Dordzhi Dzhaldzhireev: “Everything around me is a gateway to discovery”

 

Of Kalmykian descent and writing in Russian, Dordzhi Dzhaldzhireev is a poet whose work explores historic trauma, language loss and suppressed identities.

On the occasion of the comprehensive feature on his work published in the current edition of the Greek poetry magazine Teflon, we have conducted an extensive conversation with him.

Prior to delving into your work, thanks to Ksenia Kalaitzidou’s article in the current edition of the Greek poetry magazine Teflon, I was unfortunately unaware of the very existence of Kalmykia -your birthplace-, its history and traditions.

To what extent and in what ways does your poetry draw on/restore/vindicate the diverse and complex Kalmykian experience and trauma, personal and collective?

My poetics, perhaps implicitly, are largely based on an understanding of the Kalmyk people’s historical journey (at least of the relatively recent), the events and traumas they have had to endure, albeit in order to understand how they are changing our future.

It seems to me that a lack of reflection leads to conclusions, including in art, which are detrimental to the people’s culture, especially during a period of potential assimilation.

Like many Kalmyks, I have had to deal since childhood with the insurmountable pain of the consequences of historical trauma, with the awareness of injustice and unresolved conflicts of Kalmyk identity:

The Dusty March (Torgut Escape) - the resettlement in 1771 of part of the Kalmyks to China due to pressure from the Russian Empire, the Civil War (1917-1922) and the subsequent migration of parts of the Kalmyk people;

The Famine in the Volga region (1920), the collectivization of Kalmykia (late 1920s - 1930s), the Famine of 1932-1934, the participation of Kalmyks in World War II, the period of Soviet rule and during the 1990s in the context of the Russian Federation.

The most terrible tragedy, which literally destroyed the Kalmyk way of life, deserves mention: the treacherous deportation of the Kalmyk people (1943-1950).

According to various sources, more than 40,000 of the 97,000-98,000 Kalmyks deported to Siberian exile between 1943 and 1950 perished.

Undoubtedly, the most terrible consequences of these events are felt in descendants (the generations of my parents, these contemporaries of mine, and later).

Currently, the Kalmyk language is on the verge of extinction, a vital cultural layer of the people, largely associated with their nomadic way of life. Unemployment is rampant, and a mass exodus of young Kalmyks to metropolitan Russia is underway.

The grave consequences, of course, are expressed in a repetition of the tragic events that occurred on February 24, 2022, which sparked renewed unrest among the young Kalmyks. The world has changed, has become a world.

Reflecting on these events led me to the conclusion that my poetic experience must largely be based on reassembling my identity and searching for ways to preserve my people’s culture and transform the divisions among Kalmyks (including after 2022).

Initially, I struggled for quite a while to establish my poetics, as I hadn’t evolved beyond the more classical structure of poetic texts, immediately beginning to write in a freer, less formal form.

This, in fact, provoked skepticism and misunderstanding, as I didn’t directly utilize artifacts of the Kalmyk cultural code, which was typical for the construction of “national literatures” during the Soviet period (for example, the use of folklore, the history of local nature and people, etc.)

I would like to consider that my poetics was “tempered” specifically within the Kalmyk literary community, so that it could eventually move beyond other negative characteristics, such as national exoticization.

It was in this region that I began to fully connect with Kalmyk culture and the collective memory of the people.

My goal is to fully express and convey my sense of self as a representative of the Kalmyk ethnic group, exploring the creation of new forms and unique experiences, which, I daresay, could be my contribution to the development of new Kalmyk poetry.

In the constant experimentation and subsequent evolution of art forms, I observe resistance to assimilation and colonial thinking.

My creative work also aims to assist Kalmyk poets and create low-level horizontal communities among artists for interaction and mutual assistance, so that through our joint efforts we can enrich Kalmyk culture and create something new.

