Professional Life
[Part of the interview is cut out from the video: the interviewer asks the speaker to talk about his professional life]
Mehmet Kraja: This is it, with regards to my biography, meaning until the time when I started working as a journalist in Rilindja. Then I became dedicated to Rilindja. It was always an idea I had, naturally I started writing. I published my first book in ‘78.
Kaltrina Krasniqi: You surely started writing earlier.
Mehmet Kraja: Yes, of course as a high school student, yes. I’ll tell you a detail about high school, I started…Writing is a different story which needs a little…it’s like something special, but this is from the aspect of life I have to say that now taking into account that literature doesn’t…we all knew that literature here doesn’t allow you to support yourself, to survive, therefore one had to have a profession. Journalism was always closer to me, and most writers primarily worked at newspapers or did journalistic work, or work around newspapers, sometimes in publishing houses, so this was the work that writers primarily did.
And I became involved in journalistic work at Rilindja. I worked there until Rilindja was closed, until the day it closed I worked at Rilindja.. I have over twenty years of experience in journalism, I worked in journalism for about 33 years until I left it. So, it was a profession we practiced, which I practiced in two different time periods. I worked as a journalist during the socialist period, I practiced the profession at the time … the period of disorder I would call it, it wasn’t socialism, or communism, or freedom or nothing – the years of the ‘90s was a time without time, I don’t know what it was. I can’t define it, I don’t know myself what it was, and I arrived at that period after the war, I continued working in journalism. So I have around 30 years of experience working as a journalist, sometimes as an active reporter, then for a time as a columnist, then as an editor, then…meaning most of the usual work that’s done in journalism.
This is it with regards to the profession I practiced, always leaving aside work, my individual commitment to the personal motivation I had – literature.
With regards to literature, I started writing as a high school student, I started publishing. I wrote as a beginner, meaning I had no idea how literature was created (smiles). I had a notebook I wrote in. When I was in high school I published the first story of my young life. I sent my first story to the editorial staff at Jeta e Re, I barely managed to type it on a typewriter. It was quite a long story, and I sent it to Jeta e Re. The editor-in-chief was Esad Mekuli.
When I got a job after a while, sometime in the spring, and then the holidays came and for the holidays I went to the village of Kraja. There, in the village, we didn’t have anything. When it arrives…meaning communication was difficult and sometimes impossible. One of them came, it was Ibrahim Berijashi who published, he’d published and knew here {points towards the window} pupils and students from Kosovo and he’d met…no, Esad [Mekuli] sent him a telegraph, “Tell me who this Mehmet Kraja is. Is it a pseudonym, who is it, because I want to publish his story?” He tells him, he sends him a telegraph or writes him a letter, I don’t know, and tells him. Meaning, that’s when my history of publication begins and then my introduction to Esad, when I got my first job when I came to Pristina in ‘71. And he places me in the student dorms and right after that the first thing that I did was, I went, I met with Esad Mekuli. He welcomed me in an extraordinary way, I don’t believe that today there’s an editor among the ones `whom we know who would welcome someone like that. Esad was incredible in that regard. He welcomed me in an extraordinary way and then my cooperation with Jeta e Re began, pretty much for several years, without an interruption.
Naturally, along with my work as a journalist, I had to set aside and sacrifice enough time for literary work. Here we don’t have…no one in Kosovo lived off of literary work. We can’t get by living off it. Meaning, I don’t think there was anyone who could live off literature. We couldn’t live off the work we did in the field of literature. It was always our secondary work, a second job and then we committed to it.
I published year after year, by now there are around 25 books. There are mainly, eleven or twelve novels, among them stories, drama, I also wrote journalistic books — three-four journalistic books. And of course I wrote articles, hundreds of articles, with thousands of journalistic texts in newspapers.
Kaltrina Krasniqi: A small digression, this story. .. what’s it about?
