The Literary Afterlives of Enver Hoxha (Part 1)
On Ismail Kadare's The Palace of Dreams, Agamemnon's Daughter, and The Successor
As this post got far too long, I decided to divide it into two parts, the second of which can be found here.
I first encountered the terms Hoxhaism and Hoxhaist and, therefore, the figure of Enver Hoxha in a Brazilian1 Facebook group centered on far-left politics. My ostensible intention was to learn Portuguese while witnessing some good old-fashioned leftist infighting and, needless to say, the group’s self-identified Hoxhaists did not disappoint. Hoxhaists, at least outside of Hoxha’s home country of Albania, which he ruled from 1944 until his death in 1985, are best known for constantly accusing everyone of “revisionist deviation,” a fetish for domed, concrete bunkers, and subscribing to a rigidly utopian high-Stalinism not seen this side of the Cultural Revolution, or perhaps anywhere outside of North Korea nowadays.2
Who was Enver Hoxha, the man who gave his name to one of the most absurd and bizarre flavors of the far-left? Anyone who passes through the airport in Tirana will find a bookstore stocked not with mass-market paperbacks but with academic texts in multiple languages on Albanian history, many of which, naturally, deal with Hoxha and his regime. But I’m supposed to be a writer of (what I hope is) literary fiction and this is supposed to be a book review, or rather, an overarching review of what I have come to term “the Ismail Kadare Enver Hoxha trilogy.”
Ismail Kadare is the Albanian writer. If you are at all familiar with world literature, you will have likely heard of him, or, at the very least, his name will ring a bell. If you ask someone to name an Albanian author, there’s a 99% chance they will say Kadare. Along with its selection of academic texts, the Tirana airport bookstore also boasts Kadare’s entire oeuvre. Kadare’s novels sit alongside the history books and are also available in multiple languages. The message is clear: to read Kadare’s fiction is to educate yourself about Albania.
I’ve already discussed my views on the educational value and purpose of art here, but in this case, it’s impossible for me to divorce Kadare’s work from the historical and political context in which it was created and, therefore, the role it has been anointed to play in the construction of collective memory in post-communist Albania. That being said, I don’t believe any familiarity with the historical or political context is necessary before engaging with much of it, as dystopias, real and imagined, can generally stand on their own. However, some knowledge of the period does, in my opinion, make for a richer reading experience and generates a deeper admiration for the author for having been a writer under such, quite frankly, deranged circumstances.
The Palace of Dreams: 1984 Meets an Allegorical Ottoman Empire
The Palace of Dreams, the first in this trilogy of sorts, follows young Mark-Alem, scion of the powerful yet perennially cursed Quprili/Köprülü family, as he quickly rises through the ranks of the darker side of civil service. Of Albanian origin, the Quprilis/Köprülüs are Ottomanized subjects of the Empire living in its capital of Istanbul. The novel opens with Mark-Alem marveling at a dossier detailing his family’s illustrious biography,3 one replete with viziers, petty nobility, and high-ranking civil servants, as he prepares to start his first day working at the titular Palace of Dreams (also known as the Tabir Sarrail). A fairly obvious allegory for the feared Sigurimi secret police, the task of the Tabir is to collect and interpret the dreams of all the Empire’s citizens, with the ultimate goal of discovering a so-called Master Dream that could potentially influence matters of State. Those who control the Palace, control the State, it is said. And not all dreams come to the Palace via innocent means; some are forcibly extracted from people confined within its walls, while others are complete fabrications created to purposely sow discord.