In particular, poetry is the emergence of new connections, implicit or even previously non-existent, which also positively influences the process of preserving and developing culture, because when you try to create something new, you also solve old problems.

How much has its focal point shifted or has been re-evaluated since you relocated from the periphery (Elista) to the metropolis (St. Petersburg)?

I don’t think my focus has changed at all, as my life in St. Petersburg is determined solely by the possibility of earning a living, because it’s very difficult to find work in Kalmykia, and literature doesn’t provide a steady income.

I have extensive experience relocating to different cities and countries, but I always returned home.

My upbringing in Kalmykia, perhaps due to my character, experience, and personality, was quite isolated. I wasn’t particularly sociable and didn’t find understanding among my peers or the older generation.

Unfortunately, there were no opportunities to study poetry -by which I mean no courses on creative writing-, let alone practice it, so I had to search for all the information blindly. Perhaps this experience was quite useful for me.

Given this, I can say that my location doesn’t particularly influence my ideals, especially since it’s possible to create projects, interact, and communicate remotely.

In what sense do you consider yourself a “decolonial” poet and activist in the contemporary Russian context?

In a broad sense, decoloniality in the context of my poetic practice largely pursues the goal of developing a new model of writing that departs from the tradition of Soviet “national literatures” and overcomes the historically established centralization of the literary process in Russia, previously localized primarily in the metropolises.

Since I consider myself a Kalmyk poet, yet one born into a Russian-speaking family and using Russian primarily for poetry and everyday communication, an important part of my decoloniality is a direct rejection of any forms of “great Russian culture” in art, instead developing and constructing a poetic optic built on Kalmyk identity.

I also study my native language and practice my poetry in Kalmyk, which further expresses my intentions to combat assimilation, currently gaining momentum against the backdrop of a reduction in the number of lessons on the languages ​​of the peoples of the Russian Federation, the change in the status of Russian languages ​​to “optional” in schools and cultural marginalization, amid the growing rise of right-wing and militaristic movements in Russia.

Currently, in the Russian-language literary scene it is very difficult -if not impossible- for representatives of various peoples of Russia (without being in migration) to express themselves without state sanctions.

Literature in the regions, in relation to institutions, seems to be in a difficult position; in many republics, there are no literary journals, and neither state nor non-state support is available.

With this in mind, I strive in every way to support and assist poets and poetesses from among the peoples of Russia to assert themselves, to develop and communicate their voices through poetry to everyone (including those who deny us our presence), as I know firsthand the xenophobia that people from among the peoples of Russia face.

Of course, decoloniality does not mean the irreversibility of separatism, which, incidentally, does not always lead to real independence from the mother country, but rather the intention to achieve the right to independently determine one’s own life, achieving autonomy in decisions, in terms of the ideals I defend - namely, the right to preserve and develop one's native culture.

I see the only future for artists from among the peoples of Russia as finding support only in community, solidarity, and mutual assistance. Nothing about us without us.

I also see great value in the positive impact poetry can have on people. My fellow poets and I have organized charity events, the proceeds of which have gone to aid funds for victims of repression, refugees, the poor, survivors of sexual violence, and so on.

I share a goal, like others who share my spirit -despite my obvious vulnerability- to change the often unjust, sometimes even terrifying, order of things.

Your poetry is regarded as experimental/avant-garde, and is, for the most part, hermetic and barely penetrable. How do you define “experimentation” nowadays, both structurally/stylistically and in terms of content? Is it inherently political?

The poetic development of my writing began immediately with intuitively freer forms, as I wrote without thinking anyone would ever see it, so I was constantly experimenting.

At that time, one could confidently say that my work was depoliticized.

I enjoyed constructing and being constructed alongside the text, working with its countless potentialities, sensing my own situational potential, understanding that the lack of orientation of (any) body is its invulnerability.

Before I began directly engaging with poetry, I tried to learn from every gesture, every signification and premonition.

