure from those which are considered an artistic breakthrough in literary works and in our case like the figures of Dad and Dudum, which should be considered together as representatives of Power and Violence. The author merit is the granting of the two social-political archetypes that have ruled Albania among all the time until the 20-th century. How many Chieftains, Majordomos, Reeves, constabulary commanders, cooperatives elders, commissioners, directors, deputies and ministers used to be part of us? Such has been hundreds. Monsters with debonair faces, monsters with monstrous faces, tarnished souls and black-risk people that never forgot that ever and anon to pour ashes in our eyes by doing some public commonweal or in benefits of a dervish, a “common weal” for the sake of name. The naive peasant used to say: “mister so and so does good deeds too”. In the narration with same title, the reeve is the continuation of the same character with Dad, but not of a socialist dad but that of the Albanian democracy (read anarchy). This character has evolved, but still awakes a grater disdain and a deep disappointment feeling for our vicious realities. Anyway, the deflection of the white and black colors and the emplacement of these characters in concrete situations make them artistically reliable. Even Capo Eros and Humpback Hefest are like two halves of one entire. The connotation and the hyperbolas that the author has used has crated two different characters not only in their physical appearance but also in their characters. As beautiful and fascinating is Capo Eros, capable to absorb like with a magnet and to seduce all the feminine beauty, as ugly and repellent is Humpback Hefesti, pray of whom is all the feminine world seduced after Capo Eros who is incapable to fulfill their sexual desires. This couplet also reminds Power and Violence (read Dad and Dudum) but in a more indirect sense. Women are seduced by the power of Eros and are defeated by Sword’s violence. This couple that stigmatizes the moral aspects of nowadays society becomes unwillingly her portrait.
Beside the literary language inside Shefki Hysa writings vivify even southern-northern dialectical forms, taken from the labors environment and due to the characters psychology. But actually, the language of this narrator is characterized by the will and the effort to produce new forms, often work formation forms, produced with the dough of our linguistic treasury or to activate rear forms, which have impact in the ideas’ expression, in portrayals and give to the artistic tableau a special emotional connotation. Some of them are: the hole entity was re-alarmed, flummery attitude, anxious expectancy, over–tiring, imperial twilight, ghoulish flip, head-idol of the empire, crouched in invisibility, lights constellation, ticklish laughter, crazy love, widow-hood fast, elderly solitude, the darkness of the stocking cave, pained body, greasy acridity, fatty acridity, winter souls, mysterious ruins, draggle-tailed snows, etc. Sometimes this linguistic attainments stipple around a name or around his form, in word formation and in the lexical field of the key words for example world-neck, dream-neck ,hope-neck, pig-neck, lost-neck; the dept-city, the city-dept; or I’m Dullë Baxhaja, the multi-hands, multi-voice, the multi-face, the very invisible, the very ubiquitous… and other new colloquialism acquire new-words with new-meanings in function of the ideas ex: the idea that we have to deal with an immoral human being is given by these words: ladies tracer, searcher, hidden gluttonous, his body pullulates for the amorous desire, devil orgasm, erotic battle. An ominous tiding is given by these means and other characterizations: the raven-phone, the ravish phone, cawed, portentous, the ominous tiding, the thunderclap- tiding etc. I doubt that these word-forming structures aren’t influenced by one of his literary idols, Ismail Kadare writer. But still the linguistic novelties artistry goes further when they serve to built up alliterations and harmonic sound organizations that create coherence to the realities essence. Ex: the blood traces hunter, love rendered him into an ox for Danana, carrion crows with black-calamity caws, a calculated hesitation from diabolic minds etc. These sounding organizations and the metaphoric, symbolic and metonymy language of the author bring up his prose near to poem, because we know that these are means and techniques of writing poems. In order to establish stylistic effects the author uses densely functional suffixes, often diminished: slightingly, dully, bluntly, blindly, violently, furiously, cyclonically (as adverbs); geezer, dame, a saintly way, groom, little avenue, little town, squeaker, a small lawn, a small fez; (nouns): decrepit, grayish, wounded (adjectives) etc. Actually these morphological operations in word structure refresh it, make it meaningful and more thought-conveyer and sense conductor. To see their functional side we can give an illustration in a more concrete way. Ex: he considered himself grandee as Penelope, he took the little antenna with the top of his fingers and picked up the fez; …the walls were grizzled, the roof-tiles where livid, kissed the absorption like a small strawberry, with a singer tone… I was out-scarred etc. The use of vulgarizations by this author, have an artistic function to justify the art democratization, the right of citizenship of speech, authenticity of circumstances etc. The possibility for another cause is not either excluded. Generally the writers and the artists aren’t the nature’s caressing nor are the power favorable and this kind of language puts them nearer to the mass of simple people because they do not differentiate themselves as ideal authors, on the contrary, often they feel real authors, people made of flesh and blood and, this language is the expression of