Mehmet Kraja: It’s about our surroundings there, about developments…meaning it was a slightly ethnographic story, according to an old story about who knows where. An old thing I don’t remember now. But, it was a story about the surroundings, about the place and the time there, I mean something like that. It wasn’t anything great of course, I was young at the time, I don’t think I knew how to write anything, but as it turned out it left an impression on him and they published one by one in a few…I published a few stories that I then collected into a specific book.
Now there’s one thing here, that we need to take into account, that the formation we had as writers, was difficult for us. All the writers here in Kosovo had a difficult time shaping themselves. We found ourselves in very confusing situations. This confusion you’ll see for yourselves, but as I said before, not nationalism, not…
In Yugoslavia we were free in the sense of introducing modes of writing, of literary methods because in ‘57 Tito and Krleža proclaimed the pluralism of methods and one didn’t go to jail anymore for literature. You didn’t go to jail anymore in Yugoslavia for literature. There were ways of maintaining control, there were ways of inspecting, which were done through instruments, because I mean we were always somewhere, and in that way we were checked up.. But there wasn’t a problem in this sense, we weren’t trying to be, maybe because here and there we didn’t have…there wasn’t a need for us to be ideological dissidents. How to become an ideological dissident when you can write like Ionesco or Beckett, Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot was put on in Paris in ‘67, or ‘68, in ‘69 it came to Pristina. I mean in ‘69 it was put on stage in Pristina … you didn’t have a chance to become an ideological dissident in those circumstances. And this, has to be removed from that … that we had ideological dissidence in Kosovo or Yugoslavia – no! Because, Tito took the argument for it away, when he proclaimed the pluralism of literary modes and methods or of all methods. Of course, they favored those who wrote…meaning those who applied the socialist methods, of realism or what not, or Marxist methods. They were the favorites of the authorities, but we all had our freedom.
But there was something else, national dissidence began to develop and that’s what the authorities fought. That’s why an entire literature of metaphors was created and developed in Kosovo, with metaphoric language, stories with hidden meanings in them. A literature was developed which said one thing, but you were meant to understand something else. A whole literature was created to disguise national dissidence. I conditionally say to disguise it and to…because in metaphors you can’t be caught at all. Regardless there were the metaphor police, if I can call them that, who reviewed them and handed out warnings to writers even about metaphors. That tower, those castles, this…”E di një fjalë prej guri” (I know a word of stone), wrote Azem Shkreli. This stone, what is this stone, why is this stone used so much? Why are towers so present in the poetry of Kosovo’s writers?
So an entire literature was created, an entire literature was created in the language of metaphor. It was used to hide dissidence. And in prose, I used to be a poet, I’m a prose writer, even in prose we dealt with historical themes, with themes…my first two-three novels deal with distant subjects which always aimed at… “I remember very well, my apartment is in Bregu i Diellit (Sunny Hill), it was during the police curfew of ‘82, it was during the police curfew after the demonstrations. It lasted a long time. The police curfews got longer, they got repeated several times, sometimes on the anniversary of the demonstrations it seemed like a police force was created anew. I think it was in ’82, no in ‘81, when I wrote the novel Udhëzime për kapërcimin e detit (Instructions on crossing the sea) and it was about the Middle Ages. I was writing it, and I know that from the window [of the room] where I wrote at night, I looked at the police who had taken over an intersection and stood there and inspected. Of course the police, with their special forces equipment, protected, stopped circulation, there was no movement at that time, there wasn’t supposed to be any. Anyone who left their apartment could have been killed. And the entire time I watched the police and how they stood at the intersection, while I wrote Udhëzime për kapërcimin e detit… which was about the Middle Ages.”
So, before my eyes I had the police and here I had a topic about the Middle Ages. So, we learned to talk in allusions and to talk with metaphors. This was a…a literature was created which spoke indirectly with metaphors in order to disguise national dissidence. But we all had a problem now, this is the thing I said earlier that our literary formation took place with many problems. Our dissidence, on the one hand we had the socialist realist literature we continually absorbed from Albania, Albanian literature had the national Renaissance, the literature of the Renaissance, it also had the socialist realist literature that came from Albania. From Kosovo there was, for example in prose, there were a number of stories, three unimportant novels, or maybe they were important, it doesn’t matter, but, a short literary tradition, it didn’t have a canon. It was a body of literature that could be read in a week, or two, and that was that. And then what was one to do?
