FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
Exactly one year ago, in the hall of the Opera and Ballet Theater, on a stage where Mother Teresa bowed with rosary beads in her hands, the writer Ismail Kadare was paid a state tribute. The funeral music and the honors near the deceased were interrupted only for a few minutes during the ceremony, when Edi Rama, the only person to whom the Kadare family entrusted this moment of honor, gave a speech.
Surprisingly, the focus of the speech was not so much the deceased or his contribution to the nation, but the efforts that Edi Rama had made to organize the ceremony at the Opera and Ballet Theater, accompanied by the dilemmas of finding a worthy place in Tirana where the writer's body would rest.
After explaining the image of Mother Teresa on stage, while describing the "strange anxiety" of those who proposed a place for Kadare's grave, Rama listed in an ironic tone several suggestions: " to the Frashëri Brothers, to the park in front of Rogneri, to the green field behind the Prime Minister's Office, to the Cemetery of the Martyrs of the National Liberation War, and even to the Cemetery of the Martyrs in Kosovo."
All of them, rejected with the ease of a ruler who sees nothing around him but greed and who has lost the ability to trust the people around him.
Again with irony, Rama also mentioned a missing mausoleum or pantheon for the "heads of the nation", where there would surely be a place for the writer's body.
"This is what happens when we don't have a pantheon for the nation's dead heads like the rest of the world," some said. Someone else called for a "mausoleum," he said.
Then, he challenged the solemnity of the death ceremony with an unusual satire, saying: "If we built a tower behind Skanderbeg, with many apartments for all the dead by name... we would perhaps forever close the historical problem of finding a burial place."
And so, he stood "terrified" by the thought of the line of living people looking for apartments for graves and decided not to choose anything. Nothing at all.
A year later, he has chosen nothing, leaving an indecent void: Ismail Kadare is laid to rest this early July in the Tufina cemetery, where Edi Rama chose to leave him for good.
Despite the praise and eulogies for Ismail Kadare who " lifted the Albanian language to the highest peak", Prime Minister Rama has not known or has not wanted to give the promised grave to the author of the verses: " If no grave accepts you/ No marble or crystal morgue/ Should I still carry you/ Half dead, half alive?"
However, we are no longer in the realm of letters, but in banal reality. Where the place of the dead writer depends on the whims of the ruler who has promised that: "Ismail Kadare deserves to rest in a final home that is his alone . "
But even a year later, the question remains: What prevented Rama from keeping his promise? Is it perhaps easier to play with Kadare's words than to be at the height of a serious statesman? Was the Kadare family wrong to believe the prime minister's words?
Whatever the truth, Ismail Kadare remains unrivaled in Albanian literature and while he was alive, Ismail managed to maintain a privileged relationship with the government, while now that he has been dead for a year, no one is remembering the genius Kadare, who has remained in Tufina as an unfulfilled promise of those who hold the keys to state palaces./ Lapsi.al
Lini një Përgjigje