discontent, their inner revolt. Let’s get to a new problem: it’s about the foreshadowed and impressionable tonality of the literary and artistic work, or in other words to the emotional-idea attitude of the author. We know that these tonalities and attitudes are reflective towards different socio-political, economic and cultural realities, but primarily they express the outlook and the evocation of the artist. He has a social origin, sources of the fortune, economic situation, political engagement, ideological convictions, and the psychology as an artist and as a human being. Being like this he can’t be immune from the politics’ influence but would be necessary not to fall its pray. Generally in his literary work Shefki escapes from this trap. He presents in that book an incubus commander who shoots with a bullet behind shoulders but to the other side he has a partisan nurse that feels sorry for human beings and moves heaven and earth to save their lives. The socialist realism is stigmatized there, but it is also spoken out in a delightful way for Ismail Kadare, Dritero Agolli, and Bilal Xhaferri as characters in the novel “Slave of Peace”. In any case, like in the “Slave of Peace”, the hell scene, which actually is excessively episodic and has nothing to do with the main lines of the conflict’s development, where the writers of socialist realism don’t let each other to perk, is explained by the eternal envy of creators but even by the state politics to put them against each other and this has been real. Other scenes are justified by the symbolic burden of main characters. Still the author sometimes hasn’t purposely avoided the exaggeration. “Beasts’ junket, the lion grabs the haunch (Dad), the wolf a part of the chest (Dudumi), Chippings some ribbings (some cadres of the party and power), and hyenas (some simple communists and distinguished miners) what is remained from the beasts’ junket. Ex: Dudum is described not as a lawman but as a gigantic police, a biped brute as an ignorant being, the wolf-herder of the human race of this city of the hell. Even the city itself is scaring, rolled with an old mountain pelisse and a black cloud cap above the head, a city that consumes only peppers, whose paunch is empty and cant fill the miners’ punches either etc. It is to be mentioned that Bulqiza or Memaliaj of the 80s don’t differ too much from this tableau. Even the fact that with the same vivid colors and the same grotesque scenes are described Dad and Dudum, as representatives and products of yesterday and Reeve and Kumria as representatives and products of the present, assures that the author doesn’t see all in black and white, that the exaggeration is an artistic lawsuit and not a political playbill. In the roman “The Cursed Heaven”, in the ingoing scene the portraiture of the two harlequins, that among centuries have tried to destroy Albania, the scenes of the battle for the head-idols’ crown in the chapter for the Holy Mountain and especially in the narration “The idols Empire” it is built the thought that idols are our national disgrace. The author feels sorry for this country and that’s why every time he has the chance, he reveals his patriotic soul, his anguish for Chameria and for the Cham’s issue, for Kosova and Kosovar’s issue, for the whole Albania and for the Whole Albanian issue. The scenes with Pirro of Epyr, with Bilal Xhaferri, and of the massacre committed in Chameria, of that of the Bota’s Saddle, the scene with the two emigrants in America etc are the evidence that establish this kind of conviction. I wonder how many years will we wander as Jewish in desert. Despite all this, optimism and hope, is not lacked by the author. The depiction of big-heart characters as uncle Miho, the lakes’ magic oldster, the presence of lovers who for the sake of a great feeling know how to sacrifice, underline this faith. Another important artistic joint in the narrative composition of this author, in which his mellow values catch the eye distinctly, is undoubtedly a psychological rummage of characters, of feelings, of thoughts, of manners and their attitudes especially in the culminant and conflict moments. In “The Cursed Heaven” novel, when Jack is between two choices the battle of motivations is very long and he finds very difficult to choose: loving Rozafa, not just because of affection, but for great true human feelings and sincere love, in this way bearing the vital privations and sacrifices or lay in bad with Diella, the innocent ideal-beauty who isn’t guilty toward him and who is also a victim of Dad gaining in this way a well ordered life in Tirana, in expectancy of a important post but without human dignity. What triumphs in his soul is closely connected with the power of his character when he discovers that Rozafa was massacred to open the way to the marriage of Diella. He doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice paying his disapproval with death, there in the mountain, in coldness, in darkness, in the wolf’s mouth. Even in the major narrations, especially in those in which the author doesn’t use stunts but the vital juice is directly given, the psychological motivation is naturally founded, it flows in their interiors because of the action and the personality of the characters, is not an outer dishing to legalize characters’ variables. Lets remind certain narrations such as “Didini”, “Testimony”, “Maggie of the City” , “Olives”, “Qopeku” ,”The Oldster of the Lakes” etc. Shefki Hysa’s compositions speak out clearly of the fact that he has the ability to bake art works with dough from his own magic. There are writers who have created during their entire life but haven’t baked a single crumpet from their corn. With his tireless job, with culture and passion he will always be able to mould and bake each time better his literary bread. His so far compositions allow us to hope so.