Recalling one of my experiences interacting with a text, I felt a momentary sense of total tension, like the moment just before something happens, when space either generates an event or identifies the possible (what was previously impossible).

I sense that this process, seemingly consigned to the past, is constantly ongoing, never reaching its logical conclusion.

I feel the same about my other texts.

Each text has its own vision, like a fingerprint or the retina of the eye, seemingly from the bottom of the water, contaminated by the history of a dimension (where you and I are), and this sensation (of vision) glimmers within me like separate worlds.

Perhaps some find interacting with text-centric, hermetic writing repulsive, but I think it’s like nurturing a black hole on a windowsill next to houseplants; if it were removed, the room might seem truly empty.

In other words, I don’t see hermetic writing as something radically closed. Perhaps, quite the contrary, it’s radically open, since accessing it requires flexible thinking, free association, and so on.

At the beginning of our conversation, I touched on the context of generating new experiences, and I consider this the primary goal of my poetic writing in relation to experimentation.

Previously, I perceived experimentation as a certain sensitivity, a feeling based more on mythological principles, so to speak.

Now, over time, understanding this process anew, I understand that it is a purely political gesture.

In my case, experimentation is the basis for reassembling and constructing a national identity, an attempt to horizontalize non-human agents and overcome anthropocentrism, overcoming militarism, and addressing social issues.

“For a Kalmyk poet to write today in a contemporary way is a multiple challenge, because he is called to choose between the imposed Russian language and his native one, the natural evolution of which has been ruptured,” Kalaitzidou notes.

How do you respond to this challenge and how do you eventually cut this “Gordian knot”?

At the moment, I see no other solution, in my case, than to write decolonially, as I understand it, resisting the imposition and marginalization of any “great culture.”

That is, to write while embedding and developing one’s personal and national identity, gradually transitioning to one's native language.

This requires considerable time, close community, and the exchange of experience among all creative people, philologists, and other scholars, regardless of national origin. Cultural development requires joint participation.

The main thing I would like to emphasize is that we must avoid conflicts and mutual accusations regarding, for example, Russian-speaking representatives of peoples and those who speak their native language.

I have always seen and continue to see the foundation of identity as the basis for changing this situation.

The translation of your work also constitutes a challenge. Do you maintain a close relationship with your translators? How has it been working with Ksenia Kalaitzidou?

That’s true. My texts are very difficult to translate, I believe, so I’m deeply grateful to everyone who was able to translate them.

It’s a difficult, collaborative process (I consider literary translation a form of collaborative writing), and the very possibility of translating my texts demonstrates the translators’ extraordinary abilities and talent.

I’m happy to have met such people and, I hope, will continue to meet them in my life.

Ksenia is a very sensitive, professional, and wonderful translator! I trust her completely, so I didn’t interfere with the process, but I was always ready to help and answer questions.

I’m very happy and grateful to Ksenia Kalaidzidou for translating my texts into Greek. To be honest, I never thought my poems would ever be read by Greek readers, and I thank her from the bottom of my heart!

Your poetry is influenced by the European literary tradition, mainly modernism, T.S Eliot, Paul Celan, Meta-realism and the Beat generation, is highly visual and also abundant with neologisms.

Would you like to elaborate on the complexity, the joys and the pain of the creative process?

Yes, that’s a whole other story.

Of course, the influence of both the European and non-European literary traditions in my work cannot be denied.

In Russia, for example, some have attempted to construct a speculative genealogy of me, trying to find similarities or place me within the context of Mikhail Eremin and Arkady Dragomoshchenko (after whom the prize I received in 2021 is named), and geographically, with Velimir Khlebnikov (he’s my fellow countryman).

I view this neutrally and don’t deny the possibility of continuity if it helps people better understand the context of my poetic writing.

Moreover, it’s impossible to be a completely original author.

My first love of music had a very strong influence on my creative process; I really love hip-hop, dub, reggae, and so on.