Mark-Alem is first assigned to work in the Palace’s Selection department, where the dreamy wheat is separated from the chaff. Here, he encounters an intriguing dream from a local merchant involving a bull, maddened by the sound of a musical instrument nearby, rampaging across an old bridge, a symbol of the Quprili/Köprülü family. He debates whether to relegate it to the archives or to forward it to the Interpretation department for further analysis. He eventually decides to send it onto Interpretation, fearing he might make a fatal error in not doing so. Constant second guessing of one’s actions is part and parcel of any authoritarian or totalitarian system, and though Mark-Alem lives in perpetual fear of making a mistake, the only way he seemingly falls is upward. Not even his vizier uncle’s foreboding warnings of the hammer of power falling once more upon the family, followed by the brutal murder of a group of Albanian folk poets at said uncle’s residence and the arrest and later execution of another uncle by agents of the Tabir—as was foretold by that pesky dream with the bridge, the instrument, and the bull—can stop him from gaining yet another promotion. The story ends with Mark-Alem having reached the pinnacle of his career in the Palace of Dreams, assigned to work with directly with the dreams of the Sovereign himself. But success is bittersweet; Mark-Alem ends the novel as a confused, demoralized young man, guiltily unsure of his place within the system.
The Palace of Dreams makes an excellent, if obvious, companion to Orwell’s 1984, a version of the classic dystopian tale that combines the genre’s familiar totalitarian tropes with a distinctly Albanian and Balkan twist. Stylistically, Kadare seems to employ slapstick-esque character actions and reactions that work well with the surreal, allegorical setting and the exaggerated distortion of reality it presents. That being said, I’m hesitant to comment too much on questions of style in Kadare’s case, as many English translations of his earlier work are based on French translations of the original Albanian, a translation inception, if you will, in which at least more than a few stylistic elements are lost.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning the book’s journey to publication. Originally published in 19814 in Albania, amazingly enough the book was allowed to remain on shelves for two weeks before being banned by the authorities for obvious reasons. Even still, the book sold 20 thousand copies.
Favorite quotes:
“All modern States, including the Ottoman Empire, were merely old, bloodthirsty institutions buried by time, only to return to earth as spectres.”
“I think it’s this world that chooses the dreams and anxieties and imaginings that ought to be brought to the surface, as a bucket draws water from a well…It’s this world that selects what it wants from the abyss.”
“What was the truth, then? Could it ever be found when its very roots were in dream?”
“For in the nocturnal realm of sleep are to be found both the light and the darkness of humanity, its honey and its poison, its greatness and its vulnerability.”
Side note: I absolutely love the cover of this particular English edition of The Palace of Dreams. It’s simple, direct, and thematic—no Lush bath bomb or Unicorn Frappuccino patterns to be found here. More of this in cover design, please.
Agamemnon's Daughter: The novel that wasn’t
I came into Agamemnon's Daughter believing it was a novel but was instead received with a bit of a story collection. It was an unexpected surprise—I guess the “and stories” on the cover should’ve clued me in—but nevertheless, an ultimately pleasant one. The title story is more or less contemporary and direct, with explicit references to places within Tirana and Albania (though Hoxha himself is simply referred to as “the Guide”), while the other two (“The Blinding Order”, “The Great Wall”) transport us once more to Kadare’s allegorical historical empires. Kadare’s choice to place his dystopian Albania avatar in the context of an empire is an interesting one—is it a comment on the vastness of totalitarian state power or on the grandiose and ultimately ridiculous version of socialist Albanian exceptionalism Hoxha espoused?
I suppose it’s time to discuss the elephant in the room when it comes to all things Kadare: unlike the sexless Palace of Dreams—Mark-Alem amazingly fucks even less than Winston Smith, which is to say, not at all—Agamemnon’s Daughter is full of what many have come to term “the male gaze.”
My unpopular opinion is that this can be done well and done poorly, and Kadare does both. The “male gaze” works in Agamemnon’s Daughter, as the titular story is told from the point of view of the ex-lover of the daughter in question, Suzana, who is forced to break things off with him due to her father’s rapid rise within the ranks of the Party. “If I’m not there by half past eight, don’t wait for me,” Suzana tells our narrator the day of the annual May Day parade. We follow him as he attends the parade anyway, as he’s received an invitation to sit in the grandstand with all the Party bigwigs for reasons unknown. What might I have done to deserve this privilege? The narrator wonders as he proceeds past the checkpoints towards his assigned seat, lost in his memories of past purges (in the cultural sector, among the military, even within the upper-echelons of the Party itself) that paint a harrowing picture of the actually existing dystopia that was Hoxha’s Albania, as well as his memories of Suzana. Their split is framed in terms of a sacrifice that mirrors that of King Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia in order to continue his fight against Troy. As Iphigenia was sacrificed to please the gods, so Suzana must sacrifice her happiness to please her father and the Party.
