• 1 Musine Kokalari (1917-1983) was an Albanian writer and political activist. Born to a middle-class f (...)
• 2 Musine Kokalari published three books in her lifetime. In addition to Siç më thotë nënua plakë (193 (...)
• 3 For an overview of the role and status of Albanian women throughout the nineteenth century and befo (...)
• 4 Geraci Mauro, “Musine Kokalari dhe fuqia e ëmbël e poezisë: letërsia, autobiografia dhe antropologj (...)

1There are few men in Musine Kokalari’s fiction.1 Few that matter anyway. Whether in the short stories that make up her debut collection Siç më thotë nënua plakë [Tales from my Grandmother] or her only full-length novel Sa u tunt jeta [How Life Swayed], it is women who propel forward the story, who make the Albanian world spin.2 Of course, there are women in the domestic space: they clean, they cook, they gossip; they help pregnant women give birth, and they put children to bed by reading them fairytales. But there are also women who do labor: they do farm work, take care of livestock, cut down wood, and manage household economies. And the women in Musine Kokalari’s fiction negotiate with each other: they are portrayed as the ideators and implementers of the intricate marriage arrangements that were the bedrock of Albanian society at the turn of the twentieth century.3 Their inner lives are as complex as the roles that they perform. If Italian scholar Mauro Geraci describes Kokalari’s worldview as permeated by a “gentle, lofty, and muted anthropological sensibility,” it is a voice that shifted radically after the poetry of her teenage years, collected only posthumously under the title Kolla e vdekjes [The Cough of Death].4 The women who speak in her later works are not tender, nor are they maternal if the maternal is understood as gentle and nurturing. These women have to ensure their livelihood, often against the backdrop of poverty and unhelpful husbands. They do not have the time, nor the patience, for tenderness. And they fight: they fight in the streets, they throw insults at each other, and they break decorum.

• 5 See Hoxha Mentor, Figura e femrës në letërsinë shqipe: Stërmilli, Kokalari, Migjeni, Koliqi [The Fi (...)
• 6 Elsie Robert, History of Albanian Literature, Boulder, Social Science Monographs, 1995, p. 209-334.
• 7 Ibid., p. 339.
• 8 Kokalari’s emotional attachment and intellectual debt to the Albanian National Renaissance can be t (...)
• 9 Geraci, “Musine Kokalari dhe fuqia e ëmbël e poezisë,” op. cit., p. 19. See also Shatro Bavjola, Be (...)

2What to make of Kokalari’s women and the way she writes about them? To define them as complex requires that I place Kokalari within the literary and historical context she was inspired from and writing against: a strictly male literary canon where motherhood emerged as a woman’s sacred duty. While a recurring presence in epic poems and prose, the women of Albanian literature were first and foremost heroic mothers, idealized figures of mythical proportions that modelled a sacrificial form of womanhood. Under the pen of male authors, and in the male imagination, they were granted very little beyond this role.5 Inspired by the National Renaissance Movement, Albanian authors of the mid-to-late nineteenth century were literary and political men, and they saw literature as a battleground where Albanian identity was shaped and legitimized. The poetry and prose of this period is characterized by a self-mythologizing ethos that blended oral narratives with poetic melodrama to establish a new canon through which Albanianness itself would be defined and proved.6 In his seminal work chronicling the history of Albanian literature, Robert Elsie writes that “[it] was the Rilindja [National Renaissance] period ... which moulded Albanian literature and determined many of its subsequent characteristics.”7 Kokalari too was shaped in part by this canon and her ethnographic fiction is deeply interested in Albanian history and folklore.8 But she also belonged to a literary tradition in transition, as the patriotic elan of mid-to-late nineteenth century Albanian literature gave way to a modern realism that depicted and denounced the poverty and subjugation of its most marginalized classes.9

• 10 Çapiriqi Suzana, “Roli i kanonit letrar në përjashtimin e gruas shkrimtare nga historia e letërsisë (...)
• 11 Suta Blerina, Pamje të modernitetit në letërsinë shqipe: Proza e shkurtër e Koliqit, Kutelit Dhe Mi (...)

