A Short Border Handbook: A Journey Through the Immigrant's Labyrinth [Lingua Inglese] - Brossura

Kapllani, Gazmend

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0997316985 ISBN 13: 9780997316988

Casa editrice: New Europe Books, 2017

Riassunto

A Short Border Handbook is a cogent and comical journey into the depths of dictatorship, migration, and borders from an Albanian who grew up in Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist madhouse, longing for the West, only to find yet more visible and invisible borders on his arrival.

After spending his childhood in Stalinist Albania during the Cold War, and fantasizing about life across the border, the unnamed protagonist (based closely on the author) flees to Greece, the only country in the Balkans that belonged to the “Western bloc”?only to get banged up in a detention center. As he and his fellow immigrants try to make sense of the new world, they find jobs and plan their future lives in Greece, imagining success that is always beyond their grasp. The sheer absurdity of both their plans and their new lives is overwhelming. In a narrative both ironic and emotional, Kapllani interweaves the story of his experience with meditations upon “border syndrome”?a mental state, as much as a geographical experience?to create a brilliantly observed, amusing, and perceptive debut. And an ever timely one at that.

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Informazioni sull'autore

Gazmend Kapllani, the author of three books, teaches creative writing and European history at Emerson College and was previously a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and a writer-in-residence at Wellesley College. He has held talks at numerous colleges and universities including the University of Michigan, Columbia University, Brown University, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Wellesley College, and Bennington College. Born in 1967 in Albania, he crossed the mountainous border into Greece illegally, on foot, in 1991. In Greece he worked as a builder, a cook, and a kiosk attendant while earning a doctorate at Athens University. For more than ten years he was a columnist for the leading Greek daily Ta Nea. A Short Border Handbook, written in Greek, was a bestseller in Greece and translated into several languages. In 2017 it received the prestigious Italy’s Letterature dal Fronte (Literature from the Borders) Prize of Cassino, Italy, dedicated to Greek literature for the year. Kapllani’s other books include the novels My Name is Europe (2010, Greece; 2013, France) and The Last Page (2012, Greece; 2015, France). He is currently working on a novel in Albanian and a short story collection in English.

Dalla quarta di copertina

An exhilarating and blackly comical exploration of immigration from an Albanian who grew up in a totalitarian madhouse, longing for Greece, where he found more absurdities?and who eventually settled in the United States

“Kapllani treats the absurdities of nationalism in the Balkans?and everywhere?with mischief, wit and insight.” ?Independent
“One of this book’s pleasures is the author’s honesty, but one of its shocks is that it exposes an everyman’s struggle for dignity. We think of walls and borders as something either in the past or in the Middle East. Kapllani brings borders closer to home.” ?Guardian
“A telling reminder of how the borders that many of us are lucky enough to regard as bureaucratic inconvenience often form unimpeachable barriers and of how the way they are policed can be ruthless and absurd.” ?Irish Times
“As a student of borders, I was fascinated by this meditation by a wise Albanian of what it means to be an immigrant. With great insight, through his personal story, Kapllani has enabled us far better to understand and enter into this overwhelming problem of our times.” ?Peter Stansky, author of Edward Upward, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

An exhilarating and blackly comical exploration of immigration from an Albanian who grew up in a totalitarian madhouse, longing for Greece, where he found more absurdities?and who eventually settled in the United States

Kapllani treats the absurdities of nationalism in the Balkans?and everywhere?with mischief, wit and insight. ?Independent
One of this book s pleasures is the author s honesty, but one of its shocks is that it exposes an everyman s struggle for dignity. We think of walls and borders as something either in the past or in the Middle East. Kapllani brings borders closer to home. ?Guardian
A telling reminder of how the borders that many of us are lucky enough to regard as bureaucratic inconvenience often form unimpeachable barriers and of how the way they are policed can be ruthless and absurd. ?Irish Times
As a student of borders, I was fascinated by this meditation by a wise Albanian of what it means to be an immigrant. With great insight, through his personal story, Kapllani has enabled us far better to understand and enter into this overwhelming problem of our times. ?Peter Stansky, author of Edward Upward, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

1
Reaching, never mind crossing, the borders of a country under a totalitarian
regime like Albania was, until 1991, the equivalent of a miracle—or
a mortal sin. Exit visas were few and far between; those who got them
were the lucky ones. The rest of us, most of us that is, looked on the ones who
got them as a breed apart, something along the lines of extraterrestrials. We were
condemned to speculate endlessly about what lay on the other side of the borders.
Either that or we would torture ourselves with the simple conclusion that life went
on as normal, even on the other side.
Dismissing the possibility that there was life beyond the borders proved
quite an effective survival strategy, spiritually as well as physically. At some point,
in the subconscious of many of us, the world-beyond-the-borders became more
than the continuation in time and space of some common world.
As the years went by, and Albania’s isolation became absolute, the worldbeyond-
the-borders gradually assumed the status of a separate planet. For some
people that planet was paradise, for others it was a place of terror. But for all
that, another planet.