This was the literature you had to shape yourself with. And what did we do then? We were under constant pressure, from the literature from Albania which was limited, but that had within it national romanticism and of course socialist dogma – the two things it had within it. Because Enver Hoxha accomplished a symbiosis of national romanticism and communist ideology, he did this, he grafted them well, and he packaged them beautifully in order to give it to us. Internally Albanians didn’t buy it, inside Albania it was very difficult to swallow this beautiful package. We, here across the border ate it up easily. I mean we were under the constant pressure of socialist realism and this ideology of Albanian national romanticism and we were under the pressure of the impossibility that it offered. We saw that literature, that method of socialist realism that we didn’t like, and on the other side, in Yugoslavia, we had exceptional opportunities to communicate with let’s say European literature, world literature.
I said I had the [book] sets, while in Albania at that time one didn’t and couldn’t read Dostoevsky, nor Kafka, nor Proust, nor Joyce, nor…so an entire literature. We on this side were supplied with exactly this kind of literature, on the other hand…because Yugoslavia had now declared it was open to different literary artistic currents and to Western influences. And it was even, it was even fashionable to be as similar as possible. Sometimes there were a lot of epigones in this regard. There was epigonism and plain plagiarism with regards to the West. There was much epigonism.
Now Kosovo’s literature found itself under pressure from two sides. It wasn’t very clear in that regard, as to how to orient oneself. A number of writers became social-realists like the writers in Albania. Someone became a modernist, as if it was…the models were, what do I know, the models within Beckett, I mentioned another…So, on the one hand ultra modern, and on the other an almost primitive socialist-realism. Between these two oppositions, we were in a very bad spot and we had a problem, which we didn’t notice, but later became obvious. Who did we leave the reader to? What happened to the reader?
In fact we liked being modern, a few plays like Beckett’s were written. Novels were also written which were like, what do I know, one of Joyce’s or someone else’s…they were made according to Western models, or anti-novels. An anti-novel like Nathalie Sarrault’s…what do I know. But, one thing was a problem, that the reader was quite taken with the socialist-realist literature of Albania because the constellation of knowledge and the level of knowledge but also the spiritual condition of the Kosovo reader of that time, corresponded and communicated easier with the literature of socialist realism which had “socialist realism” {makes quotation marks} and national romanticism which came from Albania, rather than with Ionesco or Beckett or anti-novels.
There was a disconnect of this kind, a stinking creek ran next to the Theater of Pristina, and Becket was being performed inside the Theater. This was the discrepancy we lived in. Now, if you look at it from this distance, it seems like a parody but we lived through this. On the other hand, Pristina tried to create a cultural life, it tried to create a cultural life. That cultural life of Pristina naturally was an imitation, it imitated other cultural circles in Yugoslavia, that’s beyond discussion, that’s what it was like.
An elite was also created not really based on models like Belgrade or Zagreb, because Belgrade was far, Zagreb was far, but like Sarajevo, Skopje. Meaning certain models were created, to have an elite of its own. But that elite often had huge deficiencies and few people. When you went to the theater you saw the same people, when you went to an exhibition you saw the same people, and numerically there weren’t many people. There were a few…meaning you went to the theater you saw the same people, you went to an exhibition and saw the same people. You went to the orchestra’s concert you saw those people, meaning the number of emancipated people in the artistic literary sense was very limited.