3Literary scholar Sazana Çapiriqi writes that the “Albanian literary canon is built on the foundations of a traditional conception of literature which considers literature as the arena of heroic individuals of extraordinary talent.”10 Çapiriqi argues that this conceptualization of literature has expulsed Albanian women – as characters and as writers – from its canon. Educated in the classrooms built in the aftermath of the National Renaissance Movement, Kokalari engaged directly with the Albanian canon and the men who wrote it. But her passion for folklore and its roots in the ordinary inspired her interest in the real lives of Albanian women – women who had remained at the margins of the stories being written by Kokalari’s male contemporaries.11 In this vein, this article argues that Kokalari’s work can be read as a challenge and expansion of the mythological and male-centric canon of Albanian literature.

• 12 On the question of feminist genres, and literature as feminist practice, see Micir Melanie, The Pas (...)

4In considering Kokalari’s position and her challenge to the Albanian canon as a woman writer focusing on women, it is crucial to look at her writing through the prism of genre, as well as gender. So far, I have referred to her writing as fiction, and “fiction” perhaps best describes the form of her published works. But analyzing Kokalari’s narrative writing in conjunction with her dairies, memoirs, and correspondence, I contend that her writing blends memoir, fiction, and ethnography to produce books that act also as an archive of the customs of southern Albanian life at the turn of the century. Kokalari’s work straddles the porous borders between genres, employing both fiction and ethnography. Acknowledging this allows me to bring in the question of method as well, and what her methodology reveals about her commitments as a thinker. More specifically, it allows me to conceptualize Kokalari as a feminist thinker at a time when she may not have thought of herself in those terms. In doing so, Kokalari’s work can be used to ask broader questions about the way the depiction of women’s lives necessitates the creation of new genres, as well as the role of literature as feminist work and practice.12

• 13 Showalter Elaine, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, London (...)

5This article will show that by paying close attention to women’s lives, Musine Kokalari’s fiction highlights the importance of women’s knowledge and underscores how the domestic is important to the formation of national identity and history. To make my argument, I will interweave a close reading of two of her books with her diaries and correspondence. I begin by looking at the introductory short story to the collection Tales from my Grandmother. The meta-fictional elements in this first story confirm Kokalari’s commitment to women’s knowledge and intellectual contributions. I then analyze Kokalari’s only full-length novel, How Life Swayed, examining the diverging relationship dynamics between its women. By comparing the fictional elements of this book to the essay that serves as its coda, I show how these dynamics were informed by the need to ensure one’s own survival amid gendered restrictions. Although I reference Kokalari’s diaries and correspondences throughout this article, the final section will focus directly on her autobiographical writing to discuss her method and her decision to focus on women’s lives. I will make the case that Kokalari’s methodology – rooted in oral history – espoused a feminist ethos by design, including by making and citing the women in her life as her collaborators in the texts she wrote. Throughout, I will demonstrate that by concentrating on women’s stories, not only did Kokalari produce an authentic record of Albanian women’s lives which have historical and ethnographic value. In choosing women as her subject matter, she also produced “a literature of her own,” which – while inspired by the canon she was educated in – allowed her to depart from the epic tradition of Albanian literature.13

• 14 Although Tales from my Grandmother was Kokalari’s first book, by 1939 she had already published doz (...)
• 15 Born in the central Albanian city of Elbasan, Aleksandër Xhuvani served as Minister of Education un (...)
• 16 Kokalari, La Mia Vita Universitaria, op. cit., p. 131.
• 17 Hoxha, Figura e femrës në letërsinë shqipe, op. cit., p. 23.
• 18 See for example, Kokalari and Kokalari, Leterkembime, shenime, kujtime, op. cit.
• 19 Kokalari, La Mia Vita Universitaria, op. cit., p. 130, p. 144, and p. 188 for some examples.
• 20 Geraci, “Musine Kokalari dhe fuqia e ëmbël e poezisë,” op. cit., p. 17.
• 21 I have had the opportunity to read notebooks that Kokalari kept while she was exiled to the norther (...)