Bardhyl Maliqi
Writer

Relic

Remained to you
As remains in the clothes’ shelf
An old coat…
I am as single with your soul
That I fear to move, without you with me…
Morn:
Dishevel the hair,
Writhe the eyes,
Wake up with your image…

Dylbere Dika
Poet

The horses of Mitrovica

The horses in Mitrovica,
more comely than the idea of Triumph’s Horses,
healthy and wise,
with yellowish tufts on forehead
as a divine ray bundle.

The horses in Mitrovica,
more educated than the foreign soldiers at the bridge
who don’t let Albanians
go in their homes
in the neighborhood with Serbians.

The bridges
I have always compared with centuries-old horses.
The horse brings you on the other shore of a legend,
enters you across the city, despite being modern.
I want to run after the Mitrovica’s horses,
to pull together the events
toward other better events.

Noble Horses of Mitrovica,
the worship toward you
will make me tonight an centaur:
the half pilgrimage’s zeal with golden horseshoes,
the other half a great
human dolor.

Visar Zhiti
Poet

Movie Director

“You don’t smoke, do you?” – a voice asked me and a packet of cigarettes was addressed towards me.
“No!” – I said.
“Neither alcohol?” – The curious voice continued with poor English.
“Neither alcohol!” – I replied quietly.
“Do you have a girlfriend?!”
“Unfortunately not!” – I said, showing an astonished expression on my face. He guffawed. His way of laughing infected also some others, who were listening to our conversation, and thus this coral laugh, seems to be a flock of ducks singing.
“Then what’s the meaning of life?” – the voice exploded out of his mouth, coming hardly between his old teeth and giving an interference with his special laugh, as if he was saying something interesting.
“But, I have just arrived…” – It was me again, trying to justify myself. My words full of despair couldn’t stop those people laughing.
It was a well-known verse. The words of The Director remembered me the three qualities of a student from that time when I used to be a student, but now they didn’t give me any pleasant taste.
We were living in a small camp, which was constructed with some one-storey, not so pretty buildings, in a rectangle block. The life was hard on that isolated place and we couldn’t breathe freely. But on the other hand of this wither deepness, we were trying to find any beautiful spiritual moment, which was like irreplaceable food due to our living.
It was Saturday. A weak sun was beaming after some clouds, and sometimes the clouds were so pitiless covering the whole sun. On those moments the wind became more cool and penetrated deep under our clothes. I was out accidentally, and my thin T-shirt seems to cool me much more. My nose began to drop some small drops of a fresh liquid, that’s why I had to use my napkin that I had somewhere in the back pocket of my trousers. With a very smoothly and easy move, I caught her on her waist and I said:
“Come and hide ourselves away from this place, which is exposed to the wind and to the people’s eyes…” It was strange in contrast to other days, all those indifferent people coming by were very polite now, and on those moments, I didn’t really need their politeness. She tried to avoid my hand, but suddenly she touched a blackberry bush and was almost tearing her socks, which were hiding two very beautiful slim legs.
“Don’t try to avoid my hand,” I said, “because… just blackberry bushes would wait for you…”
She laughed, and now it was my turn to laugh.
“Why do you look at me like that?” – She asked me, after our eyes were forgotten to a vice-versa looking.
“Because you are looking me like that too!” – It was my answer.
I felt I was doing a mistake. The most desirable and inevitable mistake in the world! She was on that age where a girl has much more fantasies and the desire to a man is mixed up with the ghost of a white horse’s knight. She stuck to my body and we walked together to hide us after the wall of the sports hall, of that little town.
Meanwhile, I touched her face, as we were so close, and afterwards her hair, which was plait very thin, just like an African woman hairs. Her hair disturbed her for sure, during the sleeping at night. Easily, I kissed her cheek. It was one of those kisses, which gives more meaning than a very rush one. Afterwards, I became more confident and began to kiss the permitted face, from eyelashes, eyebrows to the nose and at the end… her lips.
Everything was happening so easily, as if it didn’t want to spoil that peacefully and cleanly angel. But her fragile lips… I don’t know how they looked like… They gave me a wonderful feeling, mixed up with a flying dream. She felt warmly on my chest, like she was, with a rose color on her face, which gave me a very sweet taste of her well ripen fruits.
“I am dangerous,” – she whispered.
“Why, do you want to hurt me?!”
“I am going to hurt your heart…” – she looked very deep into my eyes, and got confused.
“You have almost done it,” – I smiled.
A man was coming through. Fortunately, he didn’t watch at us at all.
“Oh, God!” – She called out, while the man was passing by.
“Do you know him?!” – I asked suddenly.
“It’s a friend of my father…”
But we didn’t interrupt our sin. The sin cannot be sinned. She needed to forget something, and I needed to get warmed apart from that cold wind. With a skillful move, like a ballet master, I took her body on my arms, I opened the door with the key that I had in my pocket and we entered into the body-buildings room. We lay down onto one of the sportive mattresses, and began to be more active and concerned to each-other… our breath began to be more intensively…
From that day and on, The Director couldn’t speak to me like he did before…

Arben Çokaj
Writer

The pigeons’ eggs

Story
(Dedicated to my friend Shefki Hysa)

