Rudi Erebara: “We were potential enemies earmarked for prison”

 

Rudi Erebara (Photo credit: Xhodi Hysa)

Kafka “meets” Kundera on Albanian soil in the awarded novel The Epic of the Morning Stars by Albanian author and poet Rudi Erebara.

Uncovering of the immorality of Enver Hoxha’s dictatorial regime and a tribute to the famous Albanian painter Edison Gjergo, the book is available in Greek by Strange Days Books.

An in depth conversation with the author.

The Epic of the Morning Stars is both a fictional yet very compelling uncovering of the immorality of Enver Hoxha’s dictatorial regime and a tribute to painter Edison Gjergo and the spirit of independent art in general.

What do you most vividly recall from your teenage years, while growing up during the last stages of the regime?

I recall my early childhood in the sunlit Tirana gardens that now have gone extinct; also in the movie sets around Albania alongside my father. He was one of Albania’s first film directors and amongst the most important directors we had.

He took me along for a simple reason: my brother was just born and my mother could not take care of both of us at the same time while working as a teacher.

So, I followed my father in two movies -On the verge of the summer and Freedom forest-, both on the subject of the war against the fascist Italian invaders. Life was beautiful back then.

The death of my grandmother and my crying at her funeral marked the end of those happy times.

Afterwards, something brutal happened that terminated my childhood, once and for all: my uncle, with whom I was very close, tried in his mid-twenties to escape from Albania with his friend, Petros.

They attempted to flee from the Ohrid Lake, towards Yugoslavia or Greece, and that was it. We never heard from them again, even to this day. They were considered enemies of the state, and so were their families.

Our family and the family on my mother’s side, were luckier than the rest, because the regime did not banish us from Tirana, as they did with the family members of my uncle’s friend.

They suffered badly and, to my knowledge, they were amongst the first Albanians to cross the border over to Greece in 1990. They live in Greece today as we speak.

From the day the secret police came to pay us a visit, all the youngsters of my neighborhood got the habit of taking me to spots where no one could see us to ask me where my uncle was. I did not know.

I was too young to understand what an enemy of the state was and what it meant to be one. I was an undeclared enemy of the state.

However, I understood fear quite well. Fear never left my brains until 1990, when I joined the Student Movement for Democracy. The parents of most of the older kids who asked me were my uncle was worked with the state police and secret police.

They came to live in our neighborhood in the new apartment buildings built by the regime, some on my grandfather’s land. In less than 10 years, we, the natives of the oldest neighborhood in Tirana, became a real minority in a political sense.

Fear guided us. Fear taught us what the right thing to do on every occasion was. We searched the archives, even through television, to find my uncle and his friend up to 2007, but the search was futile.

Fear was to us what a stethoscope is to the doctor, a way to find out if any infectious danger had entered our life.

Hundreds of thousand Albanians shared the same plight. We were potential enemies earmarked for prison just to fulfill the need of the regime for actual enemies.

We were useful more than just potential inmates; the regime might need us just to supply free labor in mines, construction, etc. We knew it. There was no need to be actually guilty of something.

Why does Edison Gjergo constitute such a fundamental influence on you?

Edison Gjergo, the painter, and his friends and colleagues, painter and architect Maks Velo and painter Ali Oseku, were all condemned to prison sentences pursuant to that infamous law, 55/gj, for agitation and propaganda against the “state of the people”.

All three of them got 9-year sentences, and were sent to a forced labor camp in a devil’s den called Spaç, a chrome mine in the middle of three mountains in northern Albania.

Their life story was to us, arts students, a sort of a scary movie. Their fate was a taboo in each and every discussion. We did not even know how they looked like. At that time we didn’t know whether they were still in or out of prison.

But to us, they were absolutely famous, great artists, great humans. They were such big artists, that the regime, in order to prevail against them, had to put them in jail, so all of us could take a lesson for free of what happens if you don’t obey and serve the regime.

By the end of lyceum, we had fallen in love with these great artists, of whom we knew only the legend. Their art was prohibited, so it had to be great- as it is, actually. For their art, they paid with their life.

The absence of their faces in this story made them even more sublime. The conception of this book, the The Epic of the Morning Stars, started back then. That was forty years ago.