As a child, I remember always enjoying improvising, imitating recitative, producing intricate sounds, glossolalia, and experimenting with various objects at hand to produce sound, as I didn’t have any musical instruments.

Perhaps this was influenced by the fact that I had a severe stutter, and this along with reciting poems (alone, of course) from ancient poetry greatly helped me correct this speech impediment.

Consequently, early in my career, I began writing following rhythm, abstract, and sound-producing figures.

This prompted me to undertake a specific work on phonetics, the goal of which was to derive a certain semanticity not from the meaning of words, but from phonetic connections. I saw this as a way to obtain information freed from verbal context.

Again, these were early experiments, so I was not critical of them, and thus these techniques can still be found in my writing, which is why readers, translators, and critics began to associate them with the futurists.

Later, I became very interested in new materialism (object-oriented ontology), the ideas of de-anthropocentrism, and animal rights.

At that time, I was involved -and still am- in eco-activism (in particular, I participated in the cleanup of the oil spill in Anapa).

I was particularly interested in the phenomenology of space. Specifically, if we touch on one of the main themes of our conversation, the connection with the reassembly of identity, then the phenomenon of Kalmyk space should be mentioned.

This is an entrained spatial potentiality, whose materialization can occur at any moment. This is a place where literally anything can happen, a pure chance of nature.

The Kalmyk space, and in particular its steppe, lacks any possible centrality, being one vast periphery, unlike other landscapes.

The steppe affects not only people (I’ve heard many stories of people getting lost in the steppe, literally walking in circles- some have also mentioned visions or hallucinations), but also technology, causing a mapping drone to literally hallucinate.

Space develops the ability to defend against the negative influence of capitalism and neoliberalism and the militarism inherent in them; space is opportunity.

This is also the source of a special interaction with space: since ancient times, Kalmyks have measured distance by the number of songs performed along the way.

Based on this experience, I wanted to “infect” the poetic text, interrupting the linear inertia of writing with printed symbols (fractions, lines, etc.)

Into these I introduce contextual, viral ramifications or additions, making the text as autonomous as possible and permanently emanating in its sensitivity, like a bare wire in water at a spiritualist séance.

In this sense, I see working with text as a kind of desire to toss seeds onto a hot frying pan, so that they scatter across the room from the heat.

What’s surprising is that those texts, dotted with fractions, lines, and so on, when turned sideways, become very similar to the Kalmyk script of Todo Bichig (which very few people in Kalmykia, including myself, unfortunately, speak).

This was unintentional, which once again convinced me that I may be constructing my method of constructing poetic text correctly (for myself), accessing collective cultural memory not only through direct cultural artifacts, traditions, and literature, but also through space, sound, affectations, and so on.

Of course, in my early work it was much easier for me to write poetry. I literally followed inspiration. I had no mentor and I didn’t attend any courses. However, over time, it became more difficult.

I began to work with sources, more critically analyze the ideas introduced into the poetic text. Writing a poem a day, as I did in the past, no longer seems true.

Considering that I, perhaps like many others, had to literally reassemble myself after February 24, 2022.

Also, as a result of many life troubles, including unemployment, I was depressed and I was in a creative crisis. I tried to get out of it, mostly by writing poetry for myself, while simultaneously searching for new poetic practices.

But I have already found the strength in myself to continue creating, publishing and preparing new projects.

In 2027, my book Beyond Salvation, translated by Venya Gushchin, will be published by World Poetry Books (USA). I am very happy about this and I want to separately thank Venya for his enormous work!

You also seem to be fascinated by the Rebetiko microcosm. Why?

I’ve always felt like I lived in Europe, but the image of a monumental, cemetery-like Europe, full of triumphs, empires, republics, Enlightenment and so on, that most people conjure up, always felt alien to me.

On the contrary, I experienced a different Europe, a living one, a Europe as a land of curses, aspirations, and revelations, a profoundly anarchic space where heresies and heresiarchs roam chaotically.