I’m telling you what happened to me, without fancies, without inventions, I’m telling you about my unstable will-power, about that opinion vagueness that used to move inside my brain, about that hesitation to arrange myself…
I had been staying in Italy as a refugee for two years but I still wasn’t comfortable: At first I stayed in Lecce, then in Frossinone near Roma, but within six months I found myself in Campofelice, Palermo. Subsequently I went to Torino, Milano and lastly I found myself in Ravenna. This coastal city reminded me of my birth town, Durres, that’s why I said to myself: I think I found my place…
There was nothing left in my mind of the Italian language. Maybe those numerous movements, those southern and northern dialects made me jumble the words and I lost my confidence in speaking or maybe that change of bosses, those different people and different works had quaked my speaking with confidence.
My boss was a well-kept man. When I went to Ravenna, he had just celebrated his 75-birthday. His wife seemed to be of the same age. They lived among the fields in Lido Adriano, 5-6 kilometers far away from Ravenna, in a castle-like house with small windows. The boss used to wake up early in the morning. I used to sleep in a hut some meters far from the house, but it soon was converted into a comfortable room for me. Strangely I became friends with my boss. I had different works to do: sometimes I had to cultivate the crops near the house, sometimes I had to drive the small tractor and get into the rows of vines, pruning, spraying poison, sometimes I had to reap the grass with a reaper, to make walls, plaster works, to paint with lime, to change the lamp-shades, to repair the faucets, the sinks. As if I was a master of everything. Within a few months I began to speak fluently with them. Every Sunday Xhorxho’s (the boss’s name) two daughters used to come with their husbands and children. They appreciated my work and expressed surprise over my abilities. The daughters had entrusted their parents to me.
Sometimes I woke up at night. It seemed to me that horsemen with breastplates and lances were going to appear in those fields, in those castle-like houses far away from each other and they were going to suddenly attack, that’s why I had to toughen myself, to be ready to protect them. I’m saying all this, readers, because I want to instill in you the conviction that I was the only one they trusted.
But Xhorxho hadn’t entrusted everything to me. He had kept his hobby for himself: He was a passionate collector of pigeons. In his garden, tens of pig-nosed, hairy-footed and crested pigeons danced from morning till night. Xhorxho opened his arms and the pigeons covered him entirely. I looked at him with envying eyes, without speaking and getting lost in a host of memories. I’m not adding anything. I have been one of the most famous growers and allurers of my city, but I had never talked to Xhorxho about this because it seemed as if I was going to take a piece of his pleasure.
One day, while I was harvesting the full grown grass of the garden, I don’t know how I felt, but I began to coo so warmly and sweetly that the pigeons began to move from Xhorxho’s shoulders. At times they moved toward me, at times they turned back again to him. I went and went on cooing and those damned pigeons left Xhorxho’s shoulders and they all came to me. What could I do?… I switched on the reaper once again and I began working…
Next morning Xhorxho’s greeting was given to me even more sweetly. After that moment we intensified more our friendship. During free hours we used to speak broadly about the pig-nosed, the hairy-footed and the crested pigeons. I used to tell him about Tim’s, Skender’s and Bimi’s jobs. I used to tell him how I had once stitched up the cut breast of a pigeon, I used to tell him about my passion, pigeons lure, I used to talk to him about my childhood, how I did keep the pigeons in my breast and when I used to see a house having a bunch of pigeons in it, I would let the alluring pigeons go.
One day, while I was talking, Xhorxho turned to me:
– Can you lure the pigeons of Aldo and Xhino?