It bore the same title with the eponymous painting by Edison Gjergo, the ticket that opened the gates of Hell to him.

As for Maks Velo, I knew nothing about him back then. We became friends in 1991, and our friendship lasted until the day he left this world, last year. Our last coffee -he had tea- was one week before the total quarantine.

He told me about his last book, about the suicides of people on the day of their release after a long jail sentence. Real stories. Velo published over 7 books, memories and fiction based on memories. True books.

As for the great artist Ali Oseku, he was my professor in the Academy of Fine Arts, then later and to this day a dear friend. He is still doing great with art until now.

This memory has been following me throughout all these years as pain, danger and risk- all tightly interwoven with the fate my family would have had if I had done something wrong, just like my father.

It was very personal, in the way that a final verdict is. It was something that all of us have been carrying along. We were all possible enemies of the state.

Nowadays, I am glad that nothing grave or drastic, has happened to us in real life, because, luckily, we did not make that single big mistake, the one the fish commits with the hook. We did not take the bait. It was almost inevitable.

To face it, I wrote a book for my children and their generation, so that they could read what has happened to us all.

At present, that part of our history under the dictatorial regime is being published in 3 -and soon in 4- European languages, to fill a blind spot in the European history of war against evil.

Your novel unfolds in 1978, when the rupture between Enver Hoxha’s regime and Maoist China takes place. Why is this year so crucial in recent Albanian history?

1978 has a tremendous historic importance for Albania, because it marked the end of a wave of a soft liberalism characterized by a plethora of imprisonments of artists, musicians, actors and singers.

Even one minister of Culture ended up in jail for almost 10 years.

His son is the public intellectual Fatos Lubonja, a great human being who survived 18 years of prison once risking execution, while serving a 10-year sentence in a forced labor camp.

That was the year when Albania entered its darkest period since the Ottoman occupation. Total isolation.

It started the “made in Albania” communist dictatorship, under the same old Marxist- Leninist ideology, yet outside the Soviet or Chinese payroll. The whole of Albania was transformed overnight into a natural prison.

Like those old Soviet Babushka dolls, several of the novel’s characters, and especially the protagonist/alter ego of Edison Gjergo Edmond/Suleiman, are in conversation with/fighting against a secret self. Why?

After 1978, in absence of the help from the big communist economies, only propaganda was abundant in Albania, because it came for free.

The regime resorted to unlimited propaganda to justify the absence of the most elementary goods such as food. 80% of population ate corn bread for most of the year, as its everyday meal.

The government started picking on the healthy people as possible enemies to imprison just to make the wheels of economy turn, so they could be forced to work under terrible conditions in the chrome and iron mines.

In one way, the Albania we inherit to this day is the Albania that was left from 1978. After the breakup with China, the economy declined with no return. Everything was destroyed.

By the end of the ‘80s, there was food shortage as in Germany after Second World War. I have queued for long hours, from 2 o’clock in the morning until 6:30 just to get 100 gr of ground meat, because the available stock did not last until 7.

Only the first bunch of people could buy some. The rest had to return and wait another day.

By the end of the ‘80s, we were back to the restrictions after the Second World War: 1 kg of meat every two weeks per family of five. There was no milk, except for babies.

I have grown old and still experience this problem with milk, like most people. I just cannot drink milk. My body will not accept it 30 years from that time.

The washed-off red, a highly imaginative literary device, sets the narrative -and the characters’ problems- in motion. Is this a hint at the decomposition of an imposed political ideal?

The washed off red actually happened that day. It is a story that took place for real during the May Day parade because of the sweat, or just after a light May rain. The fact is that the only thing that the dictatorship offered in abundance was violence.

Hundreds of thousands of people got paid to live the same shitty life like their victims, but what they got paid for was to use violence. And this was a political duty. It had little else to do with life in progress. There was no ration in violence.

Somehow, people started recalling as the good old times the era of Russian rule over Albania, and later on they created an idyll about the abundance of what they called the “Chinese times”.

Communism in Albania never came to the point to become something to be idolized. It was just a propaganda that justified killing in the name of progress.

By 1978, all educated members of the Albanian elite were ether killed, imprisoned - sometimes for life-, or just crushed to inexistence.