6Kokalari published her first book, Tales from my Grandmother, in 1939 with her brother’s printing house, Mesagjeritë Shqiptare.14 The ten short stories were written at the encouragement of Albanian academic Aleksandër Xhuvani in the summer between Kokalari’s first and second years at university.15 Contemplating this assignment in her Rome diaries, Kokalari describes her work as “representing the life, thoughts, pains, superstitions and miracles of [my] people.”16 That this representation focuses almost exclusively on women and their domestic concerns should not be taken for granted: with few exceptions, the ordinary lives of Albanian women had escaped the notice of Kokalari’s predecessors and contemporaries.17 In her fiction, Kokalari reveals an instinctive understanding that the domestic is also a space where history unfolds and is thus worthy of attention. This is clear in Tales from my Grandmother, which features stories where women discuss their daily burdens and dramas unvarnished by lyrical poeticism or attempts at heroization. Even though these stories are fictional, they are also the product of Kokalari’s own childhood in Gjirokastra and her ethnographic work, undertaken independently by Kokalari throughout her twenties. The passion for folklore and the drive to collect were impulses that haunted Kokalari from her very childhood.18 In My Life at University, where she wrote about her four years in Rome, Kokalari records the summers she spent gathering stories and songs from family members and other women.19 Her archives at the Albanian National Archives are replete with notes upon notes of ethnographic material collected when Kokalari was a young researcher, with her first forays into this type of work dating back to her teenage years.20 Even during her internment in Rrëshen, when her ability to conduct that type of research was curtailed, her time in prison or Rrëshen was still marked by an ethnographic impulse.21

• 22 See Geraci Mauro, “La Muza albanaese alla Sapienza. Vita e morta di un sogno Universitario” [The Al (...)
• 23 Geraci, “La Muza albanaese alla Sapienza,” op. cit., p. 18-19.
• 24 Ibid., p. 18, fn. 15.

7From the autobiographical material available to date, it seems that Kokalari had received little to no formal training in ethnography or anthropology: her university degree at La Sapienza was in literature. In describing her work as ethnographic, I follow Mauro Geraci and Simonetta Ceglie, among other scholars, who use these terms to characterize Kokalari’s research and writing.22 As I mention above, Kokalari’s foray into ethnographic research on southern Albania is deeply personal, but her scope and methodology are informed by her cultural milieu, including her older brothers’ involvement in the Albanian literary scene as writers and publishers. Geraci classifies Kokalari’s literary works as “tregime etnografike” (ethnographic stories), a genre particular to early 20th century Albanian literature.23 The Albanian word “tregime” has a closer equivalent in the Italian “racconto,” while the English term “story” or “short story” loses some of the collective and folkloric nuances of “tregime.” Geraci describes tregime etnografike as literary works that “provide important scientific support to the cause of political independence and the construction of [Albanian] national identity. Such stories take the form of short popular sketches, infused with tones that veer from the ironic to the melancholic and stage events that try to document, film, exalt but also criticize the linguistic, proverbial, ritual, institutional and moral aspects of agro-pastoral Albania.”24 “Tregime etnografike” can be found in the works of many of Kokalari’s contemporaries, including Migjeni, Ernest Koliqi, and Mitrush Kuteli. What sets Kokalari apart is her conscious focus on gender and the blending of research with personal experience to write fictional stories that border on the auto-fictional.

• 25 Kokalari, Vepra, op. cit., p. 206.
• 26 Ibid., p. 208.

8In this section, I will focus on the opening text of Tales from my Grandmother, which bears the same name as the collection in which it appears. This story, perhaps more than any other in the book, displays the porous boundaries between fiction, memoir, and ethnography. While less rich in details than other stories, I suggest that its meta-literary framing grants authority to the figure of the grandmother, but also underscores the complicated dynamics that undergird the relationship between women in Albania, especially at a moment of cultural and political transition. “Tales from my Grandmother” opens with a challenge. As the story begins, we are directly immersed in the perspective and voice of an older Albanian woman (ostensibly the narrator’s grandmother) who confronts her granddaughter with a question: “Leave me alone, kid, don’t mess with my head, don’t waste my time. Why do you care about the way we used to live?”25 This sentiment bookends the story, with the motif returning in the conclusion as well: “I can’t even look at you, get out of my sight, you’re hurting my eyes. Go away and don’t bother me again. I don’t have time for any of this. Who cares how we used to live, you have your life, we have ours.”26 In oral testimonies, we are used to being met with willing subjects eager to share their memories, to have their voices heard. But in this story, the encounter between the ethnographer and the informant is disrupted. The subject of the research is not simply reluctant; she is unwilling. Although Kokalari’s stand-in wants to investigate women’s lives, bringing them into history, the grandmother figure questions the validity of the entire project. As I will bring to the fore in the third section, Kokalari’s interest in the domestic was dismissed as trivial, often from the very subjects whose lives she was trying to chronicle.