On the other hand, there was an effort to create our own art, to give it life, space and to create our own art. It was a bit deluded, there were also intentions, there of course were also political intentions. Of course, because let’s say it openly at that time the aim was, the aim was for Albanians in Yugoslavia to create their own identity separately from the identity of Albanians in Albania. So the idea was to create the Albanians of Kosovo, to have a Yugoslav nation. And it might have been created if a mistake hadn’t been made. Serbia made a big mistake, because after ‘81 it insisted that Albanians in Kosovo become Serbs. To make Albanians become Serbs, they wouldn’t do it, they wouldn’t become Serbs. Albanians had started becoming Yugoslavs. Or they started to or there were elements that could be transformed into Yugoslavs, or at least there were some who started a little, to integrate a little. If not a Yugoslav nation in the simple sense of the word, there were those who started to integrate. And a cultural strata was created, a literature was created and a certain number was reached…and music and … meaning all the arts were created, and a theater.
But, to be accurate, in the majority of cases this was Yugoslavian literature, Yugoslavian music, Yugoslavian figurative art with these kinds of predispositions that worked in Yugoslavia. Did we rebel? Were we what they wanted us to be? No, of course not, because we had our national dissidence. This started gradually, so national dissidence started in Kosovo when freedom began, self-awareness and freedom. Meaning a minimal self-awareness and a minimal freedom, they were used to create national dissidence, which one by one produced the developments that brought us to where we are today. That’s how I see things.
I’ll go chronologically. The ‘70s somehow corresponded with my age. I was young, meaning I was of university age and as I told you at the time they fired us from Bota e Re. So we had patience, courage and enthusiasm ahead of us. Naturally there was national euphoria. I remember in ‘78 when I was a journalist, I followed all of the gatherings that were held on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the League of Prizren. The 100th anniversary of the League of Prizren was celebrated, it was celebrated in Albania, but it was also celebrated here, it was celebrated simultaneously, and here it was celebrated very well because the state itself treated it as important. Because that was the idea that out of these Albanians we will create their own state. I tell you that even in the language there were problems like this, meaning there were these kinds of initiatives.
During the ‘70s, I mean I experienced them like the rest of the youth and with a kind of enthusiasm. With an idea of sorts that something could be done here, that we would make of ourselves what we could, the way we were, but we would make ourselves somehow. And yes, we had a kind of self-confidence if I can call it that. The ‘80s were the most disillusioning years for us. Those that had the illusions that it would happen, that they could integrate in Yugoslavia, they were beaten down. There was nothing left anymore, because even marriages broke down, there were marriages there were people married to Serbian women or vice versa but most were…the marriages broke apart.
To speak bluntly on this point, the conflict went to a point where it beggared belief that the conflict went that deep. It was thought that opinions were quite evened out, but in ‘81 a catastrophe was brought to the surface, the relations between the nations and people’s illusions. There were no more illusions about anything. On the other hand, Albanians in Yugoslavia no longer had the trust of anyone in Yugoslavia. And it wasn’t only Serbs anymore, but today of course they talk differently. It was also the Croatians, the Serbs and Slovenians and Bosnians and Macedonians that returned their hatred towards Albanians…of course Serbs led the way in that regard, but they all made up the choir. Serbs were the choir, but they were all members at the base of that choir, without exception.
It was hatred towards Albanians that brought all of Yugoslavia to its feet, without exception. Now Montenegrins say it was different…no…all of them without exception had one stance. So, people’s illusions were destroyed. Especially those of Albanians who thought they could integrate in Yugoslavia. On the other hand, connections to Albania were severed – the cultural connections to Albania. An artery was severed which had, which was life-giving for Albanians in Kosovo and Albanians in Yugoslavia because here began respectively the dethroning and the destruction of institutions or more specifically their Slavization, in an extraordinary, fast, and light-speed way, and with no other alternative, statebuilding, Slavic domination, the control over it, and on the other hand the separation from Albania, the severing of that life-giving artery.
They were the most difficult years, I see them as the years that were the most…until the 90’s, they were years of such chaos that we don’t even know what to call them. The 80’s were very difficult years. In this regard I mean we were…we ended up completely paralyzed in a corner, politicians would say this, “A mouse hole, look for it three hundred times, you still won’t find it.” I mean there was a huge amount of pressure, under the pressure of hate, under political pressure, under the pressure of imprisonment, under ideological pressure, there was a complete lack of future prospects. In one regard this did us good, it destroyed our illusions, there were no more illusions that one could do something in this place and this state.