As an example, I have to recall what happened in February 19, 1951. A small device exploded inside the courtyard of the embassy of the Soviet Union in Tirana.

For this incident, resulting in just one broken glass, 21 males and one female were shot. They were all innocent. They had nothing to do with the incident. They were killed, buried and in the next day they were judged.

Now, we have proof that the list for this genocide was prepared in the beginning of February. That was at least 12 days before the incident. All the victims were from elite Albanian families. The woman was the first Albanian female scientist.

In The Epic of the Morning Stars Kafka “meets” Kundera on Albanian ground. Would you cite them among your literary influences?

Well, Kafka was prohibited, just as was Dostoevsky and hundreds of others from the top list of the greatest writes of humankind. We all read these authors after 1992.

Have you personally faced prejudice or underestimation with regard to your work both from Western European literary critics and/or readers just because you happen to come from the literary “periphery”?

My book was just published and, unfortunately, this has happened under the unfavorable conditions of COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to Greek, it is available in Bulgarian and Italian, and will hopefully be published in Spanish too.

It was hard to make it work, because of the shortage of translators from Albanian to languages other than those of neighboring countries. How it is going to do in the market, let’s see.

Many thanks to the translators of my book in these languages. I have not had the chance to hold a copy of it in other translations yet, with the exception of the one in Italian, a language that I can read and write.

Yes, it is such a tremendous achievement for me, exactly because I come from this literary periphery.

So far, there are Albanian writers published in other languages, but no one so far got any close to the success of Ismail Kadare, our most famous writer, from 1960’s up to now.

Your novel The Epic of the Morning Stars is available in Greek by Strange Days Books, a small peripheral social co-operative enterprise functioning in a pretty much “communist” spirit within a capitalist economy.

I want to thank Strange Days Books, the translator Elson Zguri and his friend Almir Hoxhaj, who brought my book into Greek.

The truth is that for most, or maybe all of the contracts I have signed with publishing houses, I barely believed that my book was going to make it. But it did, thanks to the help of the European Union.

Without their help, I still believe that it was never going to make it, to be published as it did. Now, as I said, let’s see how it does with the foreign readers.

Here, at home, it has been a success. As for Strange Days Books, I wish them the best for the future, feeling grateful.

How do you connect with contemporary Greece in its various aspects?

Well, I was hoping to be present in Greece for the first time on this occasion. Tough luck, though!

And it is going to be a very long time before I get there, since there are no vaccines in Albania yet and the borders are still closed just to remind us how it was during the Cold War.

I have read plenty of Greek authors in Albanian translations. Yannis Ritsos was big back then.

You see, if someone wants to understand what communism is like, should first accept it within himself, that Yannis Ritsos, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Mayakovsky are not really what communists are in reality.

Elitis, Kavafis, Seferis, I’ve read them with love. All great poets.

Exploiting a real, deadly and very dangerous pandemic, a global totalitarianism is on the rise. To what extent is it similar to or does it differ from the totalitarianism that was prevalent in Albania for 45 years?

At this point, I may say, half joking, that we are somehow immune from this totalitarianism.

We who have lived under communism maybe don’t know much from Western lifestyle, maybe we are still quite behind in many aspects of that, but I assure you that we can “sniff” a dictatorship a soon as it shows up.

Who would have thought that we would come to see people that walk with masks on and stay put in a bar for 4 hours without a mask on, as it’s happening in Albania for months now?

And finally, what kind of Albania -culturally, politically, socially- and Europe do you envision nowadays?

An Albania inside the European Union gives me some hope that we will win the mafia controlling our government and destroying our lives with the same people that run communist Albania some 30 years ago.

It has to happen pretty soon, because I don’t know how many people are going to be left in this country.

Over the past 8 years, another half a million has emigrated from Albania to Europe or USA. We desperately need to be part of the EU, today, because even tomorrow feels too far for me.

I warmly thank Gregory Papadoyiannis of Strange Days Books for his valuable contribution to the organization of the interview and the author Rudi Erebara for his kindness and time.

Rudi Erebara’s novel Τhe Epic of the Morning Stars is published in Greek by Strange Days Books, translated by Elson Zguri and edited by Αlmir Hoxhaj.