• 28 Ibid.
• 29 Ibid.

11The remainder of this story follows the same pattern. While the grandmother might not have wanted to talk about the past, she has a lot to say about the present. She chastises her granddaughter about her refusal to marry, her desire to become a teacher, and even the time that she spends “writing, reading, and scribbling nonsense,” the nonsense encompassing Kokalari’s ethnographic work as well.28 She continues to rally against modern women who refuse to marry and have public relationships with their boyfriends and fiancés. For the grandmother, the present is marked by a total breakdown of decorum – including well-established gender roles. Precisely on the point of decorum, she turns the granddaughter’s question on her head: “Ha, you want to know what our customs used to be? Well, we listened when grownups spoke to us, we also held our own, but at least we behaved properly.”29 This grandmother figure – like many of the women in Kokalari’s stories – refuses a narrative of easy progress.

• 30 Danaj Ermira, “‘I’m not a Feminist but...’: women’s activism in post-1991 in Albania,” Gender, Plac (...)
• 31 See Kokalari and Kokalari, Leterkembime, shenime, kujtime, op. cit., p. 89-104.
• 32 While often positioned as the sole Albanian woman writer, Kokalari’s books were published during an (...)

12Kokalari’s works were published during an era a marked by palpable social transformation. The landscape for Albanian women was changing markedly, although not as rapidly or as radically as in other places, as she grew up. In 1928, the new Civil Code established a minimum age of marriage for girls (sixteen) and gave them the right to divorce and to inherit. The education law of 1934 opened up courses (including night courses) to fight illiteracy, in particular among women, building upon the work of women activists who had advocated for equal education for women for several decades. Such advocacy had begun by the late nineteenth century, and the first movements dedicated precisely to women’s education emerged in 1909.30 As detailed in her autobiography, Musine spent her formative years taught by teachers who had been activists for girls’ education, in schools they had opened for that specific purpose: including activists Urani Rumbo and the Qiriazi sisters.31 While these opportunities were ostensibly available to all women, not many could take advantage of them. As a result, these schools created a class of highly educated women campaigning for women’s rights.32 In this sense, the anger on display in this introductory story is also the anger of a woman whose world is going through a monumental shift that leads to great uncertainty over the place she holds in it. This uncertainty is visible in the grandmother’s words:

• 34 Cavell Stanley, Must We Mean What We Say, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015.

13The vocabulary at play here is revealing: the grandmother is experiencing what philosopher Stanley Cavell calls a lack of acknowledgment.34 She feels unseen and unheard, and thus describes herself as a rag. And she blames this transformation on young women, taken aback by the upending of gender norms that she herself had helped maintain. This story explores precisely the tension inherent to how women of various generations see their place in this patriarchal world, but also how they help uphold it in exchange for a limited amount of agency. To understand the grief experienced here it is at the same time important to understand the role Albanian women played within the structure of Albanian society. As I will explore later in my analysis of the mother-daughter relationship in How Life Swayed, Kokalari is acutely aware of the way that women wield limited freedom in Albanian society. The only space where they get to explore agency and power is within the household, where they command children and brides. In the configuration of this new world, even that power over the destinies of their daughters or granddaughters (the power to set them up for marriage, or to command around a new daughter-in-law and oversee her performance within the household) is waning. While this new generation of women have more freedom to determine the course of their lives, their grandmothers and mothers are trapped in their previous roles and lack any independence. Even their one ability to wield power in the domestic sphere is now curtailed and there is nothing to be gained in exchange, as younger women create lives and households outside their immediate reach. The world is changing, but not to their apparent benefit.

• 35 Ibid., p. 306.
• 36 Kokalari, Vepra, op. cit., p. 209.
• 37 Ibid., p. 209.

