Musine Kokalari: the writer who would not be silent

Musine Kokalari was born on 10 February 1917 in Adana, in today's Turkey. When she was three the family returned to Albania and settled in Gjirokastër, her parents' town. There, among the stone houses and the stories of old women, her literary sensibility took shape.

Studies and the first book

She studied in Tirana until 1937 and in 1938 went to Rome, to La Sapienza University. There she worked on a doctoral thesis on Naim Frashëri. In 1939 she wrote, and in 1941 published in Tirana, the book Siç më thotë nënua plakë ("As My Old Mother Tells Me"), a collection of stories in the Gjirokastër dialect, built on the tales of the town's women. This book is considered the first literary work by a woman published in Albania.

Politics

In 1943, during the war, Kokalari founded the Social Democratic Party of Albania. That same year she was among the founders of the women's magazine Shqiptarja e Re ("The New Albanian Woman"). She believed in a democratic Albania, with freedom of the press, free elections and rights for women. On 12 November 1944 her two brothers, Mumtaz and Vejsim, were executed without trial by the communists.

They took her freedom, they took her brothers and they took her pen. But they could not take the voice she had left in her book.

The trial

On 17 January 1946 Musine Kokalari was arrested. On 2 July 1946 a military court in Tirana sentenced her to 20 years in prison as a "saboteur" and "enemy of the people". The regime saw her as an opponent because she called for political pluralism and free elections.

Prison and internment

She spent 18 years in Burrel prison. From 1964 she was interned in Rrëshen, where she lived another 19 years, working as a street sweeper. She was never again allowed to write or publish. In 1960 the Committee of Three, a forerunner of PEN International's committee for imprisoned writers, included her in its first list of 30 imprisoned writers in the world.

Musine Kokalari died in Rrëshen on 13 August 1983, in extreme poverty, after a short illness with cancer.

Remembrance

In 1993, after the fall of the dictatorship, she was posthumously declared a "Martyr of Democracy", and a school in Tirana was named after her. Her house in Gjirokastër became a museum. Today scholars and readers are rediscovering both her literary work and her political ideas.

How to read her

If you can find it, read a few stories from Siç më thotë nënua plakë. You will hear the voice of the women of Gjirokastër in the 1930s, with their humour, wisdom and pain. And remember that their author spent 37 years without being allowed to write a single further page.