– Yes, – said I and began to explain him that it was necessary to take great care of the pigeons that were lured in, it was necessary to have a great ability to keep them because they could go.
Xhorxho said to me:
– Do your part, the rest of it belongs to me.
One day I took a couple of pig-nosed pigeons and let them go into their flocks. You have to know: luring pigeons is not stealing, as stealing books isn’t called stealing… It’s a sport with particular pleasure…
We went and went on with this sport… In the suburbs of Ravena the cages began to get emptied. The worried owners began to cut the pigeons’ wings…
One day, Xhorxho asked me to bring him a bunch of pigeons from Albania and I fulfilled his desire, without delay. At first we cut their wings so that the couple could get used to the place, we made them even a special food treatment. In the first months the pigeons cooed and flied cheerfully around us, leaving and coming back together with the bunch, but suddenly one day they didn’t come back.
I was worried. They were my pigeons, that’s why I began the search… I thought the other pigeon growers were giving us back the rest, Xhorxho and I owed them this. I searched and searched until I ran out of patience, but there was no sign of them…
Finally, I went to Durres… I found them in Bimi’s cages… They sat on my shoulder, began to coo as if they wanted to say something to me. I understood their language, but I didn’t answer. I kept a rancorous attitude. They were the couple that Xhorxho and I had fed. They seemed like people who hadn’t respected us, like ungrateful people. How could I justify myself to Xhorxho?!…
Amid trouble, I had an interesting idea; I took a small basket, I filled it with cotton, I went to Bimi’s cages, I clapped eyes on a beautiful couple, I took two eggs and putted them carefully in the basket. Without delay, I took the plane to Rimini and within a few hours I was in Lido Adriano.
I didn’t talk too much to Xhorxho. We didn’t say anything about the missing pigeons. I showed him the basket with eggs. That was enough, he understood me.
He smiled and spoke:
– Now it’s ok. They won’t go away anymore…
We putted the eggs in the cage of another couple. After eighteen days a couple of birds broke out of the eggs, with some shiny feathers as if they were two peacock’s birds. Xhorxho was enormously pleased and from time to time he used to talk alluringly, he felt like he had triumphed…
Months passed. One day we found their cage empty. Xhorxho and I looked at each other. I didn’t know what to say and unconsciously I did some uncontrolled actions. I went to my barrack and took the photographic equipment I still have. I began to photograph the pigeons’ cages, the house, the garden, the tractor, the reaper, the fence and everything else. I tried not to forget anything. I was seized by the desire to collect my memories, without forgetting anything and incited by this impression I said to Xhorxho that I would fly to Albania with the first plane.
As soon as I was in Durres, I went to meet Bimi, the famous pigeon grower. I wanted to verify the fact of the disappearance of the couple born and raised in Italy…
Two pigeons with peacock’s feathers began to dance on me, to coo and coo and strike me with their beak. It was the same couple, the pigeons I had lost in Italy… Two pigeons born from the eggs warmed in Lido Adriano, Ravena, fed and raised there…
The pigeons gamboled and gamboled with me as if they were two small human beings, as if they wanted to apologize for suddenly abandoning me in the foreign land… They cooed and cooed as if they wanted to justify themselves so that I could forgive them for the sake of Durres, the birthplace of their ancestors…
Immediately I understood them and smiled. I took the message. As from two carrier pigeons…
I phoned Xhorxho. I invited him to come in Albania. I convinced him to come. We were friends from a long time and he had to know my country…
And Xhorxho came… And we silently understood each other for that sudden parting…
Today I have a small business in Durres… We maintain our friendship; we are near each other in joys and sorrows… Everyone in his own country…