The unnamed narrator’s first-person romanticization and objectification of Suzana rings true for a lovelorn, struggling young man, and the fact that he views her not as a complete person but as a fantasy, a sort of goddess in the militantly atheist state that was Hoxha’s Albania, tells us far more about him than it does about her. At least, this is how I interpreted the story, regardless of Kadare’s intentions. The narrator’s attitude and behavior may seem adolescent and juvenile—and it is—but when it comes down to it, doesn’t totalitarianism make children out of all of us, what, with all the sneaking around behind Father’s (or xhaxhi's5) back? Another important thing to keep in mind is that, despite what US conservatives and other right-wingers might say, Marxism-Leninism is notoriously puritanical when it comes to any sort of sex and sexuality, and the more Stalinist—or “anti-revisionist” in this case—the current, the more puritanical it is. So perhaps Kadare’s “male gaze” and overt expression of sexuality, centered on a very masculine sort of desire though it may be, can perhaps be viewed as subversive, even, within this particular context, in which he was forced to smuggle part of Agamemnon’s Daughter out of Albania while legitimately fearing for his life.
“The Blinding Order” returns us to the same universe as The Palace of Dreams and the Quprili/Köprülü family (Mark-Alem himself is briefly mentioned as a young boy of ten or eleven) and centers on a past episode mentioned in the novel, the infamous “blinding order” issued from the imperial Sovereign that leaves swaths of the population with their eyes forcibly removed by the State, though citizens can also volunteer to be blinded. The goal of the campaign is to eradicate the “evil eye,” a term that, like “revisionist deviation,” for example, can mean everything and nothing all at once.
The story centers on a relative of Mark-Alem’s, a civil servant called Xheladin who is assigned to help implement the titular order in one of its so-called qorroffices (a sinister portmanteau of the Albanian word for “blind”—qorr—and “office”). A metaphorical Sigurimi agent responsible for state-sanctioned torture (which all methods of forced blinding detailed would constitute), Xheladin, like Mark-Alem, participates in the state repressive apparatus. Both are “men on the inside,” so to speak, and both eventually become victim to the cruel, paranoid cycle, Mark-Alem mentally, and Xheladin physically, as the latter, in an ironic twist of fate, is forcibly blinded himself, when the State closes the qorroffices in an attempt to wash its hands clean of what it has done and scapegoat its ex-enforcers.
Like the dreams in The Palace of Dreams, blindness is a fairly obvious metaphor for how populations are blinded to the wrongdoings of the State, either by force or by their own volition. If the eyes are the window to the soul, as the old saying goes, then their removal signifies the removal of said soul, of what makes us human. The blindness campaign also generates a sensation of collective blame and guilt, and turns neighbor against neighbor, each accusing the other of possessing the “evil eye.” No one is safe, from the lowliest of beggars to the highest-ranking civil servants and members of the royal court, though the more privileged are given the opportunity to choose their method of blinding and often opt for the least painful one (staring directly into the sun). Though the most obvious parallel is Hoxha’s Albania, the “evil eye” is the excuse that all authoritarian and totalitarian regimes use to mercilessly discipline and punish what they view as a potentially unruly population.
The story ends with a state-sponsored “reconciliation banquet” in which everyone is asked to forgive and forget. We made mistakes, but now it's time to move on; the future will be better, we promise. This ritualized amnesia is how most periods of authoritarianism end, not with justice—Spain’s infamous Pacto del Olvido, as well as Argentina’s Punto Final and Obediencia Debida laws6 come to mind. The truth can be known, grievances and traumas can be aired freely, but real accountability for the crimes of the State is never usually as forthcoming, and Kadare is correct to point this out.