Why are you telling us all this?
You could ask the migrant, Why are you telling us all this? The
truth is, as a migrant, especially a first-generation migrant, your first
instinct is to stay silent. Fear; caution; the violent escape, that violent
first encounter with the unknown country; that feeling of being
uninvited; resentment; longing for and rejection of home, and guilt
and rage at the same time, all take root in the migrant. A migrant
is a confused creature, highly insecure, and that is why he fears
confession. All it takes is one gesture from the other side, one sign
of denial, or indifference, of the “What’s it to me, mate, where you
come from and what you’ve been through?” kind, for the migrant to
feel ridiculous, vulnerable, and freakish. That’s why he doesn’t take
risks. Instead, he digests his experiences in isolation and before long
is convinced that they are of absolutely no interest to anyone. In the
final analysis, he thinks: I wasn’t made for telling stories, but to fight
tooth and nail for my survival. It’s not that people can’t understand;
they just don’t want to.
The alternative, baring all and confessing, is risky. Telling his
life story, the painful and contradictory journey of a migrant. But, if
he keeps it all bottled up inside, he is in danger of becoming neurotic
and resentful. The most he can hope for is that they will understand,
first him, and then all those who cannot speak, who don’t know how
to speak, who don’t have the courage to speak and who bury their
narratives deep inside themselves instead. You cannot understand a
migrant if you haven’t heard his story first.


2
T he regime did everything in its power to block all images from
the other side of the border by means of controls, arrests, and
punishments. I can still remember—I was in the second year of
primary school at the time—the day the school’s Party secretary walked
into our classroom and, among other things, asked us in a ponderous voice
(which, with monumental exertion, she tried to soften), if our parents
watched anything apart from Albanian state television. With the naiveté
of a child wanting to impress his classmates, I stuck my hand up and
duly announced that my parents enjoyed watching a channel called Savra.
There was no such thing; Savra was the name of a village near our
town, Lushnjë. But I didn’t know that. My father, alert to the dangers
involved, dealt with my unfettered childish curiosity by feeding it with
certain pseudonyms and code words for the foreign television stations he
watched on the quiet. Ultimately, not even that could save him. That
evening, he was summoned to the headmaster’s office and asked to account
for this unknown television station. You could lose your job over something
like that—and that was the least of it. He risked being accused of
“reactionary activities,” of harboring “petit bourgeois sympathies,” and
being tried for disseminating antistate propaganda. After that, he could
end up in one of those terrifying jails for political prisoners, or else be
sent to one of those villages outside Lushnjë that were full of exiles.
Savra was the best known. The truth was that there were options at their
disposal for finishing someone off. My father had to explain himself, and
explain why, first of all, he did not restrict his viewing to Albanian state
television, and why he moved around in wealthy capitalist-imperialistrevisionist-
Titoist-monarcho-fascist etc., etc. circles. Secondly, he was
required to account for his choice of pseudonym. Why Savra? Did this
imply indirect yet unambiguous sympathy for the enemies of the state
exiled in that village? He answered flatly that he did not watch foreign
television, adding that if they didn’t believe him, they were welcome to
come and inspect the aerial on his roof.
On the subject of aerials, all citizens were required by the regime
to purchase special ones, which had to be installed in such a way as
if to renounce any desire to receive images from the world-beyond-theborders.
The truth was that my father had two aerials: one on the roof,
for appearances’ sake, and another, illegal one, the one referred to inside
the family as “the antlers.” It was an indoor aerial, used mainly for
picking up Italian channels. This double aerial was the perfect symbol
for the divided individual living in a totalitarian state. One side of you
functioned to appease the terrifying gaze of the regime, the other, more
congenial side, tried to escape its all-powerful watch by cunning.
Fortunately the episode with the aerial did not have further
repercussions. I was treated to a stinging slap from my father, sealing
my hatred for the Party secretary, and although still a child, I began to
realize that I had to stop being one, especially when it came to dealing
with Party secretaries. I was so furious with her that I secretly prayed that
some terrible fate would befall her, as that, and only that, would assuage
my wrath, and only then in part. I wished—fantasized even—about
her slipping, falling and breaking her leg—both legs; that she would fall
ill and die a slow, painful death; that a brick would land on her head,
killing her on the spot. The fantasy that brought me absolute satisfaction,
however, was seeing her lying on the ground, squashed under the wheels of
a cart (one of those from the farmers’ cooperative, on filthy wheels pulled
by emaciated horses that you used to see driving around town).
Time passed and with it my sadistic fantasies. I found out, much
later, that my prayers had been answered in part, but not quite in the way
I’d imagined: the Party secretary developed a peculiar illness, which made
her look permanently cheerful. It was unbelievable considering she was one
of the most stony-faced people on the planet. At school she was known
as “the statue.” Now each time there was a Party convention, she would
collapse in fits of laughter, shrieking away, and the more she shrieked,
the more idiotic she looked. News of her nervous laughter reached the
Party Committee, which ruled that in the interests of ideology, the Party,
and the revolution, she should go into early retirement. As they pointed
out, she was not simply unsuitable, but was harming the revolution and
the dictatorship of the proletariat through her infirmity. That was the
last she was heard of.

Leaving your country means breaking with it.
A true migrant is an incorrigible, egotistical narcissist.
He thinks he’s too good for his native land, and does not
deserve the poverty, the lack of prospects, the violence, the
corruption, the filth, the hypocrisy, or the lack of love. For all
these reasons, for him, exile is above all a choice.
Leaving is a choice, a choice to break with the country
of his birth. This break follows him for the rest of his life.
It will be the source of his sense of guilt and of freedom,
rejection and denial, daydreaming and nostalgia, forgetting
and melancholy, mood swings and schizophrenia. Only if he
makes a success of life abroad, only then can he make peace
with his own country again. If he doesn’t make it, he will be
left hanging, at odds with the world and with the universe.
He will make a great show of how much he loves his country
of origin for one reason alone—to annoy people in his new
country, the country he believed would offer him a better
future, but which, in his opinion, has denied him one. In the
final analysis, he has rejected his own country in favor of this
new one; he has had more faith in this new one than in his
own. Shouldn’t that in itself be enough for them to hold their
doors wide open for me? he asks himself.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: New Europe Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2017
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0997316985
• ISBN 13: 9780997316988
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 125
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile