Iolanda Malamen: Ardian-Christian
Kuciuk, God has given you a second literary homeland: Romania. So, as it could
be said, “the sweet burden” of two languages in which you can write different
things. I find that fascinating.
Ardian-Christian
Kuciuk: I must say that
these two homelands, in time, became more textual than literary. For me, the
fascination lies more for the gift required to maintain a real equilibrium
between the sweetness of the burden and burden of the sweetness.
- You have
reinvented yourself in a new culture. Was that, though, a trauma?
- It was more than
a reinvention, it was like climbing a mountain backwards. Before writing
directly in Romanian “The year in which the swan was invented” in the graceful
year of 1996, for instance, I believed that I would not write in another
language except Albanian, ever again. Maybe it was a trauma for the other,
although my behavior had no stains of abnormality. It was the natural rise of a
literary opera to the level at which you can produce global literature, along
with the more local the languages that you write in become.
- How many
Albanian writers, cleverly managed, could, in your opinion, have a world-wide
success?
- It is impossible
and somehow unnatural, to try a prognosis, especially for the Albanian
literature, which contains energies that are immense, unsuspected and which are
always unvalued, attacked and profaned by the literary “envydocracy”, that
tries to present dementia as coherence. Those who ventured to foretell, only
disturbed the waters and supported, through naivety, the strategies of the
idolatrous. It is certain that those chosen to move the Albanian literature
from an atheism shrouded in the so called ecumenical progress vestment, to its
primordial womb, know what to do, and they will unmistakably do it. In essence,
it seems to me that the international conquers problem is a mystical one, and
it came as a trial-test for the soul of each and every one, it reminds me of
that shocking happening that took place during the life of the great monk
Paisios the Athonite. They brought to him a child who was blind from birth; the
saint placed his hands over his head and, before praying with tears, asked him:
“Tell me, my dear, what do you wish that God should do for you?” What do you think
he answered? “I wish to become a better child!”. And in that instant light was
brought to his eyes…
- If communism
had not fallen, what were your chances as a writer in Albania?
- Before coming to
Bucharest, the country in which I thought I was violently divulged to me that
it had been feeding and that a whole different country grew in its belly, a
terrible one that moved after a set of laws and aspirations which were totally
antagonistic to literature. This is how I found out that I really did not have
a motherland anymore, except in the books I wrote until then, all of them
unpublished. I had trained myself to live like an exiled in my own quotidian
and like a demiurge in my own literature. The feeling that you have in these
kinds of periods cannot be described. You feel more and more accomplished as a
writer, but more and deader as a citizen. It is impossible for me to imagine
what would have happened to me by the shore that stood between an intangible,
but unpublished, literary country and a daily one, but ravished by transition.
I would have probably continued to write in total silence and solitude, to
publish only after the collapse of the biological literary clans that confuse
artistic power to that of the political-economic. I dreamed of teaching literature
in my home town and maybe I would have survived – taking upon myself here, all
the pathetic - like the mockingbird from one of the stories I used to tell my
daughter when she was little. A mockingbird forced to work by hour, as a
cuckoo, carved in wood, in the clock of a museum or of a kitsch life. For a
while, in Romania too, I had to do the same.
- After the
nineties, do you consider that the return to royalty would have been a risky
stake or, on the contrary: a beneficial one?
- The imposed or
embraced atheism filled immense masses of Balkans with arrogance and emptied
them of common sense. The return to royalty would have meant the resurrection
of ancestral values, which only God can make possible, and mortals have become
inured to obey anyone, to pray and destroy amongst themselves, to desperately
hope only towards the power of politics, without realizing that royalty is a
ritual and a quasi-religious presence, a teaching for becoming able to
harmonize the soul with the divine hierarchy.
- You have a
great love for the Romanian literature. What has drawn you to it?
