BY JOZEF RADI
A Shared Anniversary and the Undignified Silence of a Time That Cannot Find Itself!
Memorie.al / Sometime around the early 70s, or more precisely in the years ’74–’76, in the same class of the only gymnasium in the city of Lushnja (which at that time was called “20 Tetori”!), there were three boys who came from three different points of Myzeqe: one from the city, the second from a village on top of a hill, and the last one from an internment camp…! These were difficult times, but youth, even in the greatest adversity, knows how to color life with much light. If I dare to give a nickname to each of these three high school characters: I would call the first one: The Rebel; the second: The Fennel (Finoku); and the third: The Thorn (Tërrnuri)!!
Of course, three somewhat negatively colored nicknames for the time, but typical of the period they belonged to. But if I wanted to soften these negative names somewhat and adapt them to the values of each, I would call the first one the “Passionate Handsome One”; the second “The Daredevil’s Timid One”; and the third “The Refined Tall One…”! So, no matter how I twist and untwist this fact, the “Bermuda Triangle”… comes out complete for me…!
In Lushnja, or elsewhere, this matters little; what matters is that the lives of these three boys with the same birth year on their backs – ’57 – besides the year, had the city in common: the same school, the same class, and sometimes even the same desk…!
Thus, they (separately and together) share common realities, common paths, common courage, common sacrifices, common alienation, and today (just as yesterday), observing themselves from the height of 60 years they have reached, they could rightly believe that the homeland, the city, the school, the society, or even the more cultured inhabitants of that place… would remember them, even for a courtesy invitation, to have them present in conversations among themselves…
It is true that, from this perspective, they have long felt like the “honorable excluded” of Albanian society, the city of Lushnja, and their gymnasium!
The big question may arise for anyone: were all three together “great conspirators,” or maybe “light-minded mediocrities,” or perhaps “incorrigible troublemakers”…?! Perhaps they still are…?!
I remain convinced that even if they were so, the three, separately and together; remain transmitters of uncompromising love for their country…! Each of the three – has today a solid work and commitment both inside and outside the territory of the homeland; all three of them (separately and together) are a wandering homeland, and Albanian society has not lived a second outside their turmoil…!
The work of each of them (and of all three together) is nothing but sublime love for a language, for the city, for a country, and for an entire world for which all three (together and individually) should be a considerable pride for every reader or literature lover, and for everything that is called our common good…!
Today they live and feel honored and respected, just as much as they feel excluded and disregarded by their country, and their work lives outside any communication and appreciation they deserve…!
Nevertheless, in their sacred solitude, they feel united, as a testament to a supreme and unyielding will, with the stubbornness of sacrifice on the path of Letters and the sublime truths they have long pursued…!
These three boys of a homeland that cannot find itself, of a city, of a school, of a class, and of a desk, have been living peacefully for more than a quarter of a century in the “Peninsula of the Boot” (Italy), just so they would not be oppressed in another triangle (not Bermuda, certainly), as one lives high in the Alps, the other by the Tyrrhenian Sea, and the third in the bend of the Adriatic, always striving so that the cry of their soul, even as an echo, might reach the shores of the Great Deafness…!
After all this discourse, which will always remain unfinished, about these three “unknown” and unique protagonists, it would be right to reveal them with their names, and also with their works… so that the words manipulable by ideological winds can be overcome, and we could return to the Latin phrase “Scripta manent” (what is written remains), which I believe would be the most rightful thing for them. They are called: Shpend Sollaku Noè, Gëzim Hajdari, and Jozef Radi…!
We understand the great homeland plunged into great troubles, and it cannot deal with trifles. Well, their city is bustling with enlightened figures, and it doesn’t know whom to praise and whom to criticize first, but that school, that class where these three boys studied with sacrifices and showed the first signs of their worth, does not have enough power to prove itself and invite these boys.
It should consider it an honor that from the bosom of one class (a not very frequent case), three boys emerged who, for better or for worse, are literary voices of the Albanian language, literature, and culture; that they have been teachers, have directed magazines and newspapers, have written dozens of books in Albanian and foreign languages, have spoken publicly in local and foreign media about Albanian issues and culture, and that their figures bear no stain of compromise or corruption…!
Would it not be more than well-deserved that all three of them, in the 60th year of their lives, should be invited, appreciated, and listened to in the auditoriums of the same school, where as students, through a thousand sacrifices, they were conceived as models of freedom, as talents, and as intellectuals outside corrupt powers – living, true, and tangible models that prove that talent, even without power and without parties, can carve its own path and realize itself, in dignified disregard of all the Fatal Bermuda Triangles of Albania…! Memorie.al
