From Lura Limani
Part Four
Memorie.al / Raised in post-war Yugoslavia, my grandmother saw herself as an inseparable part of the socialist social structure. How can we make sense of her world today? By the time I came to know her, my grandmother had become a difficult woman. She seemed stern: she had a serious gaze; she was not a woman you would want to cross. In Albanian, we have the expression zonjë e rëndë—a “heavy lady.” That’s what my grandmother was like: difficult, dignified, proud; well-groomed and combed even when she was shut indoors. In my eyes, she was larger than life. There seems to have been some truth regarding her youthful, buxom body, because today her old clothes hang loose over my slender frame, three sizes too big. She had a presence that demanded attention and respect every time she entered a room.
Continued from the previous issue
Instant Emancipation
My grandmother was a pioneer of her kind: pleased with her own youthful courage, she often told us how she wore a swimsuit to swim in the Erenik River. “In the 1950s,” she would say, widening her eyes. “Times were changing, especially for women. Women had played an integral role in the liberation of Yugoslavia, and the party understood the importance of women’s emancipation.”
The Anti-Fascist Front of Women of Yugoslavia (AFW) was founded in 1941, with the sole purpose of organizing and mobilizing women in the war effort against occupation. Women’s participation in Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist efforts was unprecedented: according to official statistics, 100,000 women fought as partisans, and about 2 million contributed to the movement in various ways.
In Kosovo, the AFW’s cells, called aktiva (activists), organized women to collect weapons, food, clothing, and medical supplies, and mainly engaged them in carrying news and letters for the partisans. The AFW grew in this part of Yugoslavia, especially after the end of the war, and was vital for propagating women’s participation in voluntary work and organizing literacy courses.
In 1947, the local branch of the organization began publishing the Bulletin, a magazine in Albanian, through which it called on women to take care of their homes and “gardens” (meaning the public sphere), emphasizing the importance of women becoming educated as educators of children, society, and the state. “Every mother has the sacred duty to send her children to school,” said one such propagandistic article in the second issue.
One of the AFW’s main tasks in Kosovo was the campaign against the veil, which was worn by the majority of adult women in Kosovo. A series of articles in the *Bulletin* were devoted to this issue, clearly marking the veil as an obstacle to women’s participation in the public sphere and as emblematic of the region’s “backwardness.”
Removing the veil was supposed to “open new perspectives for work and economic protection” and was especially necessary now that women were expected to contribute to the overall development of society by working in factories, among other things, as one article in issue no. 5–6 of the Bulletin shows.
My grandmother Myrvete was also active in the campaign, as a member of the party and of the women’s auxiliary organizations. “All the women of Gjakova – and not just them, but all of Kosovo – were covered with the çarshaf [veil]. Young and old – all covered with veils,” my grandmother used to say. Young Myrvete and her friends went door to door in Gjakova to persuade families that mother and daughters should remove the veil. “This was the main task: to remove it… We told them openly: ‘It’s time to take off the çarshaf.'”
Initially, the campaign was not successful, as it faced resistance from both men and women, but in 1951, the veil was made illegal. Every member of political and social organizations had the duty to implement the campaign, starting with their own families.
“My own mother also wore the veil – I remember her well, just like that. When the time came to remove the veil… because they organized rallies, as we do now in the square. All our women – there are photographs of it, you know,” she told us, “they would go out to the square to take off the veil. Some would take it off abruptly, others slowly. My mother was ashamed. She would say, ‘How can I, an old woman, take off the veil?'”
But Kika [Myrvete’s mother] did remove the veil – or at least the çarshaf worn as an overcoat. In later family photographs – either in front of the house or on my grandmother’s wedding day – she can be seen wearing shallvare (traditional puffy trousers with pleats), with a black scarf tightly wrapped around her hair, so that her soft face and deep-set eyes were visible to everyone.
Untied Knots
I cannot finish my grandmother’s story – there is so much to say, and all of it would be of little use. The map is the territory. Just like Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” – a map that once coincided point-for-point with the territory itself – my grandmother’s life story, in its infinite totality, would become useless.
I said goodbye to my grandmother on a cold December day, as her funeral cortege coursed through Prishtina’s old cemetery, desperately searching for paths that had been overgrown with bushes and wild plants.
Zija Mulhaxha, the 80-year-old chairman of the Veterans’ Organization, said a few words about the deceased as relatives, family friends, and a small number of colleagues gathered around the open grave. I don’t remember the speech, but it must have begun with, “Myrvete Hoxha Limani was born into a generous, patriotic family…”? / Memorie.al
*This article is supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Gesellschaftsanalyse und politische Bildung e. V. – Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina.*