14In Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love,” acknowledgment is intimately tied to the question of looking, of seeing someone and recognizing their pain and the responsibility that pain places upon the seer.35 So the grandmother in this story feels not merely unacknowledged, but also unseen. “No one looks at us,” she says. People pass by and don’t even glance back. The notion of the gaze and the idea of looking permeate this introductory chapter. At various points in the narrative, the grandmother balks at her granddaughter: “I can’t stand to look at you,” while also saying that she can’t bear to look at other young women either.36 There is even a moment when she breaks down, saying “My eyes weep, please girl, I just want to see you as a bride, because I am old and who knows what will happen to me.” This is a slip, a rare moment of vulnerability that betrays a hidden pain underlying the anger on display. But the moment does not last. By the end of the story, the grandmother puts an end to the discussion by telling her granddaughter: “I can’t bear to look at you... when you’re in front of me like this, I don’t want to see you for one thousand years.”37 The question of acknowledgment is a two-way street. If the grandmother feels unseen, she too refuses to see in return. And while she seems to suffer from a lack of acknowledgment, she also refuses to be seen: “Why do you look at me like that?” she asks her granddaughter. This breakdown in solidarity is simultaneously a refusal to be truly known.

• 38 Another notable example is Olga Pëllumbi’s essay “Gruaja Shqiptare: Feminizmi dhe Shoqëria e Jonë” (...)
• 39 Kokalari, Vepra, op. cit., p. 225.
• 40 Ibid., p. 226.

16In 1944, Musine Kokalari published How Life Swayed, her last work of fiction to see the light before her imprisonment and her only full-length novel. Like the rest of her published fiction, the story interweaves personal observations with fiction and ethnography to narrate the events of a traditional Gjirokastra wedding, from the negotiations between two families to the wedding itself. The novel is followed by a coda where Kokalari drops the mantel of fictional narrator and presents herself as an essayist in what is perhaps one of the few historical texts that directly addresses the woman question in Albanian society.38 In this epilogue too, the topic of transformation and change is at the forefront: Kokalari contemplates the world that she has described and labels it as the “twilight of a bygone era.”39 The coda is explicit in its commitments to feminist principles and denouncement of the structures that consign women to “the heavy chains of servitude and fanaticism.”40 If in “Tales from my Grandmother,” there was a tension in the adversarial relationship between two women at different poles of a changing world, How Life Swayed is about the world before it changed and Albanian women’s place in it.

• 41 Ibid., p. 228.

17How Life Swayed presents a crucial conundrum, for if the world Kokalari portrays is a female-centric one, then its faults are also perpetuated by women. After all, it is women who negotiate engagements and rule over the lives of family members in the domestic sphere. Kokalari paints a rich picture of women as decision-makers, wielding power. But her story is not one that repaints spaces of oppression (like the home) as spaces of liberation. The question is always: who is power wielded over? More often than not this power is wielded over girls and young women, as Kokalari demonstrates how they are bent into shape first by the demands of their mothers, and later by the demands of their mothers-in-law: “[After the wedding], the girl is put under her mother-in-law’s heel, lives terrified of her father-in-law, and scared of her husband whose word is law.”41 In the epilogue to the novel, Kokalari writes clearly that the wedding day is a threshold, but not necessarily into a new life; it is rather a threshold into another realm where the young woman (more often than not barely a teenager) ends up in another servitude. Her mother’s home had been nothing but a servitude in preparation for the same services to be rendered in the girl’s future home as a wife.

• 42 Tatar Maria, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, New York, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021, p. 121 (...)

18Through Kokalari’s eyes the Albanian wedding becomes the center of literature and history. We see in her fiction that the domestic is not a space bound by the perimeter of the family home, but rather an interconnected network of homes that obey their own rules and their own conventions, conventions entirely orchestrated and negotiated by women. When the main character, a woman called Qibro, decides that it is high time that her daughter marry, she makes no effort to ask her husband or seek help from any male figures. Rather, she turns to Teto Haxho, an older neighbor who is known for her matchmaking skills. The two women hash out the list of potential suitors. Haxho is a well-respected visitor in their neighborhood’s households and appears to know the economic and social standing of every young man, and how good of a match they would make for Qibro’s daughter. Here Kokalari testifies to what sort of literature and stories are possible by focusing on the ordinary, including ordinary acts of speech like gossip. Maria Tatar argues that “gossip has value precisely because it creates opportunities for talking through the emotional entanglements of our social lives.”42 Likewise, Kokalari in this novel describes how gossip is itself currency, as women’s whole livelihood depends on it.

