French President Emmanuel Macron conferred France’s highest honour, the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour Award, upon the Albanian novelist and poet during a ceremony at the Palace of Congresses in Tirana today.
Macron delivered a speech during the special ceremony:
Mr. Prime Minister!
Dear Edi!
Dear Linda!
Mrs. Speaker of Parliament,
Mrs. Deputy Prime Minister,
Mrs. Rector,
Mr. Mayor
Ambassadors,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear Ismail Kadare,
Dear lady!
To live is to fight, Seneca used to say. You have transformed his saying into: To write is to fight.
You definitely belong to the line of Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, to the class of those who stole every word from silence, those who risked burdening the record with every line, and those whose every novel risked being the epitaph of their career.
And this was because you lived and created as a free man in a country that was not free. Post-war Albania was more Soviet than the Soviets themselves, more Stalinist than Stalin himself under the iron yoke at such a point, as we already talked a bit earlier. You grew up in an architectural gem, the city of Gjirokaster, in a big house full of empty rooms that you filled with your dreams and readings.
At the age of 11, you became so passionate about Macbeth that you copied the entire work by hand.
It was then Cervantes, Homer, and Gogol, with whom you hardened and reinforced your intellectual defiance. This way you escaped intact from the indoctrination of your literature lecturers at the University of Tirana. When you left to attend studies at Moscow’s Gorky Institute, the temple of official literature, you were permitted to read very small pieces and light doses of the “decadent” Western literature, but by being given at the same time very high doses of the best Soviet literature. But you exchanged the doses, absorbing the first and hating the latter. This cure for dissent had a radical effect. Instead of reinforcing the ranks of the socialist realism elite, as it was called back then, you joined the guerillas of freedom of style.
Instead of singing to Soviet optimism, the hero cult, the crowd happiness and the huge march forward in history, you let life’s melancholy ooze. The mist and its storms. For you, time is cyclical, power ambiguous, reality is indecipherable and the past indelible. A funeral chant for the totalitarian seed.
And they accuse you of Western decadence. Your works and poems are published with a critical preface only, tainted with the badge of stigma. Your great novel in 1963, The General of the Dead Army, is approved as its disarming theme confuses the labels of communists. The exhumation of World War II soldiers in front of a priest and an Italian soldier under the incessant Albanian rain. And “The Monster” was banned in 1965. The government could not accept that you so closely mix the history of the siege of Troy and the intellectual oppression in Tirana of your time.
The same ban applies to “The Winter of Great Solitude”, 1973, which you manage to pull through by concealing the icy portrait of the dictator between the lines. You could have abandoned the burning ship, but you refused to abandon a people in the hands of those who had burned their freedom.
You decided to resist, throw dust in the censors’ eyes, and learn bylines, avoidance mechanisms, metaphors, and parallels. Move the Albanian dramas of your time into old myths and legends. Create fables with a double meaning, with a double foundation. You reinvent a literature because it only exists when the danger is there, and the danger is there.
You stood twice accused of inciting rebellion and you were transferred to work in remote villages.
In this power play, you emerge strong thanks to the international fame that forced the then government to tolerate your existence, allow you some freedom and the rare privilege to travel. You were even elected as an Assembly member in 1972, another invention of the regime and another way to hamper you.
All these years are a form of dance being played, a dance to drown you on the one hand, and a dance to keep you writing and saying things, on the other. And this fragile path ended with the novel “The Palace of Dreams” in 1981. The Palace is the place where the dreams of the empire’s subjects are gathered, examined and interpreted in order to spot among them the prophetic dreams that shed light on the fate of the tyrant of the empire.
In this titanic and terrible administration that reveals the intimacies of everyone, even of those living in the empire’s remotest provinces. How can one possibly not notice a metaphor for the grinding of dreams, the bureaucracy where everyone experienced?
The metaphor is too clear. The description is very obvious and the verdict is rendered: Enemy of the people!
You will no longer enjoy the right to publish in Albania. Threats became increasingly stronger until you decided to ask for political asylum in November 1990.
At that moment, you set eyes on the country that first translated your works. A country that lived inside you, long before you were to settle to live there yourself, so much so that when you were 16 you sang to the beauty of a capital you had never set foot in. A country where you already existed much earlier than you were to travel there, since “The General of the Dead Army” was already on the main shelves of the libraries since its publishing in 1970 by the publishing house Albert Michel and had aroused a strong interest and a sense of admiration for you among our compatriots. A country where you felt at home, before you settled to live in and like the character in “The Shadow”, whom you resemble a lot, you multiplied departures with the flavor of democracy and beautiful tables. Often these two reinforce each other.
I have been told that shortly after, as a fine connoisseur of our asset, you did not hesitate to call the sommelier when the bottle of wine was corked, an indicator showing you were made to live in Paris, but at the bottom of the suitcase, all these years you didn’t bring a bottle of wine. You brought something even more inebriating, even more dangerous. You brought books, books and only books; Sartre, Camus and many others that you gave away to your Albanian friends as a bottle of freedom. You have made many friends in our country; with your publisher Claud Durand of ‘Fayar’ publishing house, who had taken his professional conscience to the extent that he has even learned Albanian to verify the fidelity of the French edition of your works and who kept copies of your manuscripts in safes so that your voice could speak to the living if something happened to you.
With your translators Jusuf Vrioni, Tedi Papavrami, just to mention a few, and I salute Tedi Papapvrami here, as if to prove that literary friendships are not only as such. Claud Durand arranged together with you the famous escape in 1990, giving another strong blow to the wall of the dictatorship and a bit more freedom blew up in Albania.
Your escape triggered the early student protests in Tirana for the first time in more than 40 years. You contributed to the great awakening of the nations to tear down the Iron Curtain. Since then, living between the capital of France to the capital of Albania, finally turned into a democracy, you have divided your existence between words and things, people and places, frequently travelling between our two nations. From your strolls in the rediscovered Tirana, from that ‘Rostand’ coffee table where you put your notebook and pen every morning, timeless texts have been born at the intersection of the myths and imaginary worlds of the pyramid of Cheops and that of Tirana, between the railings of Luxembourg, the shores of Cornwall and the walls of Troy.
They always remind us how much Europe is our common continent. How much of Europe’s story is everyone’s story. How much Europe is a dream, a myth, that of the resurrection.
You continue to experience this with your family history. Your spouse, Helena Kadare, your most attentive reader, with an even sharper look due to the fact that she herself is a writer too, with your two daughters Gresa and Besjana, one serving as Albania’s Ambassador to the UNESCO, and the other a researcher in Molecular Biology at the Sorbonne, as well as with our grandchildren, Doruntina and Adrian, who are growing up in both culture.
Dear Ismail Kadare, you sometimes feel sorry for all those years of oppression that prevented you from choosing your voice, from spreading your wings, flourishing your work, but rest assured your work has lost none of its power.
The whisper of the silenced freedom is louder than any shouts. It has also shown what unites our countries inseparably and that your Prime Minister still bears this language, this love for Europe, this evidence of a Mediterranean country that looks towards the West and towards us.
For this role as a poet of the Balkans, as a rhapsode of Europe, as a messenger of freedom, for this exciting relation that you embody so preciously between Albania and France, I have the honor today to raise you to the rank of The Grand Commander of Legion of Honor!