Finally, “The Great Wall” is a departure from Kadare’s usual Albanian or wider Ottoman-sphere settings, as the “great wall” in question is the Great Wall of China. Again, our metaphors are fairly obvious here—the wall is a border, and the borders of Hoxha’s Albania were hermetically sealed, with people on both sides fearful yet curious about the other. The story pits the Chinese against the outsider “nomads” and is told from the alternating points of view of Inspector Shung, a Chinese civil servant, and Kutluk, a nomadic warrior. Later, with the death of Kutluk as he charges at the wall on horseback, the wall also transforms into a symbol of the barrier between life and death, the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Frequently described in terms that would belie its strength, the wall’s shaky structure conjures up images of the ubiquitous concrete bunkers that perhaps best characterized Hoxha’s regime outside of Albania. These domed symbols of paranoia were built to ostensibly shelter citizens in the event of a military attack from the imperialist West or the revisionist East, but now either lie as crumbling ruins of a bygone era, or have been turned into museums, as is the case of two bunkers in and around Tirana.7 The Chinese Empire’s frequent invocations of a looming or coming war, as reported by Shung, also calls to mind the aggressive isolationist xenophobia practiced by Hoxha’s regime. There is chaos on the outside and peace on the inside, and the wall is here to keep us safe.
The story’s repeated emphasis, through its themes and its dual point-of-view, on the contrast between the “civilized” Chinese and the “barbarian” nomadic outsiders, reminds me, strangely enough, of the concept of civilización y barbarie (civilization and barbarism), as proposed by the 19th century Argentine intellectual and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in his seminal work Facundo. While for Sarmiento, civilization was Europe and North America and barbarism was Latin America and the rest of what is now known as the Global South, for Hoxha, civilization was Albania led by the Party of Labor and barbarism was the imperialist and revisionist world that sat beyond its borders. Despite their differences, both men had an unflinching faith in their version of progress, in their own utopian visions and dreams, Sarmiento’s culturally European and “modern,” Hoxha’s Marxist-Leninist. If only Uncle Enver knew he had so much in common with a bourgeois liberal-conservative like Sarmiento!
The wall can also be viewed in a post-communist context, as the wall that continued to separate Albania from the rest of Europe even after the collapse of the regime. A wall that separated desperate refugees like those aboard the Vlora from the promise of a better life, and a wall of restrictive, though gradually liberalizing, visa policies that separates those with Albanian passports from the European Union, the United States, and the rest of the West.
Favorite quotes:
“His whole personality and history corresponded in sum to what in relatively polite language is called a pile of shit.” (“Agamemnon’s Daughter”)
“What sign of the zodiac do you represent, my darling, my dangerous love?” (“Agamemnon’s Daughter”)
“You probably won’t sully your blade with warm blood, but though you may keep it bright and clean, it won’t be any the less harsh or brutal.” (“Agamemnon’s Daughter”)
“Nothing now stands in the way of the final shriveling of our lives.” (“Agamemnon’s Daughter”)
“We can be together as night and day. I will be your night, and you will be my day.” (“The Blinding Order”)
“It stretched its stony body over thousands of leagues to hide that it was an empty shell” (“The Great Wall”)
Continued here.
I later learned that Hoxhaism, or, more broadly, “anti-revisionist” Marxism-Leninism is quite a thing among the Brazilian far-left, similar, I suppose, to how big Trotskyism is in neighboring Argentina.
In fact, Hoxhaism, as was practiced in Albania by Enver Hoxha himself, shares many similarities with Juche (autarchy, isolation, nationalist chauvinism, etc.).
The concept of biography, or family history, was very important in Hoxha’s Albania, as a “bad” biography could condemn a family to mediocrity in the best of circumstances and lead to its complete ruin in the worst; entire generations would be forced to pay the price for the real or perceived sins of the father/grandfather/etc. For more information on biography and how it played out in the case of one Albanian family under communism, see Lea Ypi’s wry, tender memoir Free.
By this time, Albania was completely isolated from both the West (“imperialists”) and the USSR and China (“revisionists”), as well as neighboring Yugoslavia (“revisionists” AND “imperialists”), the most recent break being with China after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.
“Uncle,” as in Xhaxhi Enver (Uncle Enver).
In Argentina, there was, to be fair, a brief spring of justice and accountability that came after its authoritarian winter, but alas, it was short lived, and impunity and forgetting reigned for over a decade afterward.