• 43 Kokalari, Vepra, op. cit., p. 229.

19In dramatizing how women negotiate their livelihoods, Kokalari describes the complicated calculations undertaken by Albanian mothers, who must balance their emotional attachments to their families with economic needs and social demands. In this work, we witness firsthand the cruelty that is imposed on young girls who, at barely sixteen, spend hours helping their mother with household chores like cooking, cleaning, and taking care of younger siblings. Within the realm of the novel, the young girl is never asked her opinion about her betrothed, she never gets to meet her future husband before the wedding day. In addition to the overall cruelty imbedded in these negotiations, there is also the cruelty of the performance that she has to give to convince her mother-in-law of her worth, to prove that she is capable of paying her the respect that this latter deserves through the rituals of coffee-making and serving. The young girl’s reputation and life hang in the balance. Marriage is but a precarious salvation that could be ruptured at every turn, leaving the young girl humiliated over something as small as a gesture. As Kokalari writes in the coda, “The young bride starts her life with fear and that is how she ends it, because for the smallest thing she will be sent back to the home she came from. The door is wide open when you leave it, but small as a hole when you try to go back.”43

• 44 On the question of unpaid domestic labor and reproductive labor, see Federici Silvia, Wages against (...)
• 45 Kokalari, Vepra, op. cit., p. 50.

20Furthermore, the marriage negotiations reveal the economic trade that underpins the institution of marriage for both households. The exchange is meant to alleviate the burden of the bride’s native household, for whom she becomes an extra mouth to feed and an extraneous body once it is transferred on to her brother or another male kin after her father’s passing. But the bride also represents an economic asset to her new household, and not only through her dowry. She will help the mother-in-law share the burden of household labor, given that at her age, she will be more capable of back-breaking than her aging mother-in-law. The world described in Kokalari’s fiction is one rife with examples of the importance of unpaid housework (and even farming work), and the economics of reproductive labor.44 In the text, this is especially obvious when Qibro and the mother of the groom discuss and negotiate a wedding date. For superstitious and religious reasons, Qibro wants to postpone the wedding date, but her future in-law haggles for an earlier date: “I don’t know. I am completely alone. Like a cuckoo in that big house. The men are never around, they are always in the fields, looking after the sheep. Alone, I can’t keep up with the household chores.”45 Kokalari expounds upon this idea of marriage as a trade in the coda to this book.

• 48 Ibid., p. 12.
• 49 Ibid., p. 30.

23Qibro’s considerations are not merely about tradition as such: she is worried that her daughter may become an unwanted stranger in a home that was never meant to be hers, especially since household duties will be passed on to whomever the brothers decide to marry. This is a practical decision meant to ensure the daughter’s future too, while Qibro acknowledges that it will pain her to see her daughter taken away from her. Likewise, thinking about her daughter’s future, she begs Haxho to find a good home for her, so she won’t be stuck “taking care of the sick.”48 And once the engagement is settled, Qibro’s emotions are ambivalent: She “felt something inside her heart. She was happy but she also felt like crying. She was happy; happy that her daughter found a good home, but she thought about the fact that she was removing her from her home.”49

• 50 Ibid., p. 48.

24These cracks of vulnerability on the mother’s part expose how thoughtfully Kokalari navigates the experiences of Albanian women at the turn of the century, and the competing pull between their affections and their duties. But for all these nuanced considerations, there is a sense in which Kokalari’s loyalties remain more squarely with daughters in the understanding that girlhood contains a potential that is then squandered after and through marriage. If for the first sections of the book, Xhemile (the bride-to-be) is seen only through the eyes of the older women around her, she is granted her own humanity beyond this role in Kokalari’s text: “[Her cousin] often came to help her. When the girls were alone, they laughed and squealed. Xhemile who seemed so quiet, would be the loudest when she was with her friends. She teased them ... and they all died laughing.”50 This picture of great merriment is immediately juxtaposed to the seriousness and coldness Xhemile is met with when she is introduced to her mother-in-law. The shelter offered by this oasis of girlhood and joy will be shattered after the girl is married off, at which point she won’t be allowed these visits without permission from her in-laws or husband. In this new home, she will be a stranger – alienated, powerless, and exploited. But she will also be lost, because she will be taught to lose the joyful girlishness and model herself on her mother and mother-in-law: ruthless with her own children, waiting for a daughter or daughter-in-law over whom she can wield whatever limited power she has.