- My love for the
Romanian culture was passed over from my father, who studied in Bucharest in
the sixties, also by the fact that Romania was one of the cardinal points of
exile for my fellow citizens, besides America and Greece. The great Albanian
writers Lasgush Poradeci and Mitrush Kuteli, had also lived, written their
masterpieces and debuted in the Romania of the thirties. I would add that I had
also started to read Eminescu in my first year of college, when I decided that
my dad should teach me Romanian. The Philology Faculty Library was rich enough,
and I had found a real shield against brainwashing: I would read in Romanian,
especially in the Marxism-Leninism, socialist realism, or history of the Labour
Party of Albania, classes. It was a charming Romanian, half real, half
en-grafted with Albanian, with bits of Thraco-Ilyrian and a lot of empathy.
Maybe I will write sometime about that experience, which acquired another
dimension of mystery, because the reading of some great Romanian writers,
later, did not produce for me any disappointments.
- Do you ever
miss, from time to time, the childhood stories?
- I have cleared my
debt with the classic way of missing, sort of speak. I don’t miss essential
things, because I was constrained to revive them in books, and to polish them,
but not in such a way so that I would lose my connection with the superior reality.
The childhood stories gave me a miracle when I was struggling, like any parent,
with a child’s insomnias. I had to take all the beautiful and wise stories from
the vivid memory of my grandparents, and filter them through my memory, so I
could retell them in an Romanian with sprinkled with Albanian idioms, like the
one from my college years, and later, when the child kept asking me for an
already over-enriched story, I struggled to go back to that initial state of
the story and I would “steal” details from the child’s memory in order to
retrieve it.
- Look, asking
all these questions has tired me. Wouldn't you like to ask me something?
- Yes: What face
does literature have for you, after all these dialogues carried out with so
many writers?
- I would like with
all my heart for you to re-edit you masterpiece “A glorious and dying tribe” at
a prestigious publishing house and to make an appeal of this manner to the most
important editors. It is the time that this exceptional epopeea to see the
light of printing again, in a circulation and distribution worthy for itself.
- In August 1998,
after I read the first appearance of the “Tribe…”, a famous Romanian critic
told me that, due to such a book, the Romanian culture should be firing its
canons. The official ones actually did it, but her canons had silence instead
of powder. Of course, my happiness that I was given to write the “Tribe…”
plenary overcomes any praise, reward or good criticism. It was then that I
understood the role of this strange relation between a certain literary value
and the officials. It is something like: the diamond has been given to me, they
insist not to honor me with a hand of coals. It is better to be alive and
considered dead, than vice versa. From a certain point of this post vitam,
the fate of this epopeea has left me behind or in shadow, but, on the other
hand, I didn't want it any other way. It is enough for the avid reader to
follow, in the book, the unpredictable relation of the Balkan entity with the
Oriental or the Occidental, the desert games as a geographical and metaphorical
space, the tools that produce and distort myths, realities – “live flesh” from
which the great literature incarnates itself; the blind soldiers parabola, or
that invisible study of the mechanisms that create and destroy empires
(exemplified by the ottoman one) – and I consider that I finished my mission…
If white holes were to exist, with the same absorption ability, but with a
proliferating power instead of a mortifying one, this book is one of those holes,
at least for me, because it can give birth to other books, like her “twin”
Albanian “Eye”, written in 2003, and which also has three editions, this far…
In the moments of profound humbleness, I find myself thinking that, even theses
two books, could be too much for the life of a single writer. That is why, I
had to carefully estrange myself from them, so that both “sides” could have
enough life and innovation, but also because the striding for self-exceeding
seems desecrating to me.
- I bow to your
talent, to your verticality, to your power of being yourself in a world
perverted and inappreciative in which the mimic of value is practiced like a
sport…
- I never forget
that literature is not God’s avatar, but only a tool to individual redemption
and of the successive leading of the community towards awakening and/or trezvia
(spiritual lucidity). Thus, it is like thinking that gymnastics is the soul of
the practitioner. Without any false modesty, but in full gratitude of my own
nothingness, dear Iolanda, I confess, that it is about a gift, and not personal
virtues. And when you want to talk about gift, it is better to keep quiet.
Maybe that is why voice also exists in its liquid form, called-writing ink.
Iolanda Malamen in dialogue with Ardian-Christian Kuciuk,
Bucharest, September 2008. Eastern European Messenger, 2009. In English
by Valentin Boboc.
In Romanian
In Albanian