I have a certain affinity for Rebetiko and rebetes, as historically, after the establishment of the Metaxas dictatorship and in the post-war period, there were attempts to erase the cultural heritage of Rebetiko from the history of Greek music, and rebetika performers were subjected to repression.

This resonates deeply with me, because attempts were also made to erase Kalmyk culture during the deportation of the Kalmyks, with films, books and records being destroyed.

My childhood and adolescence in Elista, the capital of the Republic of Kalmykia, where my parents moved from my native village of Iki-Chonos (named after the ancient Kalmyk Chonos clan, to which I belong, whose nomadic camps were located in this area), were marked by a high level of juvenile crime.

I also had direct and indirect contact with the “blatnye” (criminal underworld) subculture and often suffered from this particular type of inconvenience.

Finally, Rebetiko culture stems from the fusion of Europe and Asia, which immediately evokes warm feelings in me, as my culture is also eclectic: it combines European and Asian influences, and I can’t imagine myself without them.

Incidentally, I love Greek music, especially folk music, and I often listen to Roumeli folk songs.

“[His] texts are reminiscent of a magic spell, a mantra or a delirium coming from afar,” Kalaitzidou concludes. How do you relate to whatever lies beyond our rational grasp, whether it may be described as faith or spirituality?

For me, everything around me is a gateway to discovery, so to speak. I don’t want to live in a world where anything is inanimate, impossible. It seems to me that every object in our world is autonomous in its essence.

I don’t see this world as a single living island amidst an eternity of cold and entropy.

On the contrary, everything we see and encounter every day seems to me like a perspective, behind which lie the interactions of objects, hyper-objects, phenomena, and so on, across an infinity of different dimensions.

When I hear birdsong, I wonder what dialect of their language they speak and how they would be understood by members of the same species, say, living 300 kilometers away.

What stories about the creation of the world do they recount? Did they perhaps have their own Odyssey? The very idea that we once didn’t exist in their language is astonishing!

Respecting and striving to love everything that not only grows, breathes, and develops, but also appears to be “lifeless”, frozen and inert, feels like a purely spiritual act to me.

Being attentive to and compassionate with this world and sharing in the pain and suffering of those who are defenseless or suffer alone - that’s what I want to believe in.

According to the article, in the recent past, and “prior to the sweeping changes in Russian publications and magazines,” you participated in the cultural life of the country.

What does it take to continue to do so and how would you describe the Russian cultural life at present?

I participated in charity poetry events organized with colleagues both before and after February 24, 2022, and also curated several poetry festivals, such as the “Nomadic Readings” in my hometown of Elista in 2023.

I also curated the section of poets and poetesses representing the peoples of Russia at the World Poetry Day Festival “Living Voices/ Voces vivas/ Voix vives,” which was based at George Mason University in the United States, though the festival itself was held online.

At the moment, in my opinion, work has become more difficult; there is less space for expression, and censorship is necessary for safety.

In the context of the Russian literary scene, however, it was never much easier before.

Despite the closure of some journals and awards, there are a number of grassroots poetry projects in Russia that are trying to make a difference, and I am very grateful to them for that.

New authors are emerging, books and journals are being published, and grassroots communities are being formed.

Of course, it seems to me that the most important thing is to eliminate possible contradictions, show solidarity, interact more and support each other.

In a world ravaged by genocides and wars, where the rule of international law is replaced by the “law” of raw power and humanity disintegrates, why does it still matter to be engaged with art, in general, and poetry, in particular?

In my view, the most important thing we can do right now in order to show compassion and support to all people, animals, and all non-human agents who have suffered as a result of what is happening around the world is to engage in life and nothing but life, to try to see life and nothing but it, because there is nothing but it.

If we do not strive to engage in the art of living, including the arts in the usual sense, and above all, to unite, accept and try to understand each other, to show solidarity and support, to defend and fight for our ideals, to protect the vulnerable, then we will all fall into the arms of the currently developing necrocracy with all the ensuing consequences on a global scale.

