Kadare revolts: Albanian ostentation
The signature wipes away investigations
On page 9
EXCLUSIVE / APPEAL FROM THE WRITER IN PARIS
Kadare revolts:
Albanian ostentation
Ismail KADARE
Ostentation is a justified quality. A valued one too, among human peculiarities. The little ones strut, the frogs, the little ducks, the gadflies and the little fools run around in haste. There is also a sense of ostentation, and an even more hideous one. The first tool is to express it in front of foreign faces. They murmur, “Yes, yes,” quietly, until they sell out. This has crystallized into a persistent ostentation, whose hidden meanings are conveyed in a thousand ways. Not even Gjergj Skënderbeu, who measured and weighed Albanian chivalry against the honor it had given, but grief and arrogance have often forced us into shameful acts of ostentation. Our figures and our leaders have always been marked by a mix of pride and bitterness, in the middle of the long night and the many long days, at the peak of the struggle and in the throes of the state’s own hard-won dignity. And in the age of Kupovti and the struggle for survival, through a territory that was at once ours and not ours, Gjergj Kastrioti-Skënderbeu, although the country’s spirit remained in distress, did not yield to easily mastered hands. There is no place for this kind of ostentation, not even for the small and the weak, or for those who stand beneath the low branches, from the time of the old enmities and the separation of the people and the sheaves. What comes from writing, from a pen and a book, is in another place altogether. Albanians, despite being “self-aware, normal?”, even though they know themselves, still pose. They pose with grace, in a decent place and on the map of the world. Under this agreement? that they proclaim loudly, the writers of exile, using the care of words beyond their own limits, translate it into the word “leader.” Leaving aside invented and carelessly used words, I state that among us the ostentation of mediocrities, of market hucksters, of ruffians, of noise-makers of the other Europe type, despises the minds around us and has turned Albanian politics, with the knife of one against another, into a place and a meaning of such a world. Albanians, unconscious of Albania, and of its leaders? with questions. They had been astonished: “Leader.” If Albanian friendship? with the surrounding world is an effort and an agreement of minds, if their ostentation is an entry without meaning, then the writer needs to name it as such. This bond of excessive thought? toward foreigners, this improper gesture? given easily, and hidden beneath itself, if one considers over what points it still weighs, is one of the ugliest manifestations of our politics. First, because it makes us look as if we have emerged from an old history; second, because it brings out even more strongly our envy and despair, the impossible cry, although it was old and familiar to everyone.
The Tirana adventure, how it crosses the mountains to enter Kosovo
On page 4