Musine Kokalari

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Musine Kokalari (February 10, 1917 Adana, Turkey - August 14, 1983) of Gjirokastër, Albania was probably the most interesting figure among the minor prose writers of Albania's pre-communist period, both as an individual and as an author. Kokalari was the first female writer of Albania, and the only one up until the 1960s. Born on February 10, 1917 in Adana in southern Turkey of a patriotic and politically active family of Gjirokastrian origin, Kokalari returned to Albania with her family in 1920. She was early to acquire a taste for books and learning since her brother Vejsim operated a bookstore in Tirana in the mid-thirties. In January of 1938, she left for Rome to study literature at the university there and graduated in 1941 with a study on Naim Frashëri. Her stay in the eternal city gave her an ephemeral glimpse into a fascinating world of intellectual creativity and her sole aim in life upon her return to Albania was to become a writer. In 1943, she declared to a friend, "I want to write, to write, only to write literature, and to have nothing to do with politics." She had, at the age of twenty-four, indeed already published an initial 80-page collection of ten youthful prose tales in her native Gjirokastrian dialect: Siç me thotë nënua plakë ("As my old mother tells me"), Tirana, 1941. This historic collection, strongly inspired by Tosk folklore and by the day-by-day struggles of women of Gjirokastër, is thought to be the first work of literature ever written and published by a woman in Albania. Kokalari called the book, "the mirror of a world gone by, the path of transition from girlhood with its melodies and the first years of marriage to the world of the grown woman, once again bound by the heavy chains of slavery to patriarchal fanaticism." Three years later, despite the vicissitudes of the civil war, Kokalari now twenty-seven, was able to publish a longer collection of short stories and sketches entitled ...sa u-tunt jeta ("...how life swayed"), Tirana, 1944, a total of 348-pages which established her -- ever so briefly -- as a writer of substance. A third volume of her folksy tales was entitled Rreth vatrës, ("Around the hearth"), Tirana, 1944.

As the Second World War came to an end, Kokalari herself opened a bookstore and was invited to become a member of the Writers' Union, created on October 7, 1945 under the chairmanship of Sejfulla Malëshova (1901-1971). All the time she was haunted by the execution without trial of her two brothers, Mumtaz and Vejsim, on November 12, 1944 by the communists and candidly demanded justice and retribution. Having herself been closely associated in 1944 with the fledgling Albanian Social-Democratic party and its press organ Zëri i lirisë ("The voice of freedom"), she was arrested on January 17, 1946 in an age of terror concomitant with the arrest of Malëshova, and on July 2, 1946 was sentenced to twenty years in prison by the military court of Tirana as a saboteur and enemy of the people. The next eighteen years of her life she spent in the infamous concentration camp of Burrel in the Mati region, isolated and under constant surveillance, persecuted and provoked by boorish and uneducated prison officials. A broken woman, she was released around 1964 and given a job as a streetsweeper in the provincial town of Rrëshen. Musine Kokalari, once a gifted young teller of tales, was persecuted to the end of her days. Terminally ill with cancer, she was even refused a hospital bed before her death on August 14, 1983.