This, in fact, is more urgent than we might think.

Heartfelt thanks to Dordzhi Dzhaldzhireev for taking the time to engage with my questions and for providing his photograph.

I would also like to thank the team of Teflon magazine for their assistance in the realization of the interview.

An extensive feature on Dordzhi Dzhaldzhireev’s work, edited/written by Ksenia Kalaitzidou, is included in the current edition of the Greek “poetic vessel” Teflon.

Lars Rudolph: “Resisting means to focus on the beauty of humans, nature, culture”

 

Based on László Krasznahorkai’s multilayered novel The Melancholy of Resistance, the iconic film Werckmeister Harmonies by the prematurely lost Béla Tarr is being re-released in Greek cinemas.

On this occasion, we speak with its male lead, the acclaimed German stage and film actor Lars Rudolph.

A relatively inexperienced film actor back then, you were chosen as the male lead in Béla Tarr’s masterful Werckmeister Harmonies. To this day, this role has probably been your most accomplished and definitely most memorable.

First of all, who János Valuska actually was?

Thank you for your interesting questions.

On the one hand, János Valuska is a man delivering mail and newspapers in a small town.

On the other, as you delve into László Krasznahorkai’s beautiful novel, he becomes a sort of an angel.

I don’t know if he even understands humanity, but he nevertheless is a very innocent, young, good person.

He’s in conversation with the music professor György Eszter -played by the late Peter Fitz- about the German organist, music theorist, and composer of the Baroque era Andreas Werckmeister and the chromatic system that he had invented.

He’s also a very passive human being, not actively engaged in politics.

To what extent has incarnating him shaped your outlook on acting?

After Werckmeister Harmonies was finished, I had the chance to travel to festivals and to participate in castings, even for Hollywood films. I was still a very young, inexperienced actor, though.

I had nevertheless worked with other directors in theatre, such as Frank Castorf. I had also received the prize for the Best Young Actor in Germany for my debut film, Jan Ralske’s Not A Love Song.

I learned a lot about acting step by step, through workshops with American film coaches. Later on, I also played in theatre in Berlin and in Zurich under the direction of Christoph Marthaler.

So, little by little I somehow became an actor.

How would you describe Tarr as a director on set as well as outside it?

I’d like to tell you how I initially met Béla.

He was teaching in the Film School in Berlin. I was a young actor at the time, working with many colleagues in the School.

During the shooting for a scene in a film, there was in the script a brutal fight between the character played by me and the one impersonated by a woman actress.

By accident, I hit her very hard and broke the membrane of her left ear. She had to go to the doctor. All of the other students blamed me for this. I was very sorry.

Béla was in the audience and he was the only person who told me that it wasn’t my fault and that she was in part responsible because she was very stiff as an actress. “If you are a good actor, you can play with an accident,” he explained me.

He was in fact watching me the whole time during the shooting. I could tell from the way he was watching that he wanted me to play in this student film.

Maybe two years later, he called me and told me: “Lars, I have a script for you. The day I found you was when I knew that I could a write a film with Krasznahorkai. You are Valuska,” he concluded.  

When we started filming, I didn’t know anything about Béla and his films.

The shooting of Werckmeister Harmonies actually commenced on a cold winter day in Budapest with the hospital scene, where the mob beats up the elderly patients in a psychiatry ward.

According to Béla, there weren’t enough film rolls for the shooting. “Glue these rolls together!” I urged him. “Lars, don’t you know my movies?” he asked me. “No, I don’t,” I responded honestly. “We cannot go home!” But we went home. I was very angry.

Before resuming the shooting, I watched Sátántangó. Then, I understood his films.

It took us a few months to start over and the whole process lasted three years because of several issues: many camera people were drunk, one producer committed suicide. I think I flew to Budapest around forty times.