You had to search for another prospect, for the sake of these people you had to look for another prospect. You had to orient them…there was no where else to turn. You would orient towards your identity and national integrity, you had no other alternative. Communism wasn’t important, ideology had not one bit of importance. Now they give it importance because it was communism, it was communism, communism since…taking into account historical periods from the liberalization of the ‘70 onwards, communism represented nothing. The national cause was the primary issue and this national cause started to gradually recruit people. There were two points of view, recruiting people and bringing them close to Albania, which was refused, the ties were broken. The people, when Enver Hoxha, when the Party Congress was held right after ’81, people went to Gjakova, half of Pristina invaded Gjakova to follow it, because they could catch the Albanian [State] Television there. It wasn’t that they were longing for Enver Hoxha, they wanted to know what was happening, what stance would Albania take at the Party Congress, what position does Albania have towards Kosovo, that’s where the problem lay.
The ‘80s were like this, they were very heavy and very difficult, but simultaneously very mobilizing because things became clear, things became defined very clearly. On the one hand, there was…but there was something else I have to say and in the middle [of all of this]… everything Albanian became good, that was the funny side of that situation, not only funny but of course also damaging, because a kind of unsustainable unification took place because values weren’t differentiated. Homogenization surpassed the normal level expected of a normal place with normal people. All people, all Albanians can’t be good.
That’s the problem of homogenization, everyone became Albanian. On the one hand, there were the authorities with their famous discrimination and their instruments that of course one couldn’t meddle with…Serbs could have been behind them, but the main tasks were done by Albanians themselves inside those institutions. Albanians themselves discriminated, they undertook actions that were bizarre, that were low. Of course there were things that were…things were clear, but on the other hand they weren’t clear, on the other hand in the homogenization of Albanians. In that moment it could have also been necessary, because a common front was being created, all of us…everything Albanian was good. Everyone was good at that time, which of course isn’t realistic but that’s how it was. Thus a huge homogenization of the population took place.
And now, these people, one could see that this homogenization and this harsh contradiction between the state and a big part of the population and between the carriers of power in Kosovo and the people as well, created huge divisions, and great dramas even within families. There were families that discriminated amongst themselves, there were problems with family members, a son against a father, there were cases like this. They banished, in a way, people who were close to the state, they started publicly hating them. Thus, a common front was created, unification and national homogenization on one side, and on the other side those who were on the other side were purged very clearly. And the situation became harsh, very harsh, and it was clear that this situation couldn’t last that long.
It lasted until the end of the ‘80s. The end of the ‘80s and that which we know now began.
Kaltrina Krasniqi: You also wrote during the 80’s. What did you write about?
Mehmet Kraja: During the ‘80s I wrote the novel that I mentioned, I watched the police and wrote a novel about the medieval ages. I naturally continued writing, I wrote plays, I wrote the play Hana prej letre (Paper Moon), which despite being awarded at the Katerina Josipi competition wasn’t performed here, because it mentioned something about a demonstration…it created that sort of allusion. So as I said, I always talked, we spoke with metaphors and there was one like this. Meaning, it was primarily literature in its function, but of course we also had journalism at the same time. At that time I can’t say that we did journalism…but near the end of the ‘80s, then it started to come alive, the situation became invigorating and they started expressing that publicly. Dissatisfaction, we didn’t express any in particular, but always a greater national endurance and dissatisfaction with other things. That was the beginning of it, meaning the beginning of political movements at the end of the years…because the ‘90s had a previous order, and that is what I just described. In the ‘80s there was a very harsh period of repression and it meant the dissolution of the system, at the end of the ‘80s, not the beginning of the ‘90s, but the end of the ‘80s. At the end of the ‘80s the dissolution really began.