Namik Mane
Writer

Monument of Skanderbeg

The monument of Skanderbeg was created by Odhise Paskali, distinguished Albanian sculptor.

Crystal

It’s a long time since we saw each other and I feel
I am forgetting you. The memory of you
Dies in me day by day,
The memory of your hair
And everything about you.
Now I’m looking everywhere
For a place to drop you
A line, a verse, or crystal kiss –
And so depart.

If no grave will receive you,
No marble nor crystal sepulcher –
Will I have to keep you always with me
Half-dead and half-alive ?

If I can’t find a chasm to drop you into
I’ll look for a lawn or field
Where I will scatter you softly
Like pollen.

Perhaps I’ll trick you into an embrace –
And go away irrevocably
And neither of us will know the other.
This is forgetting isn’t it?

Ismail Kadare
Writer, poet

The false miracle

When he opened the eyes, he saw how the sunbeams were toughing lightly the opposite wall. It was time to wake up but however he didn’t move from his bed. He only gasped and moved his arms out of the linens. He brought to mind that last night he had considered changing something in his life. Doing absolutely something worthily, which could serve to the people but he had no idea what to do. Thinking was necessary before deciding the step to take.
He had all the time, until two o’clock in the afternoon when he had to start the work in that old buses machine-shop. He was a mechanical engineer.
Recently, he had to repeat the same actions all the days. Getting up at about eight o’clock, prowling awhile until he could wake, then bathing in the old cracked wash-hand in the corner near the door, combing his hair in the blind mirror, nailed within the wardrobe covering, getting dressed and going out.
After leaving behind the long-standing hotel of the singles, along a still unpaved street, with five-storied buildings on sides, he could draw in at a crossing where he had the possibility to meet any friend and have a coffee at Piluri’s club. Then he could climb down at the city center to have breakfast at “The seaman” tavern, near the buses agency or at “The Fish” restaurant, in the boulevard which originated from the harbor. Later you could find him away the seashore, toward Bistrica embouchure. He drowsed himself in every kind of hypothesizes as far as that poppet, the schoolgirl appeared at the highroad. With black apron and white collar she could surprisingly arouse the nostalgia of the visitants, the swallows, maybe because she had to migrate every day from the village to the town, where she was doing the secondary school and conversely. His heart was flickering while he was making his steps slower, waiting for her to pass close to him. He could feel with every cell of his body the coming of the girl and suddenly, the heartbeats were intonating in her trot that was similar with that of a hind. He could hardly take heart in those moments, with the back quivering and the nape chilling from the sweat. He could feel even her flurried breathing in one of his ears and he didn’t have courage to flounce about. A voice tightened him from inside to talk to her but they had never said good-bye to each other. Her collar swished as a spring rustle while she was leaving and he damned himself that once again he hadn’t been man enough to talk to her.
But what was she thinking as she was walking anxiously awhile, without hazarding to pick up her eyes from the asphalt?! The girl was going away and he only whispered with the thinking that tomorrow he had to burst without fail. He was going to pour out his heart like the crack of a gun shot.
But the tomorrows, following quietly each other, were never ending. Every time he looked at the girl, the wing of a swallow in flight seemed to graze his face and further his heart.
– Bo! Perhaps it’s time to go to work, – he suddenly called up to himself and jumped frightened.
He began to get dressed hurriedly, but surprisingly the clothes were not the initial ones. He noticed that he was wearing a brand new suit, made of one of the most expensive and uncommon coating, that was glittering like the room itself, drowned in a wonderful, blue light, like a sleep light, but more sparkling. He wasn’t realizing if it was the sun shining this way or the flashlight. Even the furniture wasn’t the same. They were fabulous and smelled as they were just taken from the joinery. He wanted to observe a long time this fabulous change of the environment but the thinking that the bus could run away pull him out from the seat. He rushed outside.