After my initial anger at Béla, we didn’t fight. He was a kind person and always nice to me and to the rest of the crew. He had a lot of patience. “Just walk, Lars, don’t do anything. Just be Valuska,” he was instructing me. I tried to, and made it.

Lars Rudolph

The film is based on László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance, “a comedy of apocalypse, a book about a God that not only failed but didn’t even turn up for the exam,” according to James Wood.

How did you read the book at the time and to what extent has this reading evolved ever since?

I first read the novel during the preparation and loved it very much. After Béla died, I participated in some readings of the book with my music group in Berlin. The opening passage was incredible, as were the many colors the lead character has.

May the novel -as well as the film- be approached as a critique of authoritarianism and the pitfalls -even failure- of revolution?

I think it’s a critique on that. Béla, Krasznahorkai and Valuska believed in individual responsibility.

See how Valuska cared about the old men in the psychiatry ward or about his newspapers, was terrified by the aggression of the mob and ended up powerless and locked up in a mental institution.

Béla loved Thomas Bernhardt’s world and Valuska believed in the relationship with one’s family, friends, those you can talk to and also with the audience.

Béla also loved teaching, especially during the last fifteen years of his life. “Watch what’s there, watch the slow movement,” he used to teach his students. He launched the “Film Factory” program in Sarajevo in 2013.

His funeral was held in February in Budapest. Eight gravediggers shoveled the coffin into the Earth. Time didn’t exist for, maybe, ten minutes. You just heard the sound the Earth while receiving the coffin.

On the same night, we had a celebration only with his students. I wasn’t acquainted with all of them, but it was very beautiful to get to know them on that occasion.

From an existential, historic and political perspective, why may resistance be melancholic?

In Krasznahorkai’s novel there are all these weird, aggressive men following a secret order for destruction. Resisting to that, it’s just a melancholic and sad way of being and eventually becoming crazy.

As you read in the news, in Europe there’s still a right-wing, conservative and anti-foreign sentiment. You go crazy if you listen to the news all day long, especially in these times of psychotic politics.

Europe has, nevertheless, always been a mix of people who come and go, and change. That’s the interesting thing about people, art and ideas: they evolve and change.

Resisting means to focus on the beauty of humans, nature, birds, animals, culture.

At the moment I’m in the Alps with friends, walking all day until we are drained of our powers.

Hanna Schygulla, Lars Rudolph

To my mind, the whale is an unbearably sad -and probably infinitely wise- creature. What does it signify, according to you?

The whale contains a spirit that somehow changes the people, the town and the country. In one respect, this change is deadly and destructive, in another it signals the birth of new ideas.

The whale itself is a very peaceful animal, though, and symbolizes the beauty of a strange, unknown nature. So, a whale found in a town creates a more intense sensation compared to the one it would create if living by the seaside.

How do you define “arthouse cinema” in the era of AI both in European context, and on a global scale? Is controversial AI a tool of liberation -or experimentation, at least- or of submission?

There’s a lot of beauty in the movies, in the history of men and women. The art of storytelling is so incredible, almost as perfect as a beautiful flower.

I sometimes use AI to ask things. I know there’s a million of jobs going down the drain because of it.

The human race will probably die one day in the same way it was born. We will not live forever. As I’m getting old, I’m lucky that I will not witness the end happening.

You’re, nevertheless, turning 60 in August. Looking back on a modest career spanning more than 4 decades, what have you enjoyed the most, what has -perhaps- eluded you and what would you wish to explore more fully in the future?

Being a trumpet player and a musician myself, I do a lot of improvised music these days. I’ve also joined a theatrical group in Berlin which starts in September.

I’m still engaged in film and TV series, as well, when I like the role, the character that I’m offered. Luckily, I like the characters most of the time.

Heartfelt thanks to Lars Rudolph for his time and for granting me the permission to use his photograph.

Béla Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies is being screened in Greek cinemas starting July 16, in a re-release by the newly established distribution company “Amarcord”.

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.