By Visar Zhiti

The Big Tchame Concussion

Shefki Hysa is the author of many narrative and story books in which echoes the troublous Tchame wind and where people’s fate is connected with their land like the roots thrust deeply into stones but also like the life fingers blooded as they are grasp reality. He likes realism and the truth no matter how thrilling is. That is the reason he becomes its historian, strong witness, feeder of collective memory. Aforetime I have written that meanwhile the massacres in Kosovo are a stone’s throw and still vivid, even thought “The Balkan’s executioner”, the Serbian Miloschevich, the last communist dictator keeps on being judged for anti-humanism crimes to the court of Hag (in TV programs was often presented the Byblitical outgo of Kosovo’s, their expatriation from dardany since the world was created), we are exposed to another expatriatation of Albanians in the south most ancient and cruel Ilyric, although it didn’t have international televisions as witnesses nor didn’t congregate the worlds army, NATO, to punish the worse.

And so the Tchame nationalities were expatriotated from their epyrioth land, houses were set on fire. People were slaughtered in concert with live stocks, olive-groves and the future were destroyed; it was killed the national mythology. Their terror peregrinated towards mother-land and than came like another massacre the cruel dull obliteration. Even after three-thousand years no one could say anything, in the mythic Balkan, another Troia in modern times was set on fire. Meanwhile tchames found in their homeland a dictatorship, which nay didn’t try to defend the rights of its fellow countrymen, but on contrary didn’t let them alone. Maybe it prosecuted them more than the others, invented enemies, and imprisoned them. In order to meet their dreams, tchame people among their motherland communist prisons joined to Kosovo’s people to elope from hither to thither. But… the only thing they were going to meet was the rusty manacle. In this way, meanwhile Albania was cruelly fragmented by the others; Albanians did fragment inside by themselves. Later on was difficult to remember Kosovo and tchame… nothing was says about in geographic scholastic prints, history didn’t dare, conscious was constrained…
Nonetheless collective memory which milled about like a subterranean river, hidey reinforced and hardened the right resistance. Literature achieved to bring out some anonymous songs about splited lands, any tremulous Tcham wail or a blustery Kosovo elegy. Folk-dancing’s recalled apocalypse with their hullabaloo, while writers tried to create metaphoric possibilities or to say sth about Kosovo and Tchame through Ezopy’s language. I recollect that, if the poet ALI PODRIMJA like in our big sorrow would go in the trans-national coast Tchame , and would write hermetic poems which he would secure thrice: from the Albanian dictatorship, the Serbian conqueror and from the Chauvin Greeks. Here, in the remaining Albania, Tchame writers felt difficulty and prosecution. Books were prohibited to them; they set themselves in prisons, eloped, kept mum, waited….

Now the Tchame voice has came back from its sorrow ember, covered with the ash of the ancient obliteration, to cracker of promethean fire and the world is always seeing and feeling more and more its illumination and its fervour, will be longed for the truth and justice… and a slaughter population deserves to be given back their land and their spirit, wealth songs and the future…

A thrilling squawk is the literal creativity of Shefki Hyses, bearer of the tragedy of its population, that the mythical Balkan found its calmness…

Translated: By Dr. Haim Reitan