A forest with monumental trees, whose garlands were thrilling like green fountains that throw themselves into a copper air, rose at the building entrance. He stopped for a while, terrified of that fancy view, but the voice of a red horse, which appeared suddenly from the forest profoundness, shook him.
– Come on Sir, get on and I can take you wherever your heart wants, – pronounced humanly the humble horse.
– I just wanted to go to work and if you want, take me at the bus station, – asserted the boy, almost disconcerted from that horse with a man tongue.
– It’s late Sir. At this hour you return from work…I would better take you to your girlfriend… It’s been so long that she is waiting for you… She said to me that you have to meet each other today, – was felt lowly the horse, like those old-time servants of the kings’ stories.
– What are you saying, I don’t know her, and neither do I have a girlfriend?! – rebelled astonished the boy.
– You know each other Sir, you know each other! You have met each other many times in dreams, – insisted the horse.
– Then as you want, take me there, – gave in the boy and hunched at the horse’s back, which meanwhile flied across the trees that were whistling every kind of magic carols and melodies.
They stopped under the garland of a gigantic, thousand years old olive, whose bole hardly could be carried even from the arms of seven giants. The tree cleaved with a crash and in the just-opened door appeared a phosphorescent creature, with the form of a known as well as unknown girl, who looked like that schoolgirl and she was irradiating with a grace, kindly fascinating.
– I am the Beauty of the Earth. Give me your hand my sweetheart, – intonated her voice and the boy sensed that that melodic voice was shuddering even the stone and the tree.
He held out his arm, she grabbed it and in mid-air, as in dreams, they lost across a range of royal hallways and stood amidst a grandiose library, with infinity of books. The boy wondered. He forgot the Beauty of the Earth and began to browse those strange books that could tell their title with a human voice when you were touching them.
– All the thesaurus of the human knowledge is in this Library. Here you can find even the books of the famous Library of Babylonia, disappeared thousand years before. They are yours, if you like them, – said the Beauty of the Earth.
The boy didn’t take his eyes off of that Beauty, unknown from the mankind.
– Everything you are looking at is yours. I am yours too, – continued The Beauty of the Earth with her intonating voice.
– But with a condition…, – was felt the boy with half voice.
– With no conditions! The thesaurus and me belong to you, – was felt imploringly the Beauty of the Earth.
– I want this thesaurus to serve to the humanity. So this eighth Miracle, discovered by me, can be useful – emphasized the boy.
– Neither can the sun view this Miracle, – implored the Beauty of the Earth.
– Then its grandiosity is false! I don’t want a false Miracle! You have to know that the humanity has lost too much with the disappearance of the famous Library of Babylonia. –  asserted emphatically the boy.
– Don’t hurry guy, put aside the humanity and its loss. You deserve the Miracle. We belong to you, only to you.
– No! – screamed he boy. – I don’t need this miracle if I don’t have the possibility to help the people with its values.
– Forget the people and take care of yourself, Sir. You don’t exist for them.
They have never thought about you. Why serving to those people, who has never been impressed with your existence?! You deserve their servings, you deserve the Miracle too. Don’t push away this blessing but open the door when it knocks. It is said that the bird comes to your hand only once, – supplicated frightened the Beauty of the Earth.
The boy thought an instant. The beauty of the Earth reached and kissed him magically as to fuddle the boy with the celestial sweetness of her lips. He was almost falling asleep as it were, afoot.
– No, my darling, I can’t accept your gift. Maybe I don’t really exist for the people and they don’t know how much valor do I have inside but I want to change precisely for this reason. I want to become someone, be among them so they can see me with their own eyes, touch me with their hands, perceive me with mind, feel me with heart and so I can diminish their sorrows and enhance the joys. This is me. I want them to feel that I am serving them a little and say: It’s our blood! So, I want to be useful for the people, I want everything that serves them.