• 52 Ibid., p. 229.
• 53 See Stuart Mary, “You’re a Big Girl Now: Subjectivities, Feminism and Oral History,” Oral History, (...)

26Kokalari concludes this coda to her work with a note of hope, writing that a woman’s liberation will arise from the ashes of this world of “useless beliefs, customs, the remains of fanaticism.”52 She believed that the world she had depicted in the book was on its last legs. By the time Kokalari published How Life Swayed, Albanian women had seen a very slow transformation, although the customs depicted in the novel remained and still remain prevalent. Kokalari believed that a great shift was coming. The novel represents another case of Kokalari’s impulse towards collection and remembrance, the desire to record a world at its twilight that, though complicated and harsh on women, still deserved to be chronicled. Like the rest of Kokalari’s pre-imprisonment oeuvre, this novel exists as a testimony to women’s lives in their ordinariness and complexities. In producing a novel that mixes genres and methods, Kokalari was engaged in what would become a central tenant of feminist activism across the globe some thirty years after her own work: recovery, attention, and archival work as feminist praxis.53

• 54 Kokalari, La Mia Vita Universitaria, op. cit., p. 130.

27The questions “Why collect women’s stories?” and “Why Albanian women’s stories in particular?” are undoubtably at the center of Kokalari’s work. If Kokalari never asked these questions directly, she surely was challenged with them. The grandmother’s challenge –“Who cares how we used to live?” – echoes questions that Kokalari had to field in real life, as she recounts them in the diary she kept as a student in Rome. While a student at La Sapienza between 1938 and 1942, Kokalari made frequent trips to Albania between semesters. During these trips, she would throw herself headfirst into ethnographic research, “collecting popular songs of my native place and other information regarding the customs of Gjirokastra.”54 The sources she turns to for her research are the women in her life, from her mother to her sister-in-law, and even maids and washerwomen. But in approaching them for this research, she is confronted with an existential question:

• 56 Tatar, Heroine with 1,001 Faces, op. cit., p. 116. “Old wives’ tales—that is, worthless stories, un (...)

28There are two things at play in this recorded exchange. On the one hand, confronted with Kokalari’s inquiries, the women in her life respond with skepticism about her project: what about their lives and their stories is worth recording? It is, after all, “nonsense.” This is not surprising if we look at the long history of how women’s experiences and their knowledge –especially oral knowledge – has been dismissed and excluded from both literary and historical canons.56

• 57 See for example, Kokalari and Kokalari, Leterkembime, shenime, kujtime, op. cit., p. 89-104.
• 58 Kokalari, Vepra, op. cit., p. 250-331.

29At first glance, Kokalari’s stated motivation has patriotic roots: a desire to fight against the absence of Albanian literature and folklore from the global canon, and the idea of Albania as a place without history (as showcased in Italians’ attitude toward her home during her time in Rome). This impulse is understandable: Albania had been a nation-state for barely twenty years when Kokalari lived in Rome. And Kokalari was raised in a home that considered itself deeply patriotic. Indeed, patriotic sentiment permeated much of her writing, and is acknowledged by her as motivating the desire to collect information from, and write about, Albanians’ lives.57 Beyond stated intent, however, it is worth noting the particular subjects and sources of her stories. In seeking to reconstruct a cultural history of Albania, Kokalari did not turn to the archives. She could have: after all, she did her own doctorate on the writer and activist Naim Frashëri, a seminal figure in the National Renaissance movement.58 She was not foreign to the methodology of rigorous and standard academic research. Yet, these are not the sources that she reached towards to construct an image of both past and (to her) contemporary Albania. Rather, she turned to her own memories of Gjirokastra, and to other women. Here we see the ethnographic ethos in Kokalari’s research and methodology, one that is also feminist, if not explicitly so.