The Beauty of the Earth whispered and laughed violently.
– You don’t believe me?! – jumped the boy with a hurt sensibility.
– You want me to serve the people?! My love too?! My love is sacred and it belongs only to you, to nobody else! I can’t believe that you are so ingenuous at all! – stressed bitterly the Beauty of the Earth with a tearful face.
The disappointment was clearly read in all her being…
The boy faded away by her reaction, even was he ashamed for that terrible misunderstanding, however he pulled himself together and exploded dolorously:
– I feel with all my soul your sacred love and neither can I think to give that God’s gift to somebody else. I am not so immature. On people’s service I want to put the “Miracle” of this thesaurus, not you, don’t misunderstand me. The poor people are so longing for knowledge and I feel so eager in front of this thesaurus, but it looks like a desert mirage if it doesn’t quench my thirst…
– This miracle is my set of clothes and together we are a sufficient gift to quench your thirst, I hope! The bride’s set of clothes, is understood, can’t be put on everyone’s service, can it?! – interrupted his speech the Beauty of the Earth.
The boy hushed.
– Do you accept this sacred gift or you don’t?! – shouted the Beauty of the Earth, impatient as much as angry.
The boy shrugged humbly.
– Do you?! – echoed languishingly her voice.
The boy swallowed up faintly. How could he convince the Beauty of the Earth that his knowledge didn’t go for anything if he couldn’t extinguish the human curiosity, if he couldn’t soften with them, just a little, the permanent glow of the unquenched thirst of its kind, so unknown in front of the Universe Mystery?! Probably it was impossible. And he was taught from the human practice that it was impossible for the man to coexist with the impossible. Coexisting with it was an absurdity. It meant a coexistence of the life with the lie. And this was unacceptable for a guy like him, with that moral, with those convictions, with that knowledge ambit of life. But he was made this way…
– Do you?! – was repeated the Beauty of the Earth’s voice, more faraway, more glacial, sharper than the edge of a homicidal arrow.
– No! – wheezed painfully the boy.
He had the sensation that the glacial arrows of her voice permeated his heart and it ruptured and fell on the ground.
– Then goodbye, guy! Have a felicitous journey in the people’s world.
– Goodbye Beauty of the Earth! Goodbye, you unachievable Miracle! – spoke through clenched teeth drowsily the boy and immediately disappeared from that dreamy world with a frightful glass crash.
Suddenly he opened the eyes and felt that an invisible hand had thrown him away from that magical dreams paradise to the reality of the cold room. He whirled his eyes and distinguished in the concrete floor, between the bed and the dressing-table, the shredded glassworks of the flagon that, as he could understand, he had pushed down while sleeping, with the instinctive movements of the arm.
– Welcome to the human reality! – shouted joyfully the boy and after throwing away the linen, jumped with the thinking that he had to change something of this equal daily life with a gray color.
He was going to color his future with the warm colors of the dreams and put it on humanity’s service. So his life could have a sense henceforth…

Shefki Hysa
Writer

Cham Ballad

The rainbow, like a tearful greeting of goodbye,
Disappeared beyond the distances,
Over the crests’s flame,
through the rain…
Beyond the distances disappeared inflamed Chameria
And all our streets lead to north.
Roars the Mediterranean wind over the ancient Epirotic lands,
over the dearly ancestral lands.
In the abandoned pastures are grazing the thunderclaps.
The unharvested olive-groves thunder like the waves along the hillocks.
And everywhere the Cham land,
covered by the clouds,
groans muted in blood and tears,
left lonesome,
without Godhead.
We are shown the way by the bullets that whistle in darkness.
We are lightened the way by the flames that have swallowed up all earth.
Behind our backs the windstorm hits the ramshackle house doors.
And the streets prolong and prolong in north.
We, a muhaajir population, walk through the rain…
Goodbye, Chameria!

Bilal Xhaferri
Albanian Dissident Writer