• 60 Cavarero Adriana, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, New York, Routledge, 2000.

31The women Kokalari met in Korça were for the most part housewives or seamstresses who worked in groups and passed their time together sharing stories, gossip, and songs. These communities organized around gendered forms of labor seem to complicate the picture presented in How Life Swayed, where the dynamics between women are often cold or adversarial. In focusing and paying attention to women’s stories as part of her amateur methodology, Kokalari highlights that much of the knowledge needed to weave a cultural history of Albania is knowledge stored precisely with women. In not only gathering these stories, but portraying women as storytellers to whom she owes the information that would be foundational to her research, Kokalari is doing two things. First, she is positioning women as bearers of knowledge. And secondly, she is granting these women authority over their own lives, and considering them experts of their lived experience, in addition to considering that lived experience worthy of being written about. This impulse is reminiscent of Adriana Cavarero’s idea of relating narratives: if, as we had seen with the grandmother, some women do not consider their stories as worth telling, Kokalari is going against the grain and showing that they are worthy of being recorded and told.60

• 63 Shatro Gami Bavjola, “A Stranger in Rome: Musine Kokalari and Her Memoir La mia vita universitaria (...)

36As evident in the epilogue to How Life Swayed, by the time Kokalari returned to Albania permanently in 1943, her interest in women had become far more overt, as opposed to the more unintentional feminist ethos of her first two works. Instead, here we see a more conscious desire to write and dramatize the ordinary lives of Albanian women in their most intimate details. In this sense, it feels impossible to separate Kokalari’s research impulses from her own experiences. In a recent article on Kokalari, Albanian scholar Bavjola Shatro Gami writes that Kokalari’s diaries in Rome represent a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a writer coming to terms with her sense of self.63 I would argue that the diaries demonstrate also a growing consciousness of Kokalari as – if not a feminist thinker for lack of any evidence that she would consider herself as such – at least what we might call a feminist ethos that was born out of her own experiences as a woman in two patriarchal societies: the Albania of childhood and youth, and her years in Italy as a student.

• 65 Kokalari, La Mia Vita Universitaria, op. cit., p. 156.
• 66 See Popoff Alexandra, Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, New York, Free Press, 2010.
• 67 Kokalari, La Mia Vita Universitaria, op. cit., p. 156.

38Indeed, her understanding of herself as an Albanian student in a country that had invaded her own, would be just as crucial to Kokalari’s dynamics in this relationship, as her being a woman. Kokalari’s relationship to P.T. was marked by a sense of power imbalance from the very start, as Kokalari acknowledges “in front of men, I felt less educated; and his thought dominated mine.”65 While she does not make this connection herself, it is nevertheless revealing to see in Kokalari’s life a repetition of broader patterns about women in love, and gender hierarchies. For instance, P.T. would use Musine as a soundboard for his ideas, as the two discussed politics and their studies together. In her diaries, Kokalari writes about the time spent doing research for him and typing out his manuscripts, in a stark reminiscence of women like Sophia Tolstaya who was responsible for preparing and editing Tolstoy’s novels.66 Nevertheless, Kokalari already felt a sense of unease over P.T.’s domineering presence in her life, and his insistence of knowing about her feelings and whereabouts at all times became immediately stifling to her. “All these questions of his made me feel like I was losing my freedom,” she wrote.67

• 68 Ibid., p. 183.
• 69 Kokalari, Si lindi Partia Social Demokrate, op. cit., p. 58-60.

40This experience marked a turning point in Kokalari’s thinking about gender. Although she had noted a feeling of inferiority at the beginning of the relationship, P.T.’s illogical and petty behavior undermined the foundations of this belief. This relationship led Kokalari to realize that if there was a superiority, it was not innate but rather the accumulated advantage of centuries of being given the opportunity to study and access to power. “I thought: where does man’s superiority lie? What does he have more than woman, than that intelligence that he has had free opportunity to develop over the centuries?”68 This understanding of the nexus between politics and the personal appear again in the coda to How Life Swayed, and guide its outward demand for women’s equality and freedom. The notion also that one’s personal experience is crucial to one’s political awakening will reappear in her post-internment diaries, as her years of hard labor led her to feeling greater solidarity with